AHE 591 - Lesson 5

This week's lesson is on the quality and outcomes of online learning, and whether or not it is significantly better than what students receive from offline learning. I am not, nor have I been, on the faculty side of the house in my experience working in higher education, but rather on the student affairs side. Therefore, I am not as well versed in having to come up with proper student learning outcomes as a faculty member would be. I would say, however, that this course has showed me that the quality of the online learning experience is slowly but surely improving every year. There is no doubt that online education is here to stay, and will only grow over time. The question is, will the quality of the online education experience catch up with the demand of people wanting a higher education?

The demand for higher education is certainly there. The Daphne Koller TED Talk emphasized this demand, showing just how important a higher education is to people. She talked about the mob scene at the University of Johannesburg recently, where thousands of people stormed the entrance of the institution just to try to get one of the few admission spots left. Many were injured, and one person lost her life. This encapsulates how much getting a higher education means to people around the world. Koller goes on to talk about her experience with Coursera, an online platform in which some of the leading minds and instructors in their field were able to teach their subject online for free to students around the world. The results were fascinating, particularly the fact that students from different parts of the world were able to help each other in real time with questions they had, and even graded each others homework! To me, this is when you know students are engaged, and true learning is taking place.

One of the questions Dr. Major poses this week is "how might we best gather data from online courses, and the students taking these courses?" I think we need to continue to inquire from faculty who teach online and offline courses about the engagement and learning that takes place with their students in both types of courses. Faculty who only teach offline courses might be biased toward thinking that is the best method, and faculty who only teach online courses might feel that is the best method. Getting feedback from those who teach both methods, in my opinion, will offer feedback that is more objective. But, more important is getting feedback from the students who take online courses. What is it about the online experience that makes it richer than the traditional lecture course? I can personally attest that, before I took AHE 591, I did not particularly enjoy the online courses I had taken. They provided in convenience in the fact that I could access the course material any time I wanted, but that was about it. I missed the interaction I had with my classmates, and the verbal discussions that would take place in the brick-and-mortar classroom. However, with the continued growth of using video in online courses, I can see the human, face-to-face interaction in online courses becoming just as good as what students would have in traditional lectures.