The Chronicle of Higher Ed is continuing their uninformed, inaccurate, crusade against online learning, with this interview (probably not a good permanent link–unless you’re a Chronicle subscriber) with historian (and major technophobe) David Noble.
Noble is pushing his usual line, the line that the Chronicle pushes over and over again–that online teaching is worse than face-to-face teaching (and thus doomed to fail) because it includes no “real” interaction.
Yes there is something more authentic about the classroom because it allows for genuine interpersonal interaction. And this is not a controversial issue. Ask anyone to tell you about what they remember about their education and they will talk not about courses or information imparted, but about the people they encountered. Especially the teachers who changed their lives.
Of course, Noble pretends not to know that this is a fundamentally flawed premise, since in almost every case, and certainly in my experience, students report more “genuine interpersonal interaction” and more quality in that interaction online than in a traditional classroom. The interaction can also be (as I have reported on my VKP Poster) deeper, more significant, more challenging intellectually, more open to productive digression, and more persistent (thus available for review, re-thinking, and criticism), than face-to-face interaction.
Noble’s point of view is not only inaccurate, but willfully inaccurate–ignorant, in fact. Not only does he have zero personal experience in this issue (he’s never taught an online class, he’s never taken an online class as a student), but he seems to have never read a single one (of the literally hundreds) of widely available studies of online learning. The No Significant Difference homepage would be a good place for him to start–he’s got a long way to go before he’s ready to move Beyond No Signicant Difference.
Noble does what these critics do so often–he looks at the worst examples of online teaching and compares them to the best examples of f2f teaching.
My CUNY colleague Steve Brier, and my VKP colleague Roy Rosenzweig, do an excellent job of debunking Noble’s nonsense in their review of his recent book in The Nation (thanks to BMCC colleague Barney Pace for the link!).
Noble’s position is useful, in a way, though–it shows us how far we have to go in informing even our fellow academics (although non-academics may actually be far ahead of the trend in this regard!)
Never took an online class (I may though), but I can make some educated guesses:
Spontaneous participation in classroom interaction has its benefits, but the drawback of not having the luxury of the time necessary to understand the material well enough to formulate intelligent questions. Those who are “slower” in assimilating knowledge, should benefit from the ability to sit down, digest the information, figure out exactly what understanding they may lack, and how to word their queries in the manner that will benefit them the most. I suspect it works both ways, as teachers will also benefit from actually seeing the question rather than hearing it, and being better able to avoid overlooking some part of the question. An admittedly pedestrian argument, but I would have traded all my teachers, as good as they were, who never really “changed my life,” for this kind of learning. And it’s not as if distance-learning cannot be interactive, when it needs to be. I suspect the better experiences come from a balanced mix of both one-to-one and one-to-many interaction.
Excellent point, Raphael (about the mix, I mean). I think DL can be great, but not for every student, not for ever class, and certainly not in exclusivity.
I also think and have found in my research (and didn’t mention above) that asynchronous discussion offers a unique opportunity for student-student interaction…which can be so productive, so helpful in collaborative learning and building a classroom community, and which the constraints of “vertical time” in traditional classoroms aloften make impossible.