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ANNALS OF EDUCATION
THE RUBBER ROOM The battle over New York City’s worst teachers. by Steven Brill
AUGUST 31, 2009
One school principal has said that Randi Weingarten, of the teachers’ union,“would protect a dead body in the classroom.”
n a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
“You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it,” says Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.
Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. “Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence,” Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room’s “Handle with Care” poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she “loves children.”
“Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own,” Scheiner said. “There was no need to push anyone out.” Like ninety-seven per cent of all teachers in the pre-Bloomberg days, she was given tenure after her third year of teaching, and then, like ninety-nine per cent of all teachers before 2002, she received a satisfactory rating each year.
“But they brought in some new young principal from their so-called Leadership Academy,” Scheiner said. She was referring to a facility opened by Klein in 2003, where educators and business leaders, such as Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, hold classes for prospective principals. “This new principal set me up, because I was a whistle-blower,” Scheiner said. “She gave me an unsatisfactory rating two years in a row.Then she trumped up charges against me and sent me to the Rubber Room. So I’m fighting, and waiting it out.”
The United Federation of Teachers, the U.F.T., was founded in 1960. Before that, teachers endured meagre salaries, tyrannical principals, witch hunts for Communists, and gender discrimination against a mostly female workforce (at one point, there was a rule requiring any woman who got pregnant to take a two-year unpaid leave). Drawing its members from a number of smaller and ineffective teachers’ groups, the U.F.T. coalesced into a tough trade union that used strikes and political organizing to fight back. By the time Bloomberg took office, forty-two years later, many education reformers believed that the U.F.T. and its political allies had gained so much clout that it had become impossible for the city’s Board of Education, which already shared a lot of power with local boards, to maintain effective school oversight. In 2002, with the city’s public schools clearly failing, the State Legislature granted control of a new Department of Education to the new mayor, who had become a billionaire by building an immense media company, Bloomberg L.P., that is renowned for firing employees at will and not giving contracts even to senior executives.
Bloomberg quickly hired Klein, who, as an Assistant Attorney General in the Clinton Administration, was the lead prosecutor in a major antitrust case against Microsoft. When Klein was twenty-three, he took a year’s leave of absence from Harvard Law School to study education and teach math to sixth graders at an elementary school in Queens, where he grew up. Like Bloomberg, Klein came from a world far removed from the borough-centric politics and bureaucracy of the old board.
Test scores and graduation rates have improved since Bloomberg and Klein took over, but when the law giving the mayor control expired, on July 1st, some Democrats in the State Senate balked at renewing it, complaining that it gave the mayor “dictatorial” power, as Bill Perkins, a state senator from Manhattan, put it. Nevertheless, by August the senators had relented and voted to renew mayoral control.
One thing that the legislature did not change in 2002 was tenure, which was introduced in New York in 1917, as a good-government reform to protect teachers from the vagaries of political patronage. Tenure guarantees teachers with more than three years’ seniority a job for life, unless, like those in the Rubber Room, they are charged with an offense and lose in the arduous arbitration hearing.
In Klein’s view, tenure is “ridiculous.” “You cannot run a school system that way,” he says. “The three principles that govern our system are lockstep compensation, seniority, and tenure. All three are not right for our children.”
randi Scheiner says that her case is likely to be heard next year. By then, she will have twenty-four years’ seniority, which entitles her to a pension of nearly half her salary—that is, her salary at the time of retirement—for life, even if she is found incompetent and dismissed. Because two per cent of her salary is added to her pension for each year of seniority, a three-year stay in the Rubber Room will cost not only three hundred thousand dollars in salary but at least six thousand dollars a year in additional lifetime pension benefits.
Scheiner worked at P.S. 40, an elementary school near Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town. The write-ups on Web sites that track New York’s schools suggest that P.S. 40 is one of the city’s best. I spoke with five P.S. 40 parents, who said that Scheiner would have had nothing to “blow the whistle” about, because, as one put it, the principal, Susan Felder, is “spectacular.”
Scheiner refused to allow me access to the complete file related to her incompetence proceeding, which would detail the charges against her and any responses she might have filed, saying only that “they charged me with incompetence—boilerplate stuff.” (Nor could Felder comment, because Scheiner had insisted that her file be kept sealed.) But Scheiner did say that she and several of her colleagues in the Rubber Room had brought a “really interesting” class-action suit against the city for violations of their due-process and First Amendment rights as whistle-blowers. She said that the suit was pending, and that she would be vindicated. Actually, she filed three suits, two of which had long since been dismissed. And, a month and a day before she mentioned it to me, the magistrate handling the third case—in a move typically reserved for the most frivolous litigation—had ordered Scheiner and her co-plaintiffs to pay ten thousand dollars to the city in court costs, because that filing was so much like the second case. This third case is pending, though it no longer has a lawyer, because the one who brought these cases has since been disbarred, for allegedly lying to a court and allegedly stealing from Holocaust-survivor clients in unrelated cases.
It takes between two and five years for cases to be heard by an arbitrator, and, like Scheiner, most teachers in the Rubber Rooms wait out the time, maintaining their innocence. One of Scheiner’s Rubber Room colleagues pointed to a man whose head was resting on the table, beside an alarm clock and four prescription-pill bottles. “Look at him,” she said. “He should be in a hospital, not this place. We talk about human rights in China. What about human rights right here in the Rubber Room?” Seven of the fifteen Rubber Room teachers with whom I spoke compared their plight to that of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or political dissidents in China or Iran.
It’s a theme that the U.F.T. has embraced. The union’s Web site has a section that features stories highlighting the injustice of the Rubber Rooms. One, which begins “Bravo!,” is about a woman I’ll call Patricia Adams, whose return to her classroom, at a high school in Manhattan, last year is reported as a vindication. The account quotes a speech that Adams made to union delegates; according to the Web site, she received a standing ovation as she declared, “My case should never have been brought to a hearing.” The Web site account continues, “Though she believes she was the victim of an effort to move senior teachers out of the system, the due process tenure system worked in her case.”
On November 23, 2005, according to a report prepared by the Education Department’s Special Commissioner of Investigation, Adams was found “in an unconscious state” in her classroom. “There were 34 students present in [Adams’s] classroom,” the report said. When the principal “attempted to awaken [Adams], he was unable to.” When a teacher “stood next to [Adams], he detected a smell of alcohol emanating from her.”
Adams’s return to teaching, more than two years later, had come about because she and the Department of Education had signed a sealed agreement whereby she would teach for one more semester, then be assigned to non-teaching duties in a school office, if she hadn’t found a teaching position elsewhere. The agreement also required that she “submit to random alcohol testing” and be fired if she again tested positive. In February, 2009, Adams passed out in the office where she had to report every day. A drug-and-alcohol-testing-services technician called to the scene wrote in his report that she was unable even to “blow into breathalyzer,” and that her water bottle contained alcohol. As the stipulation required, she was fired.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the U.F.T. until this month (she is now the president of the union’s national parent organization), said in July that the Web site “should have been updated,” adding, “Mea culpa.” The Web site’s story saying that Adams believed she was the “victim of an effort to move senior teachers out” was still there as of mid-August. Ron Davis, a spokesman for the U.F.T., told me that he was unable to contact Adams, after what he said were repeated attempts, to ask if she would be available for comment.
In late August, I reached Adams, and she told me that no one from the union had tried to contact her for me, and that she was “shocked” by the account of her story on the U.F.T. Web site. “My case had nothing to do with seniority,” she said. “It was about a medical issue, and I sabotaged the whole thing by relapsing.” Adams, whose case was handled by a union lawyer, said that, last year, when a U.F.T. newsletter described her as the victim of a seniority purge, she was embarrassed and demanded that the union correct it. She added, “But I never knew about this Web-site article, and certainly never authorized it. The union has its own agenda.” The next morning, Adams told me she had insisted that the union remove the article immediately; it was removed later that day. Adams, who says that she is now sober and starting a school for recovering teen-age substance abusers, asked that her real name not be used.
he stated rationale for the reassignment centers is unassailable: Get these people away from children, even if tenure rules require that they continue to be paid. Most urban school systems faced with tenure constraints follow the same logic. Los Angeles and San Francisco pay suspended teachers to answer phones, work in warehouses, or just stay home; in Chicago they do clerical work. But the policies implemented by other cities are on a far smaller scale—both because they have fewer teachers and because they have not been as aggressive as Klein and Bloomberg in trying to root out the worst teachers.
It seems obvious that by making the Rubber Rooms as boring and as unpleasant as possible Klein was trying to get bad teachers to quit rather than milk the long hearing process—and some do, although the city does not keep records of that.
“They’re in the Rubber Room because they have an entitlement to stay on the payroll,” says Dan Weisberg, the general counsel and vice-president for policy of a Brooklyn-based national education-reform group called the New Teacher Project. “It’s a job. It’s an economic decision on their part. That’s O.K. But don’t complain.” Until January, Weisberg ran the Department of Education’s labor-relations office, where, in 2007, he set up the Teacher Performance Unit, or T.P.U.—an élite group of lawyers recruited to litigate teacher-incompetence cases for the city.
“When we announced the T.P.U., the U.F.T. called a candlelight vigil”—at City Hall—“to protest what they called the Gotcha Squad,” says Chris Cerf, a deputy chancellor, who, like Klein and Weisberg, is an Ivy League-educated lawyer. “You would think candlelight vigils would be reserved for Gandhi or something like that, but you could hear this rally all the way over the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Randi Weingarten is unapologetic. “We believed that the way this Gotcha Squad was portrayed in the press by the city unfairly maligned all the teachers in the system,” she says. Weingarten, who was a lawyer before becoming a teacher and a U.F.T. officer, is a smart, charming political pro. She always tries to link the welfare of teachers to the welfare of those they teach—as in “what’s good for teachers is good for the children.”
Cerf’s response is that “this is not about teachers; it is about children.” He says, “We all agree with the idea that it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent person be imprisoned. But by laying that on to a process of disciplining teachers you put the risk on the kids versus putting it on an occasional innocent teacher losing a job. For the union, it’s better to protect one thousand teachers than to wrongly accuse one.” Anthony Lombardi, the principal of P.S. 49, a mostly minority Queens elementary school, puts it more bluntly: “Randi Weingarten would protect a dead body in the classroom. That’s her job.”
“For Lombardi to say that,” Weingarten said, “shows he has no knowledge of who I am.”
hould a thousand bad teachers stay put so that one innocent teacher is protected? “That’s not a question we should be answering in education,” Weingarten said to me. “Teachers who are treated fairly are better teachers. You can’t have a situation that is fear-based. . . . That is why we press for due process.”
Steve Ostrin, who was assigned to a Brooklyn Rubber Room fifty-three months ago, might be that innocent man whom the current process protects. In 2005, a student at Brooklyn Tech, an élite high school where Ostrin was an award-winning social-studies teacher, accused him of kissing her when the two were alone in a classroom. After her parents told the police, Ostrin was arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of a child. He denied the charge, insisting that he was only joking around with the student and that the principal, who didn’t like him, seized upon the incident to go after him. The tabloids ran headlines about the arrest, and found a student who claimed that a similar thing had happened to her years before, though she had not reported it to the police. But many of Ostrin’s students didn’t believe the allegations. They staged a rally in support of him at the courthouse where the trial was held. Eleven months later, he was acquitted.
Nevertheless, the city refused to allow him to return to class. “Sometimes if they are exonerated in the courts we still don’t put them back,” Cerf said, adding that he was not referring to Ostrin in particular. “Our standard is tighter than ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ What would parents think if we took the risk and let them back in a classroom?”
Ostrin’s case may be vexing, but it is a distraction from the real issue: how to deal not with teachers accused of misconduct but with the far larger number who, like Scheiner, may simply not be teaching well. While maintaining that the union in no way condones failing teachers, Weingarten defends the elaborate protections that shield union members: “Teachers are not . . . bankers or lawyers. They don’t have independent power. Principals have huge authority over them. All we’re looking for is due process.”
Dan Weisberg, of the New Teacher Project, independently offered a similar analogy for the other side: “You’re not talking about a bank or a law firm. You’re talking about a classroom—which is far more important—and your ability to make sure that the right people are teaching there.”
By now, most serious studies on education reform have concluded that the critical variable when it comes to kids succeeding in school isn’t money spent on buildings or books but, rather, the quality of their teachers. A study of the Los Angeles public schools published in 2006 by the Brookings Institution concluded that “having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.” But, in New York and elsewhere, holding teachers accountable for how well they teach has proved to be a frontier that cannot be crossed.
ne morning in July, I attended a session of the arbitration hearing for Lucienne Mohammed, a veteran fifth-grade teacher. Mohammed, unlike most teachers sent to the Rubber Room, agreed to allow the record of her case to be public. (Her lawyer declined to make her available for an interview, however.) She had been assigned to P.S. 65, in Brooklyn’s East New York section, and was removed from the school in June of 2008, on charges of incompetence.
Mohammed’s case was the first to reach arbitration since the introduction of an initiative called Peer Intervention Program (P.I.P.) Plus, which was created to address the problem of tenured teachers who are suspected of incompetence, not those accused of a crime or other misconduct. P.I.P. Plus was included in the contract negotiated by Klein and Weingarten in 2007. The deal seemed good for both sides: a teacher accused of incompetence would first be assigned a “peer”—a retired teacher or principal—from a neutral consulting company agreed upon by the union and the city. The peer would observe the teacher for up to a year and provide counselling. If the observer determined that the teacher was indeed incompetent and was unlikely to improve, the observer would write a detailed report saying so. The report could then be used as evidence in a removal hearing conducted by an arbitrator agreed upon by the union and the city. “We as a union need to make sure we don’t defend the indefensible,” Weingarten told me. Klein and Weingarten both say that a key goal of P.I.P. Plus was to streamline incompetency arbitration hearings. It has not worked out that way.
The evidence of Mohammed’s incompetence—found in more than five thousand pages of transcripts from her hearing—seems as unambiguous as the city’s lawyer promised in his opening statement: “These children were abused in stealth. . . . It was chronic . . . a failure to complete report cards. . . . Respondent failed to correct student work, failed to follow the mandated curriculum . . . failed to manage her class.” The independent observer’s final report supported this assessment, ticking off ten bullet points describing Mohammed’s unsatisfactory performance. (Mohammed’s lawyer argues that she began to be rated unsatisfactory only after she became active with the union.)
This was the thirtieth day of a hearing that started last December. Under the union contract, hearings on each case are held five days a month during the school year and two days a month during the summer. Mohammed’s case is likely to take between forty and forty-five hearing days—eight times as long as the average criminal trial in the United States. (The Department of Education’s spotty records suggest that incompetency hearings before the introduction of P.I.P. Plus generally took twenty to thirty days; the addition of the peer observer’s testimony and report seems to have slowed things down.) Jay Siegel, the arbitrator in Mohammed’s case, who has thirty days to write a decision, estimates that he will exceed his deadline, because of what he says is the amount of evidence under consideration. This means that Mohammed’s case is not likely to be decided before December, a year after it began. That is about fifty per cent more time, from start to finish, than the O.J. trial took.
While the lawyers argued in measured tones, Mohammed—a slender, polite woman who appeared to be in her early forties—sat silently in one of six chairs bunched around a small conference table. The morning’s proceedings focussed first on a medical excuse that Mohammed produced for not showing up at the previous day’s hearing. Dennis DaCosta, an earnest young lawyer from the Teacher Performance Unit, pointed out that the doctor’s letter was eleven days old and therefore had nothing to do with her supposedly being sick the day before. The letter referred to a chronic condition, Antonio Cavallaro, Mohammed’s union-paid defense counsel, replied. Siegel said that he would reserve judgment.
Next came some discussion among the lawyers and Siegel about Defense Exhibit 33Q, a picture of Mohammed’s classroom. The photograph showed a neatly organized room, with a lesson plan chalked on the blackboard. But, under questioning by her own lawyer, Mohammed conceded that the picture had been taken, in consultation with her union representative, one morning before class, after the principal had begun complaining about her. The independent observer’s report had said that as of just a month before Mohammed was removed—and three months after the peer observer started observing and counselling her, and long after this picture was taken—Mohammed had still not “organized her classroom to support instruction and enhance learning.”
The majority of the transcript of the twenty-nine previous hearing days was given over to the lawyers and the arbitrator arguing issues that included whether and how Mohammed should have known about the contents of the Teachers’ Reference Manual; whether it was admissible that when Mohammed got a memo from the principal complaining about her performance, her students said, she angrily read it aloud in class; whether it was really a bad thing that she had appointed one child in her class “the enforcer,” and charged him with making the other kids behave; whether Mohammed’s union representative should have been present when she was reprimanded for not having a lesson plan; and whether the independent observer was qualified to evaluate Mohammed, even though she came from the neutral consulting company that the union had approved.
When the bill for the arbitrator is added to the cost of the city’s lawyers and court reporters and the time spent in court by the principal and the assistant principal, Mohammed’s case will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars.
Nor is it by any means certain that, as a result of that investment, New York taxpayers will have to stop paying Mohammed’s salary, eighty-five thousand dollars a year. Arbitrators have so far proved reluctant to dismiss teachers for incompetence. Siegel, who is serving his second one-year term as an arbitrator and is paid fourteen hundred dollars for each day he works on a hearing, estimates that he has heard “maybe fifteen” cases. “Most of my decisions are compromises, such as fines,” he said. “So it’s hard to tell who won or lost.” Has he ever terminated anyone solely for incompetence? “I don’t think so,” he said. In fact, in the past two years arbitrators have terminated only two teachers for incompetence alone, and only six others in cases where, according to the Department of Education, the main charge was incompetence.
Klein’s explanation is that “most arbitrators are not inclined to dismiss a teacher, because they have to get approved again every year by the union, and the union keeps a scorecard.” (Weingarten denies that the union keeps a scorecard.)
Antonio Cavallaro, the union lawyer, admitted that the process “needs some ironing out.”
Dan Weisberg says that because of the way cases are litigated by the union it’s impossible to move them along. He notes that, unlike in a criminal court, where the judge has to clear his docket, there is no such pressure on an arbitrator. One of Weisberg’s main concerns is the principals, who have to document cases and then spend time at the hearings. “My goal is to look them in the eye and say you should do the hard work,” he says. “I can’t do that if the principal is going to be on the stand for six days.”
Daysi Garcia, the principal of P.S. 65, is a Queens native and is considered by Klein to be a standout among the principals who attended the first classes of the Leadership Academy. She told me that, despite the five days she had to spend testifying, and the piles of paperwork she accumulated to make a record beforehand, she would do it again, because “when I think about the impact of a teacher like this on the children and how long that lasts, it’s worth it, even if it is hard.”
he document that dictates how Daysi Garcia can—and cannot—govern P.S. 65 is the U.F.T. contract, a hundred and sixty-six single-spaced pages. It not only keeps the Rubber Roomers on the payroll and Garcia writing notes to personnel files all day but dictates every minute of the six hours, fifty-seven and a half minutes of a teacher’s work day, including a thirty-seven-and-a-half-minute tutorial/preparation session and a fifty-minute “duty free” lunch period. It also inserts a union representative into every meaningful teacher-supervisor conversation.
The contract includes a provision that, this fall, will allow an additional seven hundred to eight hundred teachers to get paid for doing essentially no teaching. These are teachers who in the past year—or two or three—have been on what is called the Absent Teacher Reserve, because their schools closed down or the number of classes in the subject they teach was cut. Most “excessed” teachers quickly find new positions at other city schools. But these teachers, who have been on the reserve rolls for at least nine months, have refused to take another job (in almost half such cases, according to a study by the New Teacher Project, they have refused even to apply for another position) or their records are so bad or they present themselves so badly that no other principal wants to hire them. The union contract requires that they get paid anyway.
“Most of the excessed teachers get snapped up pretty fast,” Lombardi, the principal of P.S. 49, says. “You can tell from the records and the interviews who’s good and who’s not. So by the time they’ve been on the reserve rolls for more than nine months they’re not the people you want to hire. . . . I’ll do almost anything to avoid bringing them into my school.” These reserve teachers are ostensibly available to act as substitutes, but they rarely do so, because principals don’t want them or because they are not available on a given day; on an average school day the city pays more than two thousand specially designated substitute teachers a hundred and fifty-five dollars each.
Until this year, the city was hiring as many as five thousand new teachers annually to fill vacancies, while the teachers on the reserve list stayed there. This meant that, in keeping with Klein’s goals, new blood was coming into the schools—recruits from Teach for America or from fellowship programs, as well as those who enter the profession the conventional way. Now that New York, like most cities, is suffering through a budget crisis, Klein has had to freeze almost all new hiring and has told principals that they can fill openings only with teachers on the reserve list or with teachers who want to transfer from other schools.
Even so, the number of teachers staying on reserve for more than nine months is likely to exceed eleven hundred by next calendar year and cost the city more than a hundred million dollars annually. Added to the six hundred Rubber Roomers, that’s seventeen hundred idle teachers—more than enough to staff all the schools in New Haven.
The teachers’-union contract comes up for renewal in October, and Klein told me that he plans to push for a time limit of nine months or a year for reserve teachers to find new positions, after which they would be removed from the payroll. “If you can’t find a job by then, it’s a pretty good indicator that you’re not looking or you’re not qualified,” he said.
n Chicago, reserve-list teachers are removed from the payroll after ten months. Until December, the head of the Chicago school system was Arne Duncan, who is now President Obama’s Education Secretary. Duncan has consistently emphasized improving the quality of teachers by measuring and rewarding—or penalizing—them based on performance. “It’s my highest priority,” he told me.
Leading Democrats often talk about the need to reform public education, but they almost never openly criticize the teachers’ unions, which are perhaps the Party’s most powerful support group. In New York, where Weingarten is a sought-after member of Democratic-campaign steering committees, state legislators and New York City Council members are even more closely tied to the U.F.T., which has the city’s largest political-action fund and contributes generously to Democrats and Republicans alike. As a result, in April of 2008 the State Legislature passed a law, promoted by the union, that prohibited Klein from using student test data to evaluate teachers for tenure, something that he had often talked about doing.
Scores should be used only “in a thoughtful and reflective way,” Weingarten told me. “We acted in Albany because no one trusted that Joel Klein would use them to measure performance in a fair way.”
Reformers like Cerf, Klein, Weisberg, and even Secretary Duncan often use the term “value-added scores” to refer to how they would quantify the teacher evaluation process. It is a phrase that sends chills down the spine of most teachers’-union officials. If, say, a student started the school year rated in the fortieth percentile in reading and the fiftieth percentile in math, and ended the year in the sixtieth percentile in both, then the teacher has “added value” that can be reduced to a number. “You take that, along with observation reports and other measures, and you really can rate a teacher,” Weisberg says.
In a speech in July to the National Education Association, a confederation of teachers’ unions, Duncan was booed when he mentioned student test data. But he went on to say that “inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules . . . put adults ahead of children. . . . These policies were created over the past century to protect the rights of teachers, but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.”
Duncan’s metaphor was deliberate. He was referring to “The Widget Effect,” a study of teacher-assessment processes in school systems across the country, published in June by the New Teacher Project and co-written by Weisberg. “Our schools are indifferent to instructional effectiveness,” the study declared. Under the subhead “All teachers are rated good or great,” it examined teacher rating processes, and found that in districts that have a binary, satisfactory-unsatisfactory system, ninety-nine per cent of teachers receive a satisfactory rating, and that even in the few school districts that attempt a broader range of rating options ninety-four per cent get one of the top two ratings.
The report lays out a road map for “a comprehensive performance evaluation system,” and recommends that for dismissals “an expedited one-day hearing should be sufficient for an arbitrator to determine if the evaluation and development process was followed and judgments made in good faith.” Lucienne Mohammed’s lawyer spent the equivalent of a day disputing whether she should have been familiar with her training materials.
In seven years, Klein has increased the percentage of third-year teachers not given tenure from three to six per cent. Unsatisfactory ratings for tenured teachers have risen from less than one per cent to 1.8 per cent. “Any human-resources professional will tell you that rating only 1.8 per cent of any workforce unsatisfactory is ridiculous,” Weisberg says. “If you look at the upper quartile and the lower quartile, you know that those people are not interchangeable.”
The Rubber Rooms house only a fraction of the 1.8 per cent who have been rated unsatisfactory. The rest still teach. There are fifty Rubber Roomers—a twentieth of one per cent of all New York City teachers*—awaiting removal proceedings because of alleged incompetence, as opposed to those who have been accused of misconduct.
“If you just focus on the people in the Rubber Rooms, you miss the real point, which is that, by making it so hard to get even the obvious freaks and crazies that are there off the payroll, you insure that the teachers who are simply incompetent or mediocre are never incented to improve and are never removable,” Anthony Lombardi says. In a system with eighty-nine thousand teachers, the untouchable six hundred Rubber Roomers and eleven hundred teachers on the reserve list are only emblematic of the larger challenge of evaluating, retraining, and, if necessary, weeding out the poor performers among the other 87,300.
hile Mohammed’s hearing was lumbering on in June, the newsletter of the Chapel Street Rubber Room, in Brooklyn—where Mohammed had spent her school days since 2008—was being handed out by two of its teacher-editors. They were standing under a poster of the room’s mission statement: “TRC”—Temporary Reassignment Center— “Is a Community.” The newsletter’s banner exhorted its readers to “Experience. Share. Enrich. Grow.” Articles included an account of a U.F.T. staff director’s visit to Chapel Street and an essay by one of the room’s inhabitants about how to “quit doubting yourself,” entitled “Perception Is Everything.”
The walls of the large, rectangular room were covered with photographs of Barack Obama and various news clippings. Just to the right of a poster that proclaimed “Bloomberg’s 3 Rs: Rubber Room Racism,” a smiling young woman sat in a lounge chair that she had brought from home. She declined to say what the charges against her were or to allow her name to be used, but told me that she was there “because I’m a smart black woman.”
I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: “If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”
“That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,” she responded. “We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.” After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, “Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.”
But on July 24th President Obama and Secretary Duncan announced that they would award a large amount of federal education aid from the Administration’s stimulus package to school systems on the basis of how they address the issue of accountability. And Duncan made it clear that states where the law does not allow testing data to be used as a measure of teacher performance would not be eligible.
Duncan has fashioned the competition for this stimulus money as a “Race to the Top,” offering four billion dollars to be split among the dozen or so states that do the most to promote accountability in their schools. “That could mean five hundred million dollars for New York, which is huge,” Weisberg says. “But New York won’t be able to compete without radical changes in the law.” Such changes would have to include not only the provision forbidding Klein to use test scores to evaluate teachers (which Weisberg is most focussed on) but also provisions, such as those mandating teacher tenure, that are at the core of the teachers’-union contract. Klein has already come up with a debatable technical argument that the testing restriction won’t actually disqualify New York from at least applying for the money (because the restriction is about using test scores only for tenure decisions). Still, having that law on the books would obviously undercut an application claiming that New York should be declared one of the most accountable systems in the country—as would many provisions of the union contract, such as tenure and compensation based wholly on seniority.
We’ll soon see whether the lure of all that federal money will soften the union position and change the political climate in Albany. If it does, Bloomberg and Klein—who are determined reformers and desperate for the money—would have a chance to turn the U.F.T. contract into something other than a straitjacket when it comes up for renewal, in October. The promise of school funds might also push the legislature, which controls issues such as tenure, to allow a loosening of the contract’s job-security provisions and to repeal the law that forbids test scores to be used to evaluate teachers. If the stimulus money does not push the U.F.T. and the legislature to permit these changes, and if Duncan and Obama are serious about challenging the unions that are the Democrats’ base, the city and the state will miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in education aid. More than that, publicly educated children will continue to live in an alternate universe of reserve-list teachers being paid for doing nothing, Rubber Roomers writing mission statements, union reps refereeing teacher-feedback sessions, competence “hearings” that are longer than capital-murder trials, and student-performance data that are quarantined like a virus. As the Manhattan Rubber Room’s poster says, it’s the children, not the teachers, who are fragile and need to be handled with care. ♦
*Correction, December 1, 2009: A twentieth of one per cent of all New York City teachers are Rubber Roomers, not half of one per cent, as originally stated.
ILLUSTRATION: RICHARD THOMPSON
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Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill?printable=true#ixzz0bDeK3dBv
Monday, August 31, 2009
Missing Richard Nixon By PAUL KRUGMAN
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) - Build ID: 20090824101458
August 31, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Missing Richard Nixon By PAUL KRUGMAN
Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy's life mention his regret that he didn't accept Richard Nixon's offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today's health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.
But it's a bad analogy, because today's political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.
No, I haven't lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.
But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren't as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system's ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.
As many people have pointed out, Nixon's proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.
Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to "approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures." No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.
So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?
Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, "crazy is a pre-existing condition" — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the "death panel" lies?
But there's another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.
We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.
And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That's especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon's day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.
That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are "centrist" Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money.
Given the combination of G.O.P. extremism and corporate power, it's now doubtful whether health reform, even if we get it — which is by no means certain — will be anywhere near as good as Nixon's proposal, even though Democrats control the White House and have a large Congressional majority.
And what about other challenges? Every desperately needed reform I can think of, from controlling greenhouse gases to restoring fiscal balance, will have to run the same gantlet of lobbying and lies.
I'm not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they're up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a "transformational" president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.
Op-Ed Columnist - Missing Richard Nixon - NYTimes.com (12 September 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/opinion/31krugman.html?sq=Missing%20Richard%20Nixon&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/rrzbx
August 31, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Missing Richard Nixon By PAUL KRUGMAN
Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy's life mention his regret that he didn't accept Richard Nixon's offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today's health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.
But it's a bad analogy, because today's political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.
No, I haven't lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.
But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren't as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system's ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.
As many people have pointed out, Nixon's proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.
Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to "approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures." No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.
So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?
Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, "crazy is a pre-existing condition" — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the "death panel" lies?
But there's another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.
We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.
And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That's especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon's day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.
That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are "centrist" Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money.
Given the combination of G.O.P. extremism and corporate power, it's now doubtful whether health reform, even if we get it — which is by no means certain — will be anywhere near as good as Nixon's proposal, even though Democrats control the White House and have a large Congressional majority.
And what about other challenges? Every desperately needed reform I can think of, from controlling greenhouse gases to restoring fiscal balance, will have to run the same gantlet of lobbying and lies.
I'm not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they're up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a "transformational" president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.
Op-Ed Columnist - Missing Richard Nixon - NYTimes.com (12 September 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/opinion/31krugman.html?sq=Missing%20Richard%20Nixon&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/rrzbx
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
August 26, 2009
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
5 Myths About Health Care Around the World By T.R. Reid
5 Myths About Health Care Around the World By T.R. Reid
Sunday, August 23, 2009
As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.
I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:
1. It's all socialized medicine out there.
Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.
In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.
In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.
Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.
As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.
In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"
3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.
Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.
U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.
The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.
4. Cost controls stifle innovation.
False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.
Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)
5. Health insurance has to be cruel.
Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.
Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.
The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.
In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.
This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.
Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.
Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.
T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.
I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:
1. It's all socialized medicine out there.
Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.
In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.
In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.
Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.
As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.
In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"
3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.
Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.
U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.
The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.
4. Cost controls stifle innovation.
False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.
Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)
5. Health insurance has to be cruel.
Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.
Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.
The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.
In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.
This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.
Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.
Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.
T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Adding Layers of Skills to a Science Background By STEVE LOHR
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 20, 2009
Adding Layers of Skills to a Science Background By STEVE LOHR
In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.
The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.
Some students want refresher courses, educators say, but most are trying to broaden their appeal by adding business and communications skills or by learning how to apply their technical talents in promising fields like renewable energy, transportation and health care.
“Technical expertise by itself is not sufficient, and that is more true now than it has ever been,” said Bhaskar Pant, executive director of professional programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s school of engineering.
The technology workers most in demand in the future, according to James E. Spohrer, a researcher and director of university programs for I.B.M., will be “T-shaped people.” Such people, Mr. Spohrer explains, possess a deep knowledge in one technical discipline topped off by a wide portfolio of skills, from project management to industry expertise, that makes them more valuable to employers.
Katherine Heningburg, 28, an electrical engineer at General Dynamics in Scottsdale, Ariz., wants to become one of those broadly skilled technologists. Ms. Heningburg, who designs computer circuits for communications systems, is taking online courses from Arizona State University to earn both a master’s degree in engineering and an M.B.A.
The added skills, she said, should prepare her to lead project teams, a step into management. “My goal is to bridge the gap between the business and technical side,” Ms. Heningburg said. “And this will give me the ammunition I need to be marketable within my company, in my industry and beyond.”
In many schools, hybrid courses that apply computing to business problems are increasingly popular among continuing education students. These blended courses are in new academic niches like knowledge services, data analytics and services science, which combines technology with business processes. These hybrid disciplines apply computing to businesses as diverse as online advertising and food distribution.
“All the business knowledge and data analytics is further up the economic ladder than pure technology alone,” said Ram Akella, a professor of information systems and technology management at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “That work is not going to go offshore.”
Sometimes, a return to school is a smart way to restart a science career. That was the motivation for Mark Spencer, 53, when last fall he began M.I.T.’s Career Re-engineering Program.
Mr. Spencer has a Ph.D. in chemistry and for more than a decade was a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., specializing in atmospheric chemistry and climate modeling. But in 1995, Mr. Spencer, an avid amateur photographer, decided to pursue a long-held desire to try another career. He moved back to his home state, Massachusetts, and set up a photography studio.
MR. Spencer did well for years, as both the owner of a small business and as a photographer, winning a string of professional awards. Yet, he explained, the intellectual stimulation of photography waned over time, and the deep recession reduced sales of his business by 40 percent.
So Mr. Spencer immersed himself in courses at M.I.T. two days a week last fall and, as part of the program, started an internship this year at a technology and research firm, Agiltron. One division of the company does contract work for the government, and shortly after he arrived Mr. Spencer was asked to help prepare a contract proposal on deadline. He was hired the next day, well before the M.I.T program was over.
“I didn’t get my full money’s worth,” he joked.
Mr. Spencer said he found the M.I.T. course work useful and stimulating. But like others, Mr. Spencer also pointed to the networking benefits of rejoining a university community and the value of the program as a sign to employers that you are motivated and willing to make an entrepreneurial investment in yourself.
“If my résumé started by saying I had run a photography studio for the last 15 years, there’s no way I would have gotten in the door,” Mr. Spencer said. “Having that M.I.T program at the top of the résumé really was crucial.”
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August 20, 2009
Adding Layers of Skills to a Science Background By STEVE LOHR
In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.
The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.
Some students want refresher courses, educators say, but most are trying to broaden their appeal by adding business and communications skills or by learning how to apply their technical talents in promising fields like renewable energy, transportation and health care.
“Technical expertise by itself is not sufficient, and that is more true now than it has ever been,” said Bhaskar Pant, executive director of professional programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s school of engineering.
The technology workers most in demand in the future, according to James E. Spohrer, a researcher and director of university programs for I.B.M., will be “T-shaped people.” Such people, Mr. Spohrer explains, possess a deep knowledge in one technical discipline topped off by a wide portfolio of skills, from project management to industry expertise, that makes them more valuable to employers.
Katherine Heningburg, 28, an electrical engineer at General Dynamics in Scottsdale, Ariz., wants to become one of those broadly skilled technologists. Ms. Heningburg, who designs computer circuits for communications systems, is taking online courses from Arizona State University to earn both a master’s degree in engineering and an M.B.A.
The added skills, she said, should prepare her to lead project teams, a step into management. “My goal is to bridge the gap between the business and technical side,” Ms. Heningburg said. “And this will give me the ammunition I need to be marketable within my company, in my industry and beyond.”
In many schools, hybrid courses that apply computing to business problems are increasingly popular among continuing education students. These blended courses are in new academic niches like knowledge services, data analytics and services science, which combines technology with business processes. These hybrid disciplines apply computing to businesses as diverse as online advertising and food distribution.
“All the business knowledge and data analytics is further up the economic ladder than pure technology alone,” said Ram Akella, a professor of information systems and technology management at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “That work is not going to go offshore.”
Sometimes, a return to school is a smart way to restart a science career. That was the motivation for Mark Spencer, 53, when last fall he began M.I.T.’s Career Re-engineering Program.
Mr. Spencer has a Ph.D. in chemistry and for more than a decade was a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., specializing in atmospheric chemistry and climate modeling. But in 1995, Mr. Spencer, an avid amateur photographer, decided to pursue a long-held desire to try another career. He moved back to his home state, Massachusetts, and set up a photography studio.
MR. Spencer did well for years, as both the owner of a small business and as a photographer, winning a string of professional awards. Yet, he explained, the intellectual stimulation of photography waned over time, and the deep recession reduced sales of his business by 40 percent.
So Mr. Spencer immersed himself in courses at M.I.T. two days a week last fall and, as part of the program, started an internship this year at a technology and research firm, Agiltron. One division of the company does contract work for the government, and shortly after he arrived Mr. Spencer was asked to help prepare a contract proposal on deadline. He was hired the next day, well before the M.I.T program was over.
“I didn’t get my full money’s worth,” he joked.
Mr. Spencer said he found the M.I.T. course work useful and stimulating. But like others, Mr. Spencer also pointed to the networking benefits of rejoining a university community and the value of the program as a sign to employers that you are motivated and willing to make an entrepreneurial investment in yourself.
“If my résumé started by saying I had run a photography studio for the last 15 years, there’s no way I would have gotten in the door,” Mr. Spencer said. “Having that M.I.T program at the top of the résumé really was crucial.”
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Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom By Steve Lohr
August 19, 2009, 1:08 pm
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom By Steve Lohr
Update | 11:08 p.m. Read an article by Steve Lohr on keeping abreast of innovation in the Continuing Education special section.
A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
Noah Berger for The New York Times Tyler Kennedy, 9, searches the Web at home in California.
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.
This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.
Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.
The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
“We are at an inflection point in online education,” said Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program.
The biggest near-term growth, Mr. Regier predicts, will be in continuing education programs. Today, Arizona State has 5,000 students in its continuing education programs, both through in-person classes and online. In three to five years, he estimates, that number could triple, with nearly all the growth coming online.
But Mr. Regier also thinks online education will continue to make further inroads in transforming college campuses as well. Universities — and many K-12 schools — now widely use online learning management systems, like Blackboard or the open-source Moodle. But that is mostly for posting assignments, reading lists, and class schedules and hosting some Web discussion boards.
Mr. Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said. For example, it will be assumed that college students know the basics of calculus, and the classroom time will focus on applying the math to real-world problems — perhaps in exploring the physics of climate change or modeling trends in stock prices, he said.
“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Mr. Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”
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FEEDBACK FROM READERS...CONTAINS INTERESTING LINKS
1 2 3 ... 5 Next »
1. August 19, 2009
1:48 pm
Link
For K-12, online classes may translate to more face-to-face instruction. We pulled our son out of a useless junior high, let him play guitar and video games at home all day, and used an online charter school to teach him ourselves at night. The online curriuculum was definitely superior to what the local school offered, and the 1:1 instruction was very efficient. After one semester, he’s ahead of all his old classmates, rather than failing, and he’s enjoying life. Most people probably can’t arrange their lives to do this, but it sure can work when it works.
— Buzz
2. August 19, 2009
1:56 pm
Link
If you resonate with the studies conclusions, consider that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Imagine what we’ll begin to see when the generation that’s been “bathed in bits” begins building learning communities?
Imagine a mash-up of stumbleupon (randomizing), plus freerice.com (rewards/incentives), plus websites only slightly tweaked to deliver the core content required by states’ NCLB-mandated standards. The most successful (digital) charter school in history.
And, to take it a step further, now layer in the ability to be the personality that you want to be while learning, but still retain a social element through your digital self: http://guengerich.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/talk-to-the-digital-hand/
Great to see the validation from SRI.
— live in Austin
3. August 19, 2009
2:01 pm
Link
Learning is an independent activity Mr. Reiger to the contrary… We all decide what we want to learn — 1st decision and then for different people there are different ways to learn things… The computer which can repreat things forever — and is very patient is a good method for that reason… It can also talk to us and put up something for us to read concurrently — this is where much teaching falls down — on the visual component..A few things do need hands on practice.. say dissection but having had lots of trouble with the instruction from the human instructor on the dissection of the baby pig - I now wonder how I would have done with computer directions to guide me…. sort of like operating long distance via video hookups which are now done…..
Of course, it’s incredibly cheap to provide online education — we could be lawyers for 100$ — which is exactly why this technology is NOT being appropriately exploited except by for profits… pathetic…
and thank heavesn for Wikipedia. — there are some good people out there.
— Hetty Greene
4. August 19, 2009
2:10 pm
Link
One problem with saying that students in online classes do slightly better than students in traditional classes goes back to the old comparing apples and oranges thing. Online classes have their own assessments that may not parallel traditional assessments. The very technology tends to skew what can and cannot be assessed. Was there any standardization in the compared assessments, I wonder?
— Helen Hoffman
5. August 19, 2009
2:15 pm
Link
I’m halfway through an online master’s program with SJSU’s SLIS. It’s incredibly individualist, timely, and convenient. While the difference between an instructor that can effectively utilize the technology and also bridge the gap of disconnect between students and one who cannot is literally the difference between day and night, I think that the future of education is not as “scary” as it used to be.
p.s. I assure you Hetty, that it costs much more than you think to run these types of programs well.
— Dana
6. August 19, 2009
2:44 pm
Link
I wonder to what degree the comparisons are skewed because online learners tend to have more access to technology etc in general. There could be a real effect, but dubious about the magnitude.
— JD
7. August 19, 2009
2:49 pm
Link
Isn’t it a self-selecting group that would want to learn online? Could this be a reason why those taking online courses do better? There’s a certain drive and motivation necessary to force yourself to learn something you don’t have to.
— KV
8. August 19, 2009
2:57 pm
Link
Perhaps by giving business, civics, math and the sciences over to online learning, truly significant time in the classroom can be given over to the arts and humanities.
— Duro
9. August 19, 2009
3:00 pm
Link
Fascinating. When it came to college instruction, did the study consider whether older learners did better than traditional college students?
In my experience, on-line learning can work with motivated adults who already possess the BA or BS and take on-line classes to get a credential or a salary boost at work.
Traditional-age college students need the classroom interaction. For that matter, college-level learning is NOT an individual experience. It’s totally dependent upon dialogue and discussion. Otherwise, we might as well say that all we ever need to know we can get by gazing at our navels.
I’m very disturbed by Hetty Greene’s comment. Wikipedia may provide answers, but a college education is designed to help people ask questions and to analyze. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it does not teach analytical or critical thinking. If you don’t want those things, don’t go to college. And if you want a good lawyer, you best make sure he or she does not see the world in terms of answers and quick facts rather than in terms of questions and analysis.
College students, especially those aged 18-24, need to be challenged by the professor and fellow students in person, because they are far too sheltered and naive to seek challenges to what they already think to be true. Those over the age of 24 are not much better, but if they’ve already gone to college they know to ask questions. Young people, now raised in Hetty Greene’s world in which answers and not questions are touted as the end all and be all, are especially in need of the critical thinking skills that a college education provides.
For that matter, most of my on-line students failed their courses and the university knew they’d fail. On-line courses are cash cows *designed* to take advantage of irresponsible, parent-shielded child-adults who, while by no means dumb, are too lazy to drop courses in which they lose interest. Students in my classroom rarely fail because they stop attending class. Students on-line, however, quickly lose interest and are so enamored of their new independence that they forget to drop the course. The F stays on their record and the university gets the cash.
— sara
10. August 19, 2009
3:13 pm
Link
I have personally been the student in a variety of settings, including online, traditional college, foreign universities, community college, etc. What I have found is 1 year later, my retention rate of the material I learned is about the same, irrespective of the delivery method.
That said, I found the online learning drudgery. No live interaction with students & teachers, no debates, etc. No camaraderie, no life-long friendships formed, etc. Not good for extroverts. Living on campus with fellow students is more valuable, and leaves greater impressions, than what you learn in the classroom, particularly 30 years later. So for young people, I definitely recommend the college campus experience, living away from home starting at 18. What you learn about life & getting along with other people will never be reproduced online.
On the plus side, driving to class after work to listen to a bored adjunct for 90 minutes, then driving home is a waste of time. I could read that material myself in 20 minutes in the comfort of my home AND get a higher score on the test. You can move at your own speed and don’t waste time doing stuff that’s redundant. You can do assignments at 2 a.m. if you want - it’s your schedule. In these regards, online learning is superior. Much better for working stiffs trying to get ahead.
The subject matter is also important. Much easier to learn computer programming online than brain surgery. Anything involving people, like physical therapy, needs a large “live” component. OTH, accounting can likely be done easily online.
Bottom line is the motivated learner or student can do well in a variety of settings. As #3 pointed out, it’s cheaper to do online. Just record the professor’s lecture one time, and you’re done, even if s/he dies.
It’s also good for people who live in Timbuktu. You can still have access to the famous professor from home, something that was impossible before.
— JS17
11. August 19, 2009
3:29 pm
Link
From this overview that has been presented, it would appear that the research has discovered a correlation rather than a causation in their results.
More bluntly, people taking online courses are a self selected group of people who want to learn. In a regular college environment, that just isn’t there - there are plenty of deadbeats who get weeded out, or people who realize that this isn’t for them, or people who were pushed into college by mom and dad and just aren’t too terribly bright.
Comparison of test scores doesn’t validate the results that Ms. Means and her team has drawn from their research. Their results are interesting, but the essential point still stands; they’ll need more data on the students themselves to draw any form of conclusion about the real efficacy of online teaching.
— Jim
12. August 19, 2009
3:31 pm
Link
Just throwing online tools at people does not mean they will engage in meaningful learning. And many course management systems — Blackboard is the notorious biggest offender — are closed, proprietary, and their online media are decades behind the curve.
With some money from MacArthur Foundation, I worked with developers and with my own students to develop a combination of tools and techniques:
http://socialmediaclassroom.com and http://socialmediaclassroom/com/host/vircom
It’s free and open source software and all the curricular materials are free for others to use.
— Howard Rheingold
13. August 19, 2009
3:34 pm
Link
Re, from the article: “The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms.”
Yes, I strongly agree. As a teacher, I want students to have individualized learning experiences, especially students who are already 2-3 years behind.
Right now in Florida we actually have a state law that says students who have already been retained “2 or more years” in public schools are required to be in an “alternative placement” — but no one bothered to fund any alternative placement settings for those students already left back 2 or more years who are not eligible for special ed because they do not score low enough to qualify.
What these kids need is an online alternative placement classroom; one like the online classrooms now being used in NYC over the summer to teach math as recently profiled in the NY Times.
By offering students an online alternative, in school, the school still gets the money to educate the student, and the student has a chance for an individual online experience that may even enable the student to catch up.
And, the student could still attend music, art and PE classes with their actual age peers, which is not what happens now.
Now, what happens is you can be a 4th grade teacher, and get a very tall, very physically large 13 year old male student who should be in 7th grade, but is still stuck in
4th grade.
This is not a good situation for that student, or for the other students who are actually only 10 years old.
And the larger student does not like taking 4th grade art, music and PE three years in a row either.
So, I am looking forward to more online learning in schools, especially for situations like the above. This would really be a tremendous help to all students and teachers.
— florida voter
14. August 19, 2009
3:36 pm
Link
While enrolled in a mixed media course, where lectures were delivered online through Blackboard with weekly discussion/quiz sessions in a classroom, we quickly found that the best way for many of us to watch the lectures was, in fact, together. This gave everyone a chance to ask questions in the middle of the lecture, and have a possible answer. However, having the ability to go straight to lectures during review helped in studying for finals, or doing homework. Nonetheless, given the complex content of the course, I feel that at least some human interaction was necessary for conceptual comprehension.
Though there are some days I wish all professors came with a fast-forward button…
— KD
15. August 19, 2009
3:41 pm
Link
On the contrary, Buzz, I think most people can rearrange their lives to allow their kids the best education. There’s no law, biological or otherwise, that says kids can only learn between 9 and 3 or between September and June. Teenagers in particular are more awake in the afternoon and evening than they are at 7am. Why not allow them to adjust their educational schedule to fit their circadian rhythm by implementing more asynchronous learning?
— The Princess Mom
16. August 19, 2009
3:52 pm
Link
Being in a doctorate program at Boston University, I can certainly attest to the rigor and depth of the educational experience. I have degrees and certification from several prominent institutions (Kenyon College, University of Colorado - Boulder, University of TN - Knoxville, University of Memphis), and would put my on-line experience at BU against any of my excellent live classroom experiences. Being able to continue to work while attending graduate school has been a major plus. I am able to remain in my house, no travel time, and can archive lectures and classes.
On the down side, one misses the informal exchanges of student-to-student and student to faculty personal contacts.
— Charles Tighe
17. August 19, 2009
4:07 pm
Link
I agree with the last paragraph completely. I have studied in online only, classroom only, and an online/classroom hybrid. While I learned a lot from all of them, logic in online classes and political science and all the drama that entails in classroom classes, I did like the hybrids. Sharing thoughts online and then meeting in person.
— Walter G
18. August 19, 2009
4:20 pm
Link
I completed an accredited online graduate course in the Humanities at the age is 83! Independent study is the way we all learn, and through the graded discussions and a good professor, it is the only way of the future for working people who cannot travel for their studies, and saves the enormous expense of dormitory life.
It is truly astounding that schools do not offer more online courses..
— Elaine
19. August 19, 2009
4:27 pm
Link
You may want to take a look at this interview on K-12 math teaching online: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/08/12/teaching-k-12-math-online-reasoning-mind-ceo-alex-khachatryan-part-1/
— Sramana Mitra
20. August 19, 2009
4:30 pm
Link
I’ve never participated in on-line distance learning; but I wouldn’t have guessed these results. However, Jim (11) makes a good point. Test results are not really a good proxy for testing all-around ‘learning.’
JS17 seems to have more varied experiences than I have; and seems to capture several facets of the argument. I think certain subjects and basic disciplines could be taught on-line; but others wouldn’t lend themselves to it. Hetty Green thinks one could become a lawyer for $100. Good luck with that. How is one going to participate in a Socratic dialogue amongst ones peers? Maybe when videoconferencing improves and becomes cheaper.
— Larry
21. August 19, 2009
4:37 pm
Link
I wonder if what could also be happening, with regards to college students participating in online courses, is that those people voluntarily taking these courses are self-selected to be students with more tenacity and self-discipline than students who would not be able to make that commitment. Just a thought. I could be way off-base here.
— Zachary Elwood
22. August 19, 2009
4:56 pm
Link
@ duro, “Perhaps by giving business, civics, math and the sciences over to online learning, truly significant time in the classroom can be given over to the arts and humanities.”
Math *is* a humanity. It is not a science. It is an art in itself, not a tool, although it can be used as a tool, much as the English language can be used as a tool though it is not *merely* a tool.
And the best way to learn it is through wide ranging mathematical conversation with an actual mathematician, as opposed to “problem sets”. Unfortunately there is little to no math (proofs, methods of proof etc), and next to no mathematicians, below university level in this country so most people are not exposed to this fact.. Perhaps an inherent flaw of forced “education”.
As to the original article, I suspect again that, because correllation is not equal to causation, there is quite a bit of self-selection in the study. Whether this be true or not, however, the lower cost of online instruction will drive increased use of online education systems in the future.
— steve in W MA
23. August 19, 2009
5:03 pm
Link
The key is that online eSchools allow students to have instant access to iconic media, i.e. photographs, film/video clips,
animation clips, virtual field trips, QTVRs, sound clips to help convey information and concepts. Much better for teachers to SHOW & TELL rather than to just TELLl information to students like our ancestors did in the Bronze Age…and assume the students know what you’re talking/telling about.
Why do most kids HATE SCHOOL? Because they have to
sit in their seats for six hours a day listening to a teacher
chalkTALK to them in an attempt to convey information.
— Larry Loganbill
24. August 19, 2009
5:08 pm
Link
The curriculum currently being taught in American schools
was designed in 1892 by the president of Harvard and
“The Committee of Ten”. Essentially aren’t we preparing our
students for the early 1900s?
What do the wingnuts at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook,
YouTube, Toyota etc. say we should be teaching our kids to prepare them for the workplace of 2015-2050? Or should we teach them to farm using electric tractors and combines?
— Larry Loganbill
25. August 19, 2009
5:12 pm
Link
Let the students stay at home and enroll in a good internet
online eSchool. And provide free “brick & mortar” preschools for all 3 and 4 year-olds who live below the poverty line.
Middle class kids enter school with four times the world knowledge and vocabulary of the kids who live below the
poverty line.
— Larry Loganbill
From 26 to 50 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
26. August 19, 2009
5:19 pm
Link
There is a revolution coming in education. Already a student can have a live interaction with a teacher over the internet-even if the teacher is on the other side of the world. Materials, handouts and books can also all be sent over the internet. There is simply no reason why a student and a teacher have to be in the same room together.
American collrge campuses are basically a type of camp for young adults. They go there and learn to live without their parents, lose their virginity and party. This has nothing to do with learning.
— John C
27. August 19, 2009
5:19 pm
Link
The SRI report, in its totality, is significant and probably prophetic, in line with the continuing work of the Alfred Sloan Foundation. I have the privilege of working closely with a variety of LMS and courseware and the future is MUCH more exciting and promising than even the SRI and similar reports suggest. For high school courseware, just take a look at http://www.4tnoxrox.com and you will see what I mean. For university business programs, take a look at
http://www.vlcglobal.com. The introduction of 3D Virtual Reality to education and corporate training is truly revolutionary. There is hope both for reduced costs and improved quality for today’s tech-savvy learners.
— John P. Cragin, Ph.D.
28. August 19, 2009
5:40 pm
Link
As someone who has done both, I can say: it’s not that online learning is so great, it’s that the US classroom as it exists right now is that bad.
— Farnsworth
29. August 19, 2009
6:05 pm
Link
Having taken online and classroom college courses, I agree that the best online students are highly diciplined and self motivated, with a knack for gaining information through reading and writing. There’s plenty of oportunity for discussion. It just takes place in writing over a series of days instead of via the spoken word in a series of minutes.
In contrast, as Sara mentioned, there are plenty of students for whom online doesn’t work. While this might be due in part to age and lack of discipline, it might also be due to a difference in learning styles. If you hate reading & writing you aren’t going to do well with online content no matter your age or motivation.
I am now working on an MBA in the classroom and would probably be able finish the degree faster if I had an online option. The hour drive to campus makes it a lot harder juggle full time work and family along with the classroom time. Online learning gave me the flexibility to fit school into my schedule, rather than me fitting my life into the school’s arbitrary schedule of classes.
— vivaELvino
30. August 19, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
I had a lot of experience with a computer assisted instruction system called FIS, as a student, author, and curriculum coordinator . This study is pure crap.
— JB
31. August 19, 2009
6:54 pm
Link
The future of education is online period. Whether it is in the classroom or distance learning the use of online content that has been peer-reviewed and validated by experts in the respective fields should be available to everyone. The only way to work through this new, new economy is to have the most highly educated work force ever in time. The only way to do this is to have open access to the newest information on a daily basis. The concept of the five year textbook is gone - dead - period. information is changing at a rapid pace and the more information available the better. This is the essence of online education. I have been an academic for 23 years, I am tenured, I get up every morning at 5:00 and read my research from credible sources. I then put my notes together for that days lessons and bring to class the most current information possible. That is what these students are going into debt for! Critical thinking is imperative but it must be blended with new theories in order for it to be effective. If we are still thinking about old theories then the critical thinking is useless. New components must be added to the equation which lead to greater questions and different thought patterns.
I do not believe that face to face is dead but there is iChat to iChat. It does work.
the problem is the expense. Now with opens source LMSs becoming accepted by schools the future of online is here to stay.
the problem is how to monetize this new paradigm. Should a professor be paid the same amount for 300 students as they are for 20? It is a lot more work to review 300 papers then it is to review 20. Same as any other field. A lot of questions need to be answered. But one that has clearly been answered is that it i a new, new very “flat” world. Get over it and get with it.
— Patrick Aievoli
32. August 19, 2009
7:30 pm
Link
The key word here is ‘community.’ The online courses must be used to network, not isolate. Otherwise, we can go ahead and rework sociocultural learning theory’s most basic points.
— nick
33. August 19, 2009
8:20 pm
Link
While I think online courses can be useful, I think it’s important to consider that there may be other sources of the discrepancy in achievement. Many online courses use online assessments to measure achievement. In high school, I took several math finals for my then-boyfriend so that he could pass his online college math classes. With online exams, there is no way to ensure that the person taking the exam is the person enrolled in the course, or that prohibited materials are not being used.
I don’t think closed-book exams assessing rote memorization are useful measures of learning. But since these are the most common tools used to assess achievement, I think it’s worth considering how the experience of taking one of these exams may differ between the two contexts.
(And yes, as a TA at a large university, I know that there are students who have other people take their exams for them in-person, particularly in large classes. But at least in this situation, I have the opportunity to notice a face that I have never seen before and ask for ID.)
— Laura
34. August 19, 2009
8:52 pm
Link
It is not really a wonder that online teaching is more effective than brick and mortar schools. It provides solutions to problems that are only created and compounded by packing kids together with little supervision.
School grounds are like little islands in which kids adapt much like the kids in “Lord of the Flies.” Teachers are increasing unable to discipline students, much less teach. Students are unable to concentrate and think critically.
Yet when I put a computer in front of my daughter she can talk for hours, listen for hours, and even read books for hours. I have to pry her away. I dream of the day when brick and mortar colleges disappear and with them the drunken idiocy of our higher learning institutions.
— Soren
35. August 19, 2009
9:22 pm
Link
A plug for Sara #10. Partly there’s the problem with “student-aged” students. And, as Patrick #31 suggests along with Sara, there will be deep problems as long as schools see on-line courses as for profit, and not for educational success (as our health care system rewards procedures, not health).
But more basically, in a good classroom, one has a situation both ancient and new: telling a tale around the campfire. This is important (when the teacher’s good).
It’s not primarily about conveying information or data, but it is a great way to show how to assess data and to build it up into a picture that makes sense.
“Students learn in different ways” — fine, but also students need to improve on areas of weakness — an ability to concentrate over time on developing a coherent picture is an important skill.
The different venues will probably work differently for different fields. E.g., Patrick # 31 — not all fields change quite so rapidly; and in many places, the analysis learned on not-quite-the-moment’s data will be quite portable.
Discussion classes about literature can work wonderfully in person, in part because the communication is not just letters on the screen, but all the human ways of communicating — tone, eyes, affect, &c. — and immediate reaction — even the reaction while one is speaking.
“When the teacher’s good” — I’ve seen that instructors in some science courses are often not going on to be teachers, and they resent the time they teach, and it results in poor learning, esp. for those with less aptitude. That’s a shame; if on-line can put them out of business, fine by me!
There are some important aspects of learning that a good classroom (either lecture or seminar) can do singularly well.
— Arthur
36. August 19, 2009
10:13 pm
Link
I teach high school English in Kansas and direct a computer-based program for adults who are seeking a high school diploma.
This research flies in the face of everything I believe, but I don’t feel as though my one experience can trump this exhaustive finding. If I had not read it, I would not have believed it.
One factor that I believe might help online is the speed of learning versus the predictable and often slow learning that takes place at the one speed of the teacher. If this were removed, then it is true that students could learn much more quickly.
At age 49, I feel as though I would need to be re-educated to learn how to assist through on-line methodology. I am just a few years from retirement, and I wonder if it would be worth going back to relearn how to assist using this method.
— Kilgatron
37. August 19, 2009
10:20 pm
Link
One of the biggest misconceptions about online learning is that it is a cheap option. The standard model of large university lectures is not the best way to learn material - we know that. It is, however, much cheaper than the better versions, both in human resources and infrastructure. There’s a reason schools with very small class size and personalized attention are expensive.
To do internet based learning well takes resources. You still have to design the curriculum, set exams and assignments, and evaluate the result (computer evaluated exams like multiple choice are one of the worst ways of testing comprehension, particularly for advanced subjects). You still need a trained expert to answer questions. I’ve found answering a question in a fashion suitable for email takes about four time longer than answering the same question in person. And you need to add computer resources, and the personnel to maintain them, program them and handle security.
I’ve also heard the argument that kids could study at home on the internet before. The problem with that is that you can’t leave children unattended all day, so someone has to stay with them while they study at home. For that, we need a full time stay at home parent or the parents are going to have to pay for supervision, a la daycare.
— Jennifer
38. August 19, 2009
10:38 pm
Link
We at http://www.nixty.com are creating a hybrid platform that supports traditional K-12 and higher education, but also provides space for informal learning communities to develop. Mr. Reiger is absolutely right in indicating that peer learning will expand beyond the classroom and be integral to learning and development in the future. It has to be. We simply do not have enough educators to meet demand. The trick lies in developing tools that facilitate this kind of context.
If you are interested in helping us create this platform, then please sign up to help us beta test NIXTY.
— Glen
39. August 19, 2009
10:51 pm
Link
Finally education is adopting the most important principle of most business- differentiate your product for each market segment. I have been advocating this and is potential in education through education technology since 1970.
The problem is not the technology but the status quo protectors who control both k12 and higher education. They fight every attempt at individualized, self paced learning, even when the data shows its productivity improvement.
A big part of the problem is that most educators, especially K12, both also higher education, are technology avoiders. It will take a lot of public pressure to implement educational technology as a productivity or transformational strategy.
I am a Professor of Business and Economics who has served on State Board of Education and on the State Board for Community Colleges.
— Ed Lyell
40. August 19, 2009
11:10 pm
Link
I think that a lot of people are missing the point here.
From the tables presented on pages 44-46 of the report it is clear that although the authors do include some studies concerned with K-12 and undergraduate level performance off- and on-line, many of the studies dealt more specifically with student performance in short courses, vocational courses, courses intended as professional enhancement, and course sub-units.
Studies included in the meta-analysis include results showing that physicians who took an online course in opioid and benzodiazepine prescribing skills showed better results than those who took a traditional course, that web-based instructional modalities were effective as part of a larger programing course, and that online tutorials for teaching hypothesis testing concepts showed positive results, among others.
While such results are interesting, they do not support the idea that online courses are in any way superior (or even equal) to traditional, face-to-face, primary or secondary education.
A list of the studies included is available on page 44 of the report; I hope people will refer to it (or perhaps even the report in its entirety) before drawing any conclusions.
— E.R. Land
41. August 20, 2009
12:49 am
Link
It was BF Skinner, building on the technology and experience of even earlier pioneers of self-paced, individualized learning, who realized nearly fifty years ago what he termed the “impossibility” of transmitting the optimal amount of information to each student in the traditional classroom. I’ve taught online since 1996 and I think that the nine-point difference in achievement stated in the report quantifies what I detect as the difference between my classroom students and my online ones. Online work compels, sooner or later, active processing by students: add to this the usually greater self-motivation of those who choose online instruction and there isn’t much wonder in that slight though significant difference. On the other hand, I can’t sit down with an online student on the tailgate and figure things out in conversation. At present, the first-year college students I encounter each fall, most of whom I know would benefit far more from the structure of the online course vs. the usually overcrowded classroom course, overwhelmingly choose to stay with the classroom course rather than take the course online. I believe they make this choice because they haven’t had enough experience with both methods to make an informed choice. My hope is that, within 10 years, to see 25% of my incoming intro psych students opt for the online version. I’m patient–I’ve waited 15 years to see online work get as many approving comments as it has in this set tonight. I think it will take at least until all the college instructors of my generation retire until the full potential of online education will be realized.
Dave D (55 years young–25 years in the teaching biz)
— Dave D
42. August 20, 2009
1:47 am
Link
I agree with that. The new generation kids mostly interested in online education. if the online education website teaching games or animation based lessons, kids will love that. it give fun experience to the kids.
— Jonam
43. August 20, 2009
2:35 am
Link
Why wouldn’t online courses be more INTERESTING thus
more effective for conveying information. The students
has access to photographs, film/video and animation clips,
virtual reality field trips QTVRs and sound clips to help convey the information and concepts instead of a teacher just standing and TELLING about the information. SHOW & TELL not just TELL.
— Larry Loganbill
44. August 20, 2009
3:03 am
Link
Well for me, online training is a no no. No interaction from the teacher, no response from other students, no ideas from other students. It’s different. Try working on the computer for atleast 2 hours, isn’t it boring? A child needs to be at school where he can play with other kids, interact with other kids for self development also.
Karen Davis
san diego computer repair
— Karen Davis
45. August 20, 2009
6:12 am
Link
This sounds like a study that hypothetically showed that people taking classes near Harvard did better, and using it to claim that there was something about the geography of Harvard that made students excel.
Obviously, there are brighter students near Harvard, so they would tend to do well. And computer-oriented students probably tend to be brighter — it’s like, nerdsville!
So I don’t believe that the Internet is somehow a better learning environment. On the other hand, it is certainly cheaper. For that reason, online education should be encouraged; it allows wide access to educational resources. But it isn’t inherently superior.
— Gene Venable
46. August 20, 2009
6:44 am
Link
As a former online student and a current online instructor, I will say that online learning is not for everyone. If you are a person who is easily distracted, not organized and definetly not organized - online learning is not for you.
However, one can feel just as part of a classroom online as one does in a traditional setting. If you have a good instructor who is truly involved then the experience is just as equal to sitting in the classroom face to face. The level of the student’s involvement also makes a huge difference. If a student is willing to dive into discussions, add extra to the topic, etc. they will experience an equal level of education as those sitting in the classroom.
I do believe that the study should have specified if those researched had specific reasons for taking online course though. If distance to the nearest college was an issue and online provided not having to drive, then that is one thing. You could easily compare online to traditional. However, if the reason for online was more to do with social issues, such as anxiety, then you can not easily compare the two.
all in all, though, I am excited to see that online learning is getting some rave reviews and legitimate research. While it will never replace the traditional classroom, it is a wonderful option!
— Bethany
47. August 20, 2009
6:45 am
Link
I believe there are certain subject areas which tend to lend themselves better to online instruction and social media. For example, we here at http://www.italki.com believe that foreign language instruction is a particularly good fit. Studies have shown that interaction with native speakers improve fluency, comprehension and accuracy when learning a new language. The internet makes it possible for someone to find a native speaker to learn and practice with no matter where they live or what language they’re studying. Online learning in this case is expanding human interaction rather than limiting it.
— Eric
48. August 20, 2009
7:16 am
Link
K-12 learners today have generally been immersed in an expansive and ceaseless information stream since birth. This immersion produces transformations in information processing responsiveness and receptivity (see Strommen, E.F., Constructivism, Technology, and the Future of Classroom Learning, Children’s Television Workshop, Bruce Lincoln, Bank Street College of Education, 1992 http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/livetext/docs/construct.html) and the technologies do have an expanding impact on student motivation to learn. Currently available technologies are serious tools that affect the lives of students with immediacy and with great potential for both good and harm. Thus, a pivotal component for learning with technology tools is that an educated person uses these systems and processes in an informed, ethical, and responsible way. This component of education is not referred to at all in the above article and it should be considered essential to learners. Scholarship is not only the application of learning tools to “do something meaningful and useful,” but also recognizing ethical, responsible use, and knowing how to make things of significance with those tools. Ethics and responsibility are centered in the affective domain and they should be addressed at the core of any educational model that relies on embedded information technologies. Education also needs to foster the development of skills and attitudes that address the social and ethical issues intrinsic to the technological advancements of our society.
— Barry Grant
49. August 20, 2009
8:01 am
Link
I teach at a small two-year college that offers a variety of online courses. We that teach the on-campus versions of the classes have noticed declining enrollment in some of the harder science courses, due to increasing online enrollment.
In talking to many people about this, the general consensus is that students like the online, because it is so much easier to cheat and get better grades.
.
While I have no doubt there are some solid online courses out there, I think a teacher can’t be replaced. Otherwise, I could read a text book and be a doctor!
.
Most of the studies of online learning ignore the cheating factor and I have heard people rationalize saying that looking up the info just shows that students know where to look. They know where to find answers, but that doesn’t mean they learn the material. I agree with those saying that it doesn’t teach thinking skills or how to evaluate the answers they do find for accuracy.
.
Bottom line: Online is not equal to classroom learning in many cases.
— Face-to-Face Teacher
50. August 20, 2009
9:04 am
Link
the sad part of both studies is that students fell into the 50th percentile. Why aren’t we addressing that?
— Luise armstrong
From 51 to 75 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
51. August 20, 2009
10:04 am
Link
In response to Arthur and others I too have setup an online educational technology website that can be customized for any school at no cost and generate revenue for those schools. It is totally free, we host, you admin through our employee - so no cost again. It is user generated content and has daily updated news, music, video, sports,research, etc.
Many schools are spending tremendous amounts on LMSs and student portals we offer it for free and share in the eight streams of revenue with each school. Please review the Website and see what I am talking about.
http://www.theCampusCenter.com
— Patrick Aievoli
52. August 20, 2009
10:18 am
Link
OF course, someone has vetted SRI International and they are completely free from influence by the online education industry.
— HT
53. August 20, 2009
10:45 am
Link
Interesting read. Often, a traditional classroom is hindered by the fact that it must move at the pace of the weakest student. You can imagine the issues of having a large foreign language class - some of mine in high school and university have had more than 20 students! And if the instructor does NOT to slow down and allow each student to understand the material… confused students don’t have the chance to catch up later.
Online education, at least in the language-learning field, has the advantage of helping each person by moving at their own speed. With technology advancing and people finding more ways to socialize (and learn) on the internet, there will be better ways for students to supplement their learning… by learning local slang and idioms with native speakers, for example.
— Crystal
54. August 20, 2009
11:09 am
Link
KV makes a good point: online studies require self-motivation and self-discipline in order for the course to work. Did the study take into account the self-selection factor? That is, students who don’t have the motivation to do well are often advised, at the college level, not to enroll in online courses, or they try one and find out it is not for them. If the study were to take a random sample of students, enrolled one group in online courses and one in traditional classrooms, I suspect that we would see different statistical results. RB
— Richard Baskin
55. August 20, 2009
11:37 am
Link
This is a classic case of falsely taking correlation for causality. As I know from my experience teaching online and in person, online students are more motivated on average. You would have to be more motivated to sign up for online classes because they offer less than in-person classes. As the student who wrote above said, they are drudgery. The people who take them do so because they are forced to by their schedules and they really want to learn. Contrast this to in person classes where a percentage of the students usually comes because their parents convinced them to, or they think it’s easier than finding a job, or it’s what you’re supposed to do at their age, etc. Of course the highly motivated students learn more–but this is despite the handicaps of the medium, not because of them.
— professor
56. August 20, 2009
11:55 am
Link
So kids learn better online but they waste a boat load of time online…. quite a catch 22. Here’s what I’m referring to: http://kiwicommons.com/2009/06/what-exactly-are-kids-doing-online/
— Ashley
57. August 20, 2009
12:01 pm
Link
What comes to my mind when reading this article is that computer usage among kids, teenagers and adults has become so commonplace that they are more used to using a computer than personal interaction. Are we really given any background on the students themselves?
Furthermore, I think there are certain subjects that just cannot be supported by online learning alone, i.e. lab sciences.
I agree with the fact that learning in a community is such an important influence. Obviously, there are more nurturing environments to benefit from than others. However, among younger kids, personal interaction and the ability to understand different points of viewed must be realized in a classroom setting and not as text on a computer screen.
I do not doubt that online learning has positive qualities, but as more and more people enroll because of tuition hikes, it is a concern for the communication skills of the next generation, especially those that are essential to suceed after one’s education.
— Richard
58. August 20, 2009
12:13 pm
Link
I have 3 children enrolled in an online charter school in grades 7, 4, and 2 who have never attended a traditional brick and mortar school. They excel in online learning, and are learning incredible life skills such as time management. They are all required to take standardized state tests; and score advanced in nearly all sections. Two of my students are working a full grade level ahead in math. This is such a fantastic education option that, while only fits a small percentage of the population’s schedule abilities, works!
We attend a parent co-op group for science, art, and music, as well as many field trips. This provides them with more projects as well as social opportunities.
We are able to adjust our schedule to optimize time with dad. He works on Saturdays, so in the winter, we ski on Wednesday, and study on Saturday. What a good motivator to get homework done!
Three cheers for online education!!!
— Jennifer
59. August 20, 2009
12:15 pm
Link
Much can be learned from glancing at the report. For example:
“Despite what appears to be strong support for online
learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is
superior as a medium, In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the
online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was
the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included
additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that
produced the observed learning advantages.”
Also:
“A systematic search of the research literature from 1994 through
2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies comparing the
learning effects of online versus face-to-face instruction for K–12 students that provide
sufficient data to compute an effect size.”
Finally:
“In addition, although the types of research designs used by the studies in the meta-analysis were
strong (i.e., experimental or controlled quasi-experimental), many of the studies suffered from
weaknesses such as small sample sizes; failure to report retention rates for students in the
conditions being contrasted; and, in many cases, potential bias stemming from the authors’ dual
roles as experimenters and instructors. ”
It is not clear that self-selection has been well-controlled in this work. I will just mention that of the more than 1,000 studies reviewed, only 51 passed muster to get into the authors’ meta-analysis. Good for them for having such standards–even though problems remain, as they recognize. This is a sad comment on the quality of the original work, just 5% of the published studies making it through the filter.
— Dataman
60. August 20, 2009
12:18 pm
Link
If adults spend so much of their “work” in socio-tech environments, why wouldn’t children also find the unique benefits?
But I can’t help to wonder if this marks a point in our history when the school as we know it ends. As the 20th Century models finally starting to reach the 21st Century….
I mean really it is almost 2010.
— R. Harris
61. August 20, 2009
12:27 pm
Link
With Web Based Virtual Classrooms like WiZiQ, online learning is now an excellent, if not, preferred choice for many. Universities like UCSD (University of California San Diego) are using these web based VCs to aid in tutoring and online collaboration.
— Mark
62. August 20, 2009
12:30 pm
Link
@Richard Baskin:
If you click through to the report, you will see that the study is a meta-analysis and only considered studies that used random-assignment or quasi-experimental designs which, if done right, should take care of the self-selection problem.
— WF
63. August 20, 2009
1:27 pm
Link
Yes, you can throw technology at people and it is no assurance they will learn. But I know if you throw a really horrible instructor at a student in a traditional learning environment it is a guaranteed failure probably for more than just that one class too.
I think it’s time we quit throwing money blindly at education and begin holding the institutions and even the unions accountable for the failures of our systems. If it takes something like online instruction from at least average instructors to shake things up then I’m all for it!
— PA
64. August 20, 2009
2:20 pm
Link
I did a complete online sociology course in college. I decided to make it a sociology experiment. I did nothing. Never logged on. Never communicated in forums. Never read the materials. Purposely cheated on the exams. And so on. I got an “A” in the class. Then I asked as many of my classmates as I could about the experience, and learned we all did the same thing, and all of us got an “A.” At my University, there was a procedure for challenging grades. The handbook did not say it had to be a bad grade. So I challenged the “A” that I received. I informed the Dean of the college, and the Provost of the University, about what happened. I was disciplined for exposing the professor and the fraud of online education. The “A” remained on my transcript.
10 years later, I still think online courses are a fraud.
— MC
65. August 20, 2009
2:29 pm
Link
Reading the comments I note several points:
First, online education is not less expensive than face-to-face. Online is more labor intensive than face-to-face, hence online courses tend to serve small numbers of students. Most of the studies examined in this meta-study concerned 25 students or less.
Furthermore, the network and server infrastructure supporting online ducation is extremely expensive. Programs like Blackboard and WebCT require banks of fast servers and dedicated systems programmers together with 24/7 tech support. Students require home computers and a robust as well as reliable connection to the Internet.
Third, online courses not only self-select stronger students, they also self-select stronger instructors. In fact, a reader might draw the conclusion that active learning is more efficient than passive learning, and that active web-based learning systems are as effective as face-to-face active pedagogies. Since most instructors who work online employ significant active learning techniques (asynchronous discussion, role playing, goup writing projects) and most face-to-face instructors lecture, the results of this study of studies are not surprising.
— Marc Cooper
66. August 20, 2009
2:39 pm
Link
From my experience, I have received FAR MORE from online classes then I had when I was sitting in a classroom. I did part of my undergrad in the classroom with the rest of it online. Now, I’m working on an MBA from the University of Wisconsin completely online, which still required me to meet a satisfactory GMAT test score (same as classroom requirement) just to enroll.
Someone mention that you don’t get the analytical thinking online. On the contrary, I write nothing but analytical papers and have to use the same reasoning via the discussion boards. I’m guessing those that are oppose to it have either never taken a real class online or have some stake (such as those on the government dole) in why they don’t want online education to succeed…perhaps it threatens their job security for being lazy ???
— danny
67. August 20, 2009
2:42 pm
Link
Here is the “purpose” of SRI International, taken directly from their website:
Our founding purpose (since 1946): SRI, a nonprofit corporation, is committed to discovery and to the application of science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace. SRI has a broad charter that encourages us to make a difference in the world through basic and applied research, research services, technology development, and commercialization of our innovations.
Does anyone else see a potential conflict of interest?
— Dave Flatley
68. August 20, 2009
3:56 pm
Link
With 18 plus years as an educational instructor, I have one concern that has not been mentioned. With online education, students have a plethora of resources at their disposal during tests or while writing essays/ etc. It’s all open book. In the classroom, if the activity is closed book, all they have to rely on is themselves.
So is this 9 point gain truly a measure of what students learned and remember, or is it a measure of how well they can use resources to complete a task?
— Lisa
69. August 20, 2009
4:04 pm
Link
Important quote from the abstract of the study:
“This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se.”
The majority of the studies included in the meta-analysis looked at situations in which students met face-to-face but received additional instruction time online. These students often received more total instruction time than did the students who received only face-to-face instruction. This is an important point that the blog should have highlighted.
I believe that online instruction has tremendous potential and my experience teaching live online has been wonderful. The most effective instruction addresses topics through multiple angles and modalities. Teaching online allows me to highlight information and processes in new ways. In many ways it allows for more participation and teacher interaction than the live classroom does. Face-to-face classrooms can feel to students like a public speaking event and that can be intimidating. Hybrid instruction is likely to prove most effective in many cases . Students get the best of many worlds.
— Kim Crowley
70. August 20, 2009
4:16 pm
Link
Luise,
Percentiles don’t measure overall learning; they indicate how well people did compared to others. No matter how well students do, half of the group will always be above the 50%ile and half of the group will be below the 50%ile by definition.
The percentiles in this study (as reported in the original document, not this blog) indicate that those who received (usually) additional online instruction landed on average, a little higher within the overall group compared to students who did not have access to online instruction. We don’t know whether that had anything to do with the additional instruction. Perhaps those students had more access to other supportive resources in life in general.
— Kim Crowley
71. August 20, 2009
4:51 pm
Link
I am the CEO of a company that provides web-based ethics training for universitiy classes (EthicsGame.com). Over the past year we have reached about 3,000 students in a variety of settings. We are just beginning data analysis and our preliminary research shows that the on-line students who completed our one hour module did considerably better than those who completed the module in an on-the-ground setting. We were surprised because we had expected the reverse. Clearly we have some more work to do in the analysis. However, I can attest to the fact that our experience seems to match that which is reported above.
— Catharyn Baird
72. August 20, 2009
4:58 pm
Link
I wish the press reports on this report were as modest in their claims as the report itself. And that the authors had been more cautious when talking to the press, which likes a sensational headline.
The research is far too weak to draw the conclusion that teachers can be replaced with online instruction.To their credit, the authors admit this up front:
“The most unexpected finding was that an extensive initial search of the published literature from 1996 through 2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies that both compared the learning effectiveness of online and face-to-face instruction for K–12 students and provided sufficient data for inclusion in a meta-analysis.”
What were the limitations in the existing research that led the authors to this gloomy conclusion (which did not come across in the press reports)?
I) Internal validity
Out of 1000+ studies the authors reviewed, 33 were randomized trials, and 13 were comparison-control with decent controls. The RCTs did show pretty big positive effects (0.2 SD), however, and we know that research is not democratic. So, what’s the problem?
..which leads us to…
II) External Validity
a) Just one of the 33 randomized trials (and four of the 13 comparison-control studies) took place in a K-12 school. The rest were in colleges or training programs for medical professionals.
b) None of the (five) K-12 studies compared face-to-face instruction with online learning, which is the comparison the we all have in mind when we read the media reports. Rather, the studies compared 1) face-to-face instruction with 2) face-to-face-instruction PLUS online learning. No teachers were taken out of the equation for the treatment or control group.
The bottom line (which did not come across in the press reports…) is that this research tells us nothing about whether online learning and face-to-face instruction in K-12 are substitutes in the learning process. It does provide us some evidence, however, that they are complements.
— Susan Dynarski, University of Michigan
73. August 20, 2009
5:07 pm
Link
From the executive summary of the original study (a meta-analysis):
“An important issue to keep in mind in reviewing these findings is that many studies did not attempt to
equate (a) all the curriculum materials, (b) aspects of pedagogy and (c) learning time in the treatment
and control conditions. Indeed, some authors asserted that it would be impossible to havedone so. Hence, the observed advantage for online learning in general, and blendedlearning conditions in particular, is not necessarily rooted in the media used per se and may reflect differences in content, pedagogy and learning time.”
My opinion: When online learning works well, it’s because an instructor/designer has used the tools to encourage intimate interaction with the learning materials. Interaction beats ego-based lectures hands down. When online instruction fails to engage, it’s usually because a technology expert has simply broken a droning lecture into tediously small components and dropped the pieces onto rows and rows of ticky-tacky, sleep-inducing slides.
— Kim Crowley
74. August 20, 2009
5:16 pm
Link
I’d like to see the full study and what other conclusions were drawn besides what was published here.
A few other things I suspect contribute to this “increased achievement:”
1) Student engagement. It’s harder to tune out a self-directed computer program than it is a teacher, particularly if the teacher isn’t very good at gaining and maintaining students’ attention
2) Less disruption. Many of our classrooms are noisy, undisciplined, and unproductive. Where is it easier for a child to focus: in a classroom where others are continually distrubing the learning environment or in a room by yourself where you have nothing else going on but “learning?”
This is not a “ha, THIS is the answer” type of conclusion. The biggest complaint employers have today about the young people that they hire is that they lack the interpersonal skills - the LIFESKILLS — they need to succeed in business. That means social interaction, communication skills, etc. Online classes will NOT be able to teach that or expose kids to the real world.
Our kids are already spending too much time watching TV, playing videos, networking and surfing the ‘net. While tech is a good thing, it is NOT the only thing and it’s serving to decrease their interpersonal skills. Just like the current “Kindle in Every Backpack” moment the DLC is pushing, you can’t — and shouldn’t — turn everything into a tech problem. There’s more to education than just merely academics. We shouldn’t lose sight of that as we look to better ways to deliver that education to our youth.
— CorinneGregory
75. August 20, 2009
5:16 pm
Link
From a social constructivist point of view, I have problems with a curriculum based entirely on Internet instruction. Students benefit from constructing their own meaning from the world with guidance from instructors and collaboration with peers. While collaboration is somewhat possible with chat rooms, the venue is more artificial than sitting side by side with another student and working through a math problem or science experiment using hands-on materials.
Many online courses that I have seen isolate the student and compel him or her to work alone. The primary mode of delivering instruction is telling basic knowledge which requires lower level thinking skills and may develop procedural knowledge rather than conceptual understanding.
On a positive note, Internet instruction allows access to the incredible wealth of online information in a lively and interesting display. A motivated student can extend his/her learning on a particular topic beyond what is available in a typical classroom. Certainly the benefits of individualizing instruction and the vastness of content available will lead to more Internet instruction both in an out of the classroom.
A combination of classroom and Internet instruction may be appropriate in the future. Consideration needs to be given to the age and maturity of the students. Younger children probably need more classroom time and older children and adults may require less face to face time.
I
— Susan Whited
From 76 to 100 of 108 Comments
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76. August 20, 2009
5:23 pm
Link
The only trouble with “virtual.,” “asynchronous” learning is the issue of student questioning — and listening to other students ask questions simultaneously (in real time).
This Q&A, Call-and-Response style is the way some of us (dinosaurs, Digital Immigrants) learn best. It is the one major drawback to on-line education, as I see it.
Sincerely,
— Gus Patukas
77. August 20, 2009
5:37 pm
Link
The headline of the article is deceptive. From what I’ve been shown here, this study was no experiment, so no cause/effect conclusion can be made. It’s possible that there’s a difference in the kind of person who takes an online class and one who takes a brick-and-mortar one.
That said, I think there is real value in online education. As a math teacher myself, I’m sure there are many aspects to our curriculum that could be taught via computers just as if not more effectively than through my organization of activities, lecture, and discussion.
I think where online work is best is in facts and skills. Where in-person work is best is in the transformation of one’s approach to the material. An online course, even with moderated discussion, is not as fruitful in developing a statistician’s approach to data.
But I don’t have an experiment to back this up.
All this said, I worry that too much online learning will further erode our species’ ability to listen and pay attention to others for any length of time. Soon we’ll be texting each other from 5 feet away, “How you doin’?” No matter the educational efficiency, in-person contact has benefits all its own.
— David Ellinger
78. August 20, 2009
6:40 pm
Link
Many young people, while “wired” with i-pods and cell phones and laptops, seem to lack basic social skills and responsiveness to other people in person. And not just young people. There’s a diminishment of courtesy and kindness in general; but it’s more pronounced in the young, who at times seem literally blind to those around them.
While it would be an oversimplificaiton to lay this failure of social-skill teaching completely on screen-based technologies, I believe that the isolation involved in them, and a concurrent temptation to solipcism are certainly one cause of the problem.
If we teach young people facts and processes of fact-acquisition and leave out the warmth and mutual contact of human interaction, we will lose a vital part of real education for life.
— jb, ok
79. August 20, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
One other point: The technological revolution that was touted as a means to greatly increase students’ learning and skills has not so far produced students who have superior skills in knowledge, communication, or analysis. As a teacher of over twenty years, I have seen a general decline in vocabulary, awareness of facts, and critical thinking, instead.
The answer may not lie in more technology, but in parents and teachers who personally instill a love of learning–by loving learning themselves, right in front of the young.
— jb, ok
80. August 20, 2009
8:04 pm
Link
How do we know that what is being measured is a change in the over all environment in which the students live? How do we know that we are seeing improvements that fail to take in the possibility of a sinking baseline for what constitutes learning? What I’m driving at is that the period in which the studies covered is against the backdrop of a growing dependency on wired communication. Trying to reach students today with blackboards and face-to-face group discussions may be hampered by such students’ lack of situational awareness outside a digital context. Do we know that traditional learning is actually less effective or simply that it is easier not to swim against the current in today’s environment?
— Anthony Davis
81. August 20, 2009
8:26 pm
Link
I do not trust the study. There are numerous reasons why people take online courses, and these, not the online courses, could be the cause for the statistical difference. The people who take online courses are generally the people who are more interested in learning. Online courses are often voluntary whereas school is required for everyone. The kids who do not care about school or learning are unlikely to bother taking an online course. The people who want to learn will generally do better on tests, and are more likely to attempt extra, learning.
— Eliot
82. August 20, 2009
8:49 pm
Link
I work for the online campus at a career college in Kansas City, MO called Pinnacle Career Institute. What I have come to find, is that most of our students are people who have tried traditional college and it didn’t work out; never tried college and would like to; and or people who financially never could, but now that they work….can. Our students are in online classrooms and can in fact share with each other and talk and message back and forth. They post pictures of themselves and they can and do learn together. We have an online graduation where friends and family all over the world can log on to see their diploma and a personalized message written by them regarding their graduation. These students do in fact make friends and build relationships all online. In these types of classrooms the student is much more in control of their pace of learning wether that be faster or slower then the average student. At our school, we have seen enormous growth and expect to see even more expansion over the next few years. To me, it does not really matter which is a better education online or classroom, what matters is that there are different options for different people and that some doors may be open with online learning for someone that wouldn’t otherwise have the means to receive a higher education.
— Valerie Kindall
83. August 20, 2009
10:13 pm
Link
I have been taking online courses for a long time, and I’ve tried them at about six or seven universities. I absolutely do not agree that online education beats traditional classroom.
One thing, very often the curriculum doesn’t cover as much stuff. When I took business law online at UT,they only covered like ten chapters, when I know the on-campus course covered more. Same for my business writing course at another U.
Second: the grading is a LOT easier. I’m amazed how I manage to get A after A even though in business law, I never got an A in an assignment or exam. Reason: it was curved.
Yes, there’re many motivated students who can learn on their own, and they take online courses for that reason. But I know many of my online classmates took online courses just to get the course requirement over with asap.
Just to show you how easy it is to cheat online : look at this online academic fraud story:
‘Gross academic fraud’ at UTB-TSC rocked Office of Distance Education
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/articles/online-100590-utb-employees.html
— PLan
84. August 20, 2009
11:32 pm
Link
“Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.”
To conclude that “on line learning beats the classroom”, presumably for all students, based on a study weighted thusly is to assume that children learn the same way as adults and have the same motivations, desires, and ability to attend. They don’t.
Television was measured as an instructional media after WW II and also found to be more effective than classroom instruction - until the novelty wore off.
— Tom Hill
85. August 21, 2009
2:31 am
Link
This article does not mention the question of grading leniency which could easily account for the 9 point difference. in my college experience, most students take online classes between semesters where a 4 month session is condensed into 5 weeks or so. i was told flat-out by a professor during a winter intersession class that he will not assign any time consuming projects that also need to be graded because there simply isn’t enough time.
i had a horrible experience with a 300 level online history class where the professor expected everyone to do all of the work in that 5 week time frame. after the first week several students realized that it would be impossible to do the assigned reading so we asked about that fact. the professor told us she wouldn’t hold us to the dates but neglected to mention that the final day of class was non-negotiable. the system locked me out at midnight on the last friday and then she refused to acknowledge her statement about the dates - i offered to email all of my work to her in word documents and she didn’t even reply to me. my impression was that she simply didn’t feel like being a teacher since she didn’t have to look me in the eye. she got paid the same either way and technically wasn’t breaking any rules.
i can see that professors might make the classes more lenient once they become experienced with the time frames. the intersession professor that i had in a real classroom cut down the workload by a large amount.
how does that factor into the statistic?
— jake
86. August 21, 2009
7:33 am
Link
Hmmmm…. I’m skeptical. Granted I’m a 20+ year veteran high school teacher, so may be biased, but I’m also the tech-coordinator and a Google Certified Teacher, so I’m convinced of the power of technology to transform education. And it needs transformation. I’m just not sure an online environment is the panacea, especially for teens who thrive on social interaction.
Students in online courses already tend to be intrinsically motivated. Moreover, as the study focused predominantly higher education, the more non-academically oriented students were already removed from the equation.
I developed an online component for my film studies class last semester–all handouts were online, I posted videos to the site for students to watch, along with an online discussion group. Kids–juniors and seniors–whined constantly. “Can’t you just email it to us?” “Why can’t we just write and turn it in?”
There’s a conventional wisdom myth out there that this is the tech savvy generation. Not so. This is the social networking generation, but they’re clueless about how to use technology in a thoughtful, academic way.
It would be interested to see a similar study that focused solely on K-12 education.
— Jeri Hurd
87. August 21, 2009
7:51 am
Link
I have a 15 year old grandaughter who just finished High School and is presently at ABAC , a local community college. She is taking 16 credit hours this semiester and loving it. She was homeschooled in the 7th and 8th grade and then enrolled in the Ashworth University High School distance learning program. She did not have to deal with all the problems of a public school and could learn at ther own pace. I taught in the public school system for 18 years but I would recommend this type learning to anyone that wanted to succed. Thank you.
— Lutrelle Greene
88. August 21, 2009
9:21 am
Link
Here is an article about long-term research on Online instruction. The actual study is at http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
— June Rosenberg
89. August 21, 2009
12:40 pm
Link
I agree with the apples and oranges comment. As a lifelong educator, I would submit that the goals of online education and the goals of face-to-face education often overlap, but they are essentially not the same. The populations cited as learning “more” online are indeed populations whose goals more closely align with what online courses have to offer.
The question that we who grew up without online learning need to answer concerning those who are growing up possibly overexposed to it is this: what are they missing? In general, today’s K-12 students spend an inordinate amount of time living and learning in a virtual world. I feel sorry for them, and I think we owe them more than that.
— Jill Thorne
90. August 21, 2009
4:40 pm
Link
As an online instructor, I have two comments:
1. I was forced to pay a lot more attention to pedagogy - how would I convey this information, invite the student to learn, maintain the student’s attention - than I had in recent years, when I began constructing online courses. This also helped improve my face-to-face teaching, but I think my online courses are better done.
2. Online college students don’t last long enough in an online course to get a grade if they are unprepared in reading, writing, and computer skills, or if they lack motivation and self-discipline to complete the coursework. The bottom of the grade distribution usually drops the course in an online class.
— Carol
91. August 21, 2009
6:41 pm
Link
My online students may have in fact learned three times as much as in a regular classroom, but they have put in three times as much effort in the first place! If I dedicated as much time to teaching face to face as I do to teaching online, I’d simply be doing not much else but teaching twenty students for the duration of that one class. No one wants to talk about how labor-intensive online teaching can be. It’s a matter of both the student’s and the teacher’s motivation, self-selection, independent (and collaborative) thinking abilities and creativity, and dedication to the topic at hand. However, as much as I have succeeded in both teaching and learning online, I would NEVER want a student in social work to sit in his or her high-end suburban home to wonderfully learn all there is to know about life in the Projects without having ever set foot into the lives of their future caseload. Unless online learning is combined with real-life empathy and experience with the full engagement of all “real” senses we are in great danger unless we are preparing the student for a simulated isolated and fully sanitized and controlled life in a space capsule heading for Mars. As well, that self-selection leaves out of our studies all the students who drop out because they don’t have the discipline and initial knowledge to cope with the issues always apparent in a learning environment.
— Dineh Davis
92. August 22, 2009
1:34 am
Link
“on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.”
Modest?
I could be wrong, but doesn’t that mean about EIGHTEEN PERCENT BETTER? In many schools, that’s the difference between an A and a C.
— Smadaf
93. August 22, 2009
10:52 am
Link
We sell an online business collaboration tool and while we don’t actively market to schools we were surprised to find how many have incorporated our product into their teaching techniques. The most innovative are not just broadcasting the instructor to a passive audience but engaging the students with individualized live and recorded audio, video and graphics. A good example is Paso a Paso, which employs instructors in Argentina to teach Spanish to people in Japan. Using video the students can see hand gestures and facial expressions better than they could from the back of a classroom, the teacher can correct pronunciation, and a rich set of visual materials at appropriate places in the lesson.
http://vsee.com/blog/?p=223
— Christopher Herot
94. August 22, 2009
2:25 pm
Link
Yes, it seems like the “traditional” classroom model actually deprives our now wired students of their connectedness. As more and more students have the internet on hand held devices, does it make sense for teachers to force them disconnect and listen to us, or can we find better ways to blend the world our students live in with what we’re doing in the classroom? I think we can and we have to.
http://howtobeateacher.blogspot.com/
— Rob Ross
95. August 22, 2009
8:50 pm
Link
“Driving to class after work to listen to a bored adjunct for 90 minutes, then driving home is a waste of time.” I agree.
17 years ago I went back to the University of South Florida with the idea of taking some pre-med classes.
I drove an hour and sat through a week of listening to a grad student from India attempt to teach a subject in English, his thick nearly unintelligible Hindi accent impeding most of the learning on my part.
One lecture had 200+ students, again not an ideal learning situation.
Still another class was taught by an American female grad student who used the captive audience to try out her wannabe comic routine. She said we were a tough room. Then I drove another hour to get home.
Nearly a decade later I picked up a degree in computer network engineering, taught mostly by teachers reading PowerPoint slides and on the computer learning in week long cram sessions. This was before similar material was available on the internet.
With the exception of classes taught by one outstanding technical math and digital electronics instructor, I could have done most of the work by myself when I am less distracted.
This happens to be around 2:00 am, but the info was not available at that time. In fact, you could not even get into the computer lab except during limited daytime hours. Apparently they were worried about someone stealing the expensive ram chips.
I listened to the in class programming lectures but had difficulty keeping my focus. This time the instructor passed around a bag of candy and just bullshitted about everything but programming during that evening class. So a month into the class I switched to another campus with a more serious teacher and basically started over.
Finally I found a solution. Just listen in class, don’t take notes. At home, late at night or early in the morning, get an overview of the problem while sitting at the computer. Go to the couch, lay down and formulate a solution in my head. Go back to the computer and fill out the answer as required.
I still think my best thinking is done lying on my back with my eyes shut.
— Larry Vaughn
96. August 23, 2009
12:02 am
Link
Could it be that students are scoring higher on easier tests? Nope that is just crazy talk. The online courses and face-to-face courses give the same tests right? Nope.
Also, where are students more likely to engage in academic dishonesty: in front of a teacher or in front of a computer screen? Yep, you know the answer.
— Brandon
97. August 23, 2009
12:56 pm
Link
Online learning is streamline and is specific for a determined, motivative learner. I agree with several comments provided: It is self selected; It is convenient; an abundance of resources via media is always available; lastly, I believe that in order for an online student to be “truly” successful (able to apply the learning to real-life), the student needs to be self-disciplined and focused on their goals (whatever they are). Though that may sound like a description for any traditional learner, it’s really not!
Online learning fit the lifestyle of a “mature” learner and adult. A learner who has experienced enough life to sacrafice the traditional “social circle;” and, someone who knows exactly what they need to advance to the next level for their life or career, but find it too challenging due to work, family, or other time consuming events. Perhaps, k-12 students are not truly ready to sacrafice their youth and social interaction for that experience. K-12 students still have a lot to learn from each other, which will eventually help them to develop who they will become as an adult. That said, because education is the process of learning, it’s probably a good thing to introduce, and initiate k-12 students to this phenomenon now (an online class every semester), to prepare them for when their lives (eventually) become consumed with adult or “mature” life.
cdw
— Chris Washington
98. August 23, 2009
4:22 pm
Link
The journalist who wrote this article should have done better homework. Reading the review essay, a half-dozen of the studies referred to in the review essay, and the abstracts for twenty-some more of the studies, I see that the SRI authors do not sustain their early division between purely online and blended learning. According to the SRI review essay itself, purely online courses remain statistically no better than face-to-face courses; however, blended learning courses, which enhance face-to-face instruction with online elements, are statistically somewhat better than purely face-to-face courses.
Other features of the review essay need to be
pointed out. First, the advantages of online learning were clearer among students in technical fields who were studying to pass examinations as part of technical training; the SRI authors even point out that one such advantage was that students got to take and retake examinations in most of the studies they cited.
Second, the advantages of online learning were clearest when the online learning provided a diversion (in the sense of divergence rather than distraction) from face-to-face instruction; for example, clear advantages were shown in the many studies that tested the use of online tutorials for a single unit in an otherwise face-to-face course, using the rest of the face-to-face course as the control. Such diversions–that is, those that break a routine for students and of which students are aware–can be explained in part by the Hawthorne effect, as one of the authors of a study summarized in the SRI study pointed out.
Third, in some of the studies summarized by the SRI review essay, investigators broke the course or module into separate elements. For example, in one study, nursing students who took online tutorials in a respiratory assistance module, with the opportunity for taking and retaking practice exams, did better on a standard exam than face-to-face students who had no practice exams; however, there was no difference between groups in the practical work of inserting a temporary, artificial airway.
Finally, SRI International is not a disinterested researcher in matters of online instruction. It was founded to advance technological innovations; furthermore, although SRI itself is a non-profit entity for tax purposes, it has continuing financial relationships with its many for-profit subsidiaries, all of which are technology companies. How does a non-profit have a for-profit subsidiary, such as the Sarnoff Corporation? Maybe a tax lawyer can explain that one. The journalist sure didn’t.
— Kevin
99. August 24, 2009
1:10 am
Link
I’m actively taking online courses and find this type of learning more productive than my classroom experience for many courses. However, I see advantages to face-to-face education when lab work is a critical part of the course (chemistry, etc).
Another factor lacking from online education is the face to face social experience. My BS and MS were completed in face to face classrooms. The face to face networking adds a difficult to measure factor. The old saying is true, it isn’t always what you know, but who you know. I’m not sold that remote, online “friends” are equal to people you went out having a happy with after a rough exam.
However, as an adult learner with a family and a great career, I can’t beat the online system. I feel that I learn more because I can pause lectures when I am having trouble comprehending a topic in a lecture and use Google to quickly find supporting information and get a grasp on the topic before moving forward. In my undergrad and masters programs I would write down topics I didn’t fully understand, but I rarely went back to study them.
Overall, my personal view is that online is a good alternative/supplement for masters and some doctorate degrees. But, the experiences of post-high school college is much more than simply learning.
— Jason
100. August 24, 2009
11:46 am
Link
A good deal of the importance of traditional education is not about the rote memorization of facts, or absorbing and being able to repeat knowledge. Critical thinking and interaction with peers is a vital social skill which is learned in a classroom setting over time.
With the growing rates of children with autism, asperger’s, and other socially limiting conditions, I have to wonder how much might be attributed to a lack of early creative play, and a growing focus on non-creative, goal based education.
A child’s brain does not work like an adult’s. Education ought to reflect this fact.
— Molly Malone
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101. August 24, 2009
3:04 pm
Link
It’s alarming and depressing how many commenters in this thread are totally unaware of what constitutes great online education–and how much it has changed (for the better) with the advent of online social media tools.
These folks need to do some serious online research. Posting uninformed opinions based on personal assumptions (and even personal experience in teaching online without creating extensive interactivity) is…not cool.
— Liz Dorland
102. August 24, 2009
3:26 pm
Link
I think it is great that people can learn online in the comfort of their homes. I believe many people learn better because of lack of distractions such as class clowns etc. Being in a room full of other students may be intimidating to the person afraid of asking a “dumb” question.
I also see a problem. The problem would be for those who cannot afford a computer. There are alot of people that will not be able to take advantage of online courses. Online course only work for those who can log on and those that can afford them.
— O
103. August 24, 2009
3:29 pm
Link
My son took four online courses this summer while home from college working in an internship. The classes were a joke! The testing was even a bigger farce. I was amazed a person could get an entire degree with nothing but this level of online instruction and testing.
— Chuck
104. August 24, 2009
4:13 pm
Link
— sara wrote
“I’m very disturbed by Hetty Greene’s comment. Wikipedia may provide answers, but a college education is designed to help people ask questions and to analyze. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it does not teach analytical or critical thinking.”
Thank goodness you’re not teaching my children You clearly missed the point of Hetty Greene’s comment. Her mentioning Wikipedia was not as on-line education, but rather that it is NOT solely for profit as the content provided is contributed by users free of charge. She contends much of college on-line learning is driven by profit, NOT educational reasons.
— Robert
105. August 24, 2009
4:19 pm
Link
Amidst the debate of the finer points of the meta-analysis and anecdotal evidence supporting/against online education, I offer this as a way of critically assessing headlines like “…online education beats…”:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
— student
106. August 24, 2009
8:14 pm
Link
Duh…
— Dr. Michael K. Clifford
107. August 25, 2009
5:43 am
Link
Many people who take online courses are already mature adults. They are motivated and already bring a lot of life experience to the course. I totally agree with JS17 that a great deal of education and learning comes outside the classroom at a college and inside the classroom while interacting with other students and professors. To have a junior high student staying at home and not developing social skills scares me. Fitting into society and having social skills is a huge part of future employment.
— lindyf
108. August 25, 2009
10:31 am
Link
If the quantitative measures of effectiveness were themselves taken online (or on a computer), as I suspect, then the study is flawed because online learning will translate to better online test results. I couldn’t gather from the article whether the testing was computer-based or not.
— duh
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom By Steve Lohr
Update | 11:08 p.m. Read an article by Steve Lohr on keeping abreast of innovation in the Continuing Education special section.
A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
Noah Berger for The New York Times Tyler Kennedy, 9, searches the Web at home in California.
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.
This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.
Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.
The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
“We are at an inflection point in online education,” said Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program.
The biggest near-term growth, Mr. Regier predicts, will be in continuing education programs. Today, Arizona State has 5,000 students in its continuing education programs, both through in-person classes and online. In three to five years, he estimates, that number could triple, with nearly all the growth coming online.
But Mr. Regier also thinks online education will continue to make further inroads in transforming college campuses as well. Universities — and many K-12 schools — now widely use online learning management systems, like Blackboard or the open-source Moodle. But that is mostly for posting assignments, reading lists, and class schedules and hosting some Web discussion boards.
Mr. Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said. For example, it will be assumed that college students know the basics of calculus, and the classroom time will focus on applying the math to real-world problems — perhaps in exploring the physics of climate change or modeling trends in stock prices, he said.
“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Mr. Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”
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1. August 19, 2009
1:48 pm
Link
For K-12, online classes may translate to more face-to-face instruction. We pulled our son out of a useless junior high, let him play guitar and video games at home all day, and used an online charter school to teach him ourselves at night. The online curriuculum was definitely superior to what the local school offered, and the 1:1 instruction was very efficient. After one semester, he’s ahead of all his old classmates, rather than failing, and he’s enjoying life. Most people probably can’t arrange their lives to do this, but it sure can work when it works.
— Buzz
2. August 19, 2009
1:56 pm
Link
If you resonate with the studies conclusions, consider that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Imagine what we’ll begin to see when the generation that’s been “bathed in bits” begins building learning communities?
Imagine a mash-up of stumbleupon (randomizing), plus freerice.com (rewards/incentives), plus websites only slightly tweaked to deliver the core content required by states’ NCLB-mandated standards. The most successful (digital) charter school in history.
And, to take it a step further, now layer in the ability to be the personality that you want to be while learning, but still retain a social element through your digital self: http://guengerich.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/talk-to-the-digital-hand/
Great to see the validation from SRI.
— live in Austin
3. August 19, 2009
2:01 pm
Link
Learning is an independent activity Mr. Reiger to the contrary… We all decide what we want to learn — 1st decision and then for different people there are different ways to learn things… The computer which can repreat things forever — and is very patient is a good method for that reason… It can also talk to us and put up something for us to read concurrently — this is where much teaching falls down — on the visual component..A few things do need hands on practice.. say dissection but having had lots of trouble with the instruction from the human instructor on the dissection of the baby pig - I now wonder how I would have done with computer directions to guide me…. sort of like operating long distance via video hookups which are now done…..
Of course, it’s incredibly cheap to provide online education — we could be lawyers for 100$ — which is exactly why this technology is NOT being appropriately exploited except by for profits… pathetic…
and thank heavesn for Wikipedia. — there are some good people out there.
— Hetty Greene
4. August 19, 2009
2:10 pm
Link
One problem with saying that students in online classes do slightly better than students in traditional classes goes back to the old comparing apples and oranges thing. Online classes have their own assessments that may not parallel traditional assessments. The very technology tends to skew what can and cannot be assessed. Was there any standardization in the compared assessments, I wonder?
— Helen Hoffman
5. August 19, 2009
2:15 pm
Link
I’m halfway through an online master’s program with SJSU’s SLIS. It’s incredibly individualist, timely, and convenient. While the difference between an instructor that can effectively utilize the technology and also bridge the gap of disconnect between students and one who cannot is literally the difference between day and night, I think that the future of education is not as “scary” as it used to be.
p.s. I assure you Hetty, that it costs much more than you think to run these types of programs well.
— Dana
6. August 19, 2009
2:44 pm
Link
I wonder to what degree the comparisons are skewed because online learners tend to have more access to technology etc in general. There could be a real effect, but dubious about the magnitude.
— JD
7. August 19, 2009
2:49 pm
Link
Isn’t it a self-selecting group that would want to learn online? Could this be a reason why those taking online courses do better? There’s a certain drive and motivation necessary to force yourself to learn something you don’t have to.
— KV
8. August 19, 2009
2:57 pm
Link
Perhaps by giving business, civics, math and the sciences over to online learning, truly significant time in the classroom can be given over to the arts and humanities.
— Duro
9. August 19, 2009
3:00 pm
Link
Fascinating. When it came to college instruction, did the study consider whether older learners did better than traditional college students?
In my experience, on-line learning can work with motivated adults who already possess the BA or BS and take on-line classes to get a credential or a salary boost at work.
Traditional-age college students need the classroom interaction. For that matter, college-level learning is NOT an individual experience. It’s totally dependent upon dialogue and discussion. Otherwise, we might as well say that all we ever need to know we can get by gazing at our navels.
I’m very disturbed by Hetty Greene’s comment. Wikipedia may provide answers, but a college education is designed to help people ask questions and to analyze. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it does not teach analytical or critical thinking. If you don’t want those things, don’t go to college. And if you want a good lawyer, you best make sure he or she does not see the world in terms of answers and quick facts rather than in terms of questions and analysis.
College students, especially those aged 18-24, need to be challenged by the professor and fellow students in person, because they are far too sheltered and naive to seek challenges to what they already think to be true. Those over the age of 24 are not much better, but if they’ve already gone to college they know to ask questions. Young people, now raised in Hetty Greene’s world in which answers and not questions are touted as the end all and be all, are especially in need of the critical thinking skills that a college education provides.
For that matter, most of my on-line students failed their courses and the university knew they’d fail. On-line courses are cash cows *designed* to take advantage of irresponsible, parent-shielded child-adults who, while by no means dumb, are too lazy to drop courses in which they lose interest. Students in my classroom rarely fail because they stop attending class. Students on-line, however, quickly lose interest and are so enamored of their new independence that they forget to drop the course. The F stays on their record and the university gets the cash.
— sara
10. August 19, 2009
3:13 pm
Link
I have personally been the student in a variety of settings, including online, traditional college, foreign universities, community college, etc. What I have found is 1 year later, my retention rate of the material I learned is about the same, irrespective of the delivery method.
That said, I found the online learning drudgery. No live interaction with students & teachers, no debates, etc. No camaraderie, no life-long friendships formed, etc. Not good for extroverts. Living on campus with fellow students is more valuable, and leaves greater impressions, than what you learn in the classroom, particularly 30 years later. So for young people, I definitely recommend the college campus experience, living away from home starting at 18. What you learn about life & getting along with other people will never be reproduced online.
On the plus side, driving to class after work to listen to a bored adjunct for 90 minutes, then driving home is a waste of time. I could read that material myself in 20 minutes in the comfort of my home AND get a higher score on the test. You can move at your own speed and don’t waste time doing stuff that’s redundant. You can do assignments at 2 a.m. if you want - it’s your schedule. In these regards, online learning is superior. Much better for working stiffs trying to get ahead.
The subject matter is also important. Much easier to learn computer programming online than brain surgery. Anything involving people, like physical therapy, needs a large “live” component. OTH, accounting can likely be done easily online.
Bottom line is the motivated learner or student can do well in a variety of settings. As #3 pointed out, it’s cheaper to do online. Just record the professor’s lecture one time, and you’re done, even if s/he dies.
It’s also good for people who live in Timbuktu. You can still have access to the famous professor from home, something that was impossible before.
— JS17
11. August 19, 2009
3:29 pm
Link
From this overview that has been presented, it would appear that the research has discovered a correlation rather than a causation in their results.
More bluntly, people taking online courses are a self selected group of people who want to learn. In a regular college environment, that just isn’t there - there are plenty of deadbeats who get weeded out, or people who realize that this isn’t for them, or people who were pushed into college by mom and dad and just aren’t too terribly bright.
Comparison of test scores doesn’t validate the results that Ms. Means and her team has drawn from their research. Their results are interesting, but the essential point still stands; they’ll need more data on the students themselves to draw any form of conclusion about the real efficacy of online teaching.
— Jim
12. August 19, 2009
3:31 pm
Link
Just throwing online tools at people does not mean they will engage in meaningful learning. And many course management systems — Blackboard is the notorious biggest offender — are closed, proprietary, and their online media are decades behind the curve.
With some money from MacArthur Foundation, I worked with developers and with my own students to develop a combination of tools and techniques:
http://socialmediaclassroom.com and http://socialmediaclassroom/com/host/vircom
It’s free and open source software and all the curricular materials are free for others to use.
— Howard Rheingold
13. August 19, 2009
3:34 pm
Link
Re, from the article: “The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms.”
Yes, I strongly agree. As a teacher, I want students to have individualized learning experiences, especially students who are already 2-3 years behind.
Right now in Florida we actually have a state law that says students who have already been retained “2 or more years” in public schools are required to be in an “alternative placement” — but no one bothered to fund any alternative placement settings for those students already left back 2 or more years who are not eligible for special ed because they do not score low enough to qualify.
What these kids need is an online alternative placement classroom; one like the online classrooms now being used in NYC over the summer to teach math as recently profiled in the NY Times.
By offering students an online alternative, in school, the school still gets the money to educate the student, and the student has a chance for an individual online experience that may even enable the student to catch up.
And, the student could still attend music, art and PE classes with their actual age peers, which is not what happens now.
Now, what happens is you can be a 4th grade teacher, and get a very tall, very physically large 13 year old male student who should be in 7th grade, but is still stuck in
4th grade.
This is not a good situation for that student, or for the other students who are actually only 10 years old.
And the larger student does not like taking 4th grade art, music and PE three years in a row either.
So, I am looking forward to more online learning in schools, especially for situations like the above. This would really be a tremendous help to all students and teachers.
— florida voter
14. August 19, 2009
3:36 pm
Link
While enrolled in a mixed media course, where lectures were delivered online through Blackboard with weekly discussion/quiz sessions in a classroom, we quickly found that the best way for many of us to watch the lectures was, in fact, together. This gave everyone a chance to ask questions in the middle of the lecture, and have a possible answer. However, having the ability to go straight to lectures during review helped in studying for finals, or doing homework. Nonetheless, given the complex content of the course, I feel that at least some human interaction was necessary for conceptual comprehension.
Though there are some days I wish all professors came with a fast-forward button…
— KD
15. August 19, 2009
3:41 pm
Link
On the contrary, Buzz, I think most people can rearrange their lives to allow their kids the best education. There’s no law, biological or otherwise, that says kids can only learn between 9 and 3 or between September and June. Teenagers in particular are more awake in the afternoon and evening than they are at 7am. Why not allow them to adjust their educational schedule to fit their circadian rhythm by implementing more asynchronous learning?
— The Princess Mom
16. August 19, 2009
3:52 pm
Link
Being in a doctorate program at Boston University, I can certainly attest to the rigor and depth of the educational experience. I have degrees and certification from several prominent institutions (Kenyon College, University of Colorado - Boulder, University of TN - Knoxville, University of Memphis), and would put my on-line experience at BU against any of my excellent live classroom experiences. Being able to continue to work while attending graduate school has been a major plus. I am able to remain in my house, no travel time, and can archive lectures and classes.
On the down side, one misses the informal exchanges of student-to-student and student to faculty personal contacts.
— Charles Tighe
17. August 19, 2009
4:07 pm
Link
I agree with the last paragraph completely. I have studied in online only, classroom only, and an online/classroom hybrid. While I learned a lot from all of them, logic in online classes and political science and all the drama that entails in classroom classes, I did like the hybrids. Sharing thoughts online and then meeting in person.
— Walter G
18. August 19, 2009
4:20 pm
Link
I completed an accredited online graduate course in the Humanities at the age is 83! Independent study is the way we all learn, and through the graded discussions and a good professor, it is the only way of the future for working people who cannot travel for their studies, and saves the enormous expense of dormitory life.
It is truly astounding that schools do not offer more online courses..
— Elaine
19. August 19, 2009
4:27 pm
Link
You may want to take a look at this interview on K-12 math teaching online: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/08/12/teaching-k-12-math-online-reasoning-mind-ceo-alex-khachatryan-part-1/
— Sramana Mitra
20. August 19, 2009
4:30 pm
Link
I’ve never participated in on-line distance learning; but I wouldn’t have guessed these results. However, Jim (11) makes a good point. Test results are not really a good proxy for testing all-around ‘learning.’
JS17 seems to have more varied experiences than I have; and seems to capture several facets of the argument. I think certain subjects and basic disciplines could be taught on-line; but others wouldn’t lend themselves to it. Hetty Green thinks one could become a lawyer for $100. Good luck with that. How is one going to participate in a Socratic dialogue amongst ones peers? Maybe when videoconferencing improves and becomes cheaper.
— Larry
21. August 19, 2009
4:37 pm
Link
I wonder if what could also be happening, with regards to college students participating in online courses, is that those people voluntarily taking these courses are self-selected to be students with more tenacity and self-discipline than students who would not be able to make that commitment. Just a thought. I could be way off-base here.
— Zachary Elwood
22. August 19, 2009
4:56 pm
Link
@ duro, “Perhaps by giving business, civics, math and the sciences over to online learning, truly significant time in the classroom can be given over to the arts and humanities.”
Math *is* a humanity. It is not a science. It is an art in itself, not a tool, although it can be used as a tool, much as the English language can be used as a tool though it is not *merely* a tool.
And the best way to learn it is through wide ranging mathematical conversation with an actual mathematician, as opposed to “problem sets”. Unfortunately there is little to no math (proofs, methods of proof etc), and next to no mathematicians, below university level in this country so most people are not exposed to this fact.. Perhaps an inherent flaw of forced “education”.
As to the original article, I suspect again that, because correllation is not equal to causation, there is quite a bit of self-selection in the study. Whether this be true or not, however, the lower cost of online instruction will drive increased use of online education systems in the future.
— steve in W MA
23. August 19, 2009
5:03 pm
Link
The key is that online eSchools allow students to have instant access to iconic media, i.e. photographs, film/video clips,
animation clips, virtual field trips, QTVRs, sound clips to help convey information and concepts. Much better for teachers to SHOW & TELL rather than to just TELLl information to students like our ancestors did in the Bronze Age…and assume the students know what you’re talking/telling about.
Why do most kids HATE SCHOOL? Because they have to
sit in their seats for six hours a day listening to a teacher
chalkTALK to them in an attempt to convey information.
— Larry Loganbill
24. August 19, 2009
5:08 pm
Link
The curriculum currently being taught in American schools
was designed in 1892 by the president of Harvard and
“The Committee of Ten”. Essentially aren’t we preparing our
students for the early 1900s?
What do the wingnuts at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook,
YouTube, Toyota etc. say we should be teaching our kids to prepare them for the workplace of 2015-2050? Or should we teach them to farm using electric tractors and combines?
— Larry Loganbill
25. August 19, 2009
5:12 pm
Link
Let the students stay at home and enroll in a good internet
online eSchool. And provide free “brick & mortar” preschools for all 3 and 4 year-olds who live below the poverty line.
Middle class kids enter school with four times the world knowledge and vocabulary of the kids who live below the
poverty line.
— Larry Loganbill
From 26 to 50 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
26. August 19, 2009
5:19 pm
Link
There is a revolution coming in education. Already a student can have a live interaction with a teacher over the internet-even if the teacher is on the other side of the world. Materials, handouts and books can also all be sent over the internet. There is simply no reason why a student and a teacher have to be in the same room together.
American collrge campuses are basically a type of camp for young adults. They go there and learn to live without their parents, lose their virginity and party. This has nothing to do with learning.
— John C
27. August 19, 2009
5:19 pm
Link
The SRI report, in its totality, is significant and probably prophetic, in line with the continuing work of the Alfred Sloan Foundation. I have the privilege of working closely with a variety of LMS and courseware and the future is MUCH more exciting and promising than even the SRI and similar reports suggest. For high school courseware, just take a look at http://www.4tnoxrox.com and you will see what I mean. For university business programs, take a look at
http://www.vlcglobal.com. The introduction of 3D Virtual Reality to education and corporate training is truly revolutionary. There is hope both for reduced costs and improved quality for today’s tech-savvy learners.
— John P. Cragin, Ph.D.
28. August 19, 2009
5:40 pm
Link
As someone who has done both, I can say: it’s not that online learning is so great, it’s that the US classroom as it exists right now is that bad.
— Farnsworth
29. August 19, 2009
6:05 pm
Link
Having taken online and classroom college courses, I agree that the best online students are highly diciplined and self motivated, with a knack for gaining information through reading and writing. There’s plenty of oportunity for discussion. It just takes place in writing over a series of days instead of via the spoken word in a series of minutes.
In contrast, as Sara mentioned, there are plenty of students for whom online doesn’t work. While this might be due in part to age and lack of discipline, it might also be due to a difference in learning styles. If you hate reading & writing you aren’t going to do well with online content no matter your age or motivation.
I am now working on an MBA in the classroom and would probably be able finish the degree faster if I had an online option. The hour drive to campus makes it a lot harder juggle full time work and family along with the classroom time. Online learning gave me the flexibility to fit school into my schedule, rather than me fitting my life into the school’s arbitrary schedule of classes.
— vivaELvino
30. August 19, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
I had a lot of experience with a computer assisted instruction system called FIS, as a student, author, and curriculum coordinator . This study is pure crap.
— JB
31. August 19, 2009
6:54 pm
Link
The future of education is online period. Whether it is in the classroom or distance learning the use of online content that has been peer-reviewed and validated by experts in the respective fields should be available to everyone. The only way to work through this new, new economy is to have the most highly educated work force ever in time. The only way to do this is to have open access to the newest information on a daily basis. The concept of the five year textbook is gone - dead - period. information is changing at a rapid pace and the more information available the better. This is the essence of online education. I have been an academic for 23 years, I am tenured, I get up every morning at 5:00 and read my research from credible sources. I then put my notes together for that days lessons and bring to class the most current information possible. That is what these students are going into debt for! Critical thinking is imperative but it must be blended with new theories in order for it to be effective. If we are still thinking about old theories then the critical thinking is useless. New components must be added to the equation which lead to greater questions and different thought patterns.
I do not believe that face to face is dead but there is iChat to iChat. It does work.
the problem is the expense. Now with opens source LMSs becoming accepted by schools the future of online is here to stay.
the problem is how to monetize this new paradigm. Should a professor be paid the same amount for 300 students as they are for 20? It is a lot more work to review 300 papers then it is to review 20. Same as any other field. A lot of questions need to be answered. But one that has clearly been answered is that it i a new, new very “flat” world. Get over it and get with it.
— Patrick Aievoli
32. August 19, 2009
7:30 pm
Link
The key word here is ‘community.’ The online courses must be used to network, not isolate. Otherwise, we can go ahead and rework sociocultural learning theory’s most basic points.
— nick
33. August 19, 2009
8:20 pm
Link
While I think online courses can be useful, I think it’s important to consider that there may be other sources of the discrepancy in achievement. Many online courses use online assessments to measure achievement. In high school, I took several math finals for my then-boyfriend so that he could pass his online college math classes. With online exams, there is no way to ensure that the person taking the exam is the person enrolled in the course, or that prohibited materials are not being used.
I don’t think closed-book exams assessing rote memorization are useful measures of learning. But since these are the most common tools used to assess achievement, I think it’s worth considering how the experience of taking one of these exams may differ between the two contexts.
(And yes, as a TA at a large university, I know that there are students who have other people take their exams for them in-person, particularly in large classes. But at least in this situation, I have the opportunity to notice a face that I have never seen before and ask for ID.)
— Laura
34. August 19, 2009
8:52 pm
Link
It is not really a wonder that online teaching is more effective than brick and mortar schools. It provides solutions to problems that are only created and compounded by packing kids together with little supervision.
School grounds are like little islands in which kids adapt much like the kids in “Lord of the Flies.” Teachers are increasing unable to discipline students, much less teach. Students are unable to concentrate and think critically.
Yet when I put a computer in front of my daughter she can talk for hours, listen for hours, and even read books for hours. I have to pry her away. I dream of the day when brick and mortar colleges disappear and with them the drunken idiocy of our higher learning institutions.
— Soren
35. August 19, 2009
9:22 pm
Link
A plug for Sara #10. Partly there’s the problem with “student-aged” students. And, as Patrick #31 suggests along with Sara, there will be deep problems as long as schools see on-line courses as for profit, and not for educational success (as our health care system rewards procedures, not health).
But more basically, in a good classroom, one has a situation both ancient and new: telling a tale around the campfire. This is important (when the teacher’s good).
It’s not primarily about conveying information or data, but it is a great way to show how to assess data and to build it up into a picture that makes sense.
“Students learn in different ways” — fine, but also students need to improve on areas of weakness — an ability to concentrate over time on developing a coherent picture is an important skill.
The different venues will probably work differently for different fields. E.g., Patrick # 31 — not all fields change quite so rapidly; and in many places, the analysis learned on not-quite-the-moment’s data will be quite portable.
Discussion classes about literature can work wonderfully in person, in part because the communication is not just letters on the screen, but all the human ways of communicating — tone, eyes, affect, &c. — and immediate reaction — even the reaction while one is speaking.
“When the teacher’s good” — I’ve seen that instructors in some science courses are often not going on to be teachers, and they resent the time they teach, and it results in poor learning, esp. for those with less aptitude. That’s a shame; if on-line can put them out of business, fine by me!
There are some important aspects of learning that a good classroom (either lecture or seminar) can do singularly well.
— Arthur
36. August 19, 2009
10:13 pm
Link
I teach high school English in Kansas and direct a computer-based program for adults who are seeking a high school diploma.
This research flies in the face of everything I believe, but I don’t feel as though my one experience can trump this exhaustive finding. If I had not read it, I would not have believed it.
One factor that I believe might help online is the speed of learning versus the predictable and often slow learning that takes place at the one speed of the teacher. If this were removed, then it is true that students could learn much more quickly.
At age 49, I feel as though I would need to be re-educated to learn how to assist through on-line methodology. I am just a few years from retirement, and I wonder if it would be worth going back to relearn how to assist using this method.
— Kilgatron
37. August 19, 2009
10:20 pm
Link
One of the biggest misconceptions about online learning is that it is a cheap option. The standard model of large university lectures is not the best way to learn material - we know that. It is, however, much cheaper than the better versions, both in human resources and infrastructure. There’s a reason schools with very small class size and personalized attention are expensive.
To do internet based learning well takes resources. You still have to design the curriculum, set exams and assignments, and evaluate the result (computer evaluated exams like multiple choice are one of the worst ways of testing comprehension, particularly for advanced subjects). You still need a trained expert to answer questions. I’ve found answering a question in a fashion suitable for email takes about four time longer than answering the same question in person. And you need to add computer resources, and the personnel to maintain them, program them and handle security.
I’ve also heard the argument that kids could study at home on the internet before. The problem with that is that you can’t leave children unattended all day, so someone has to stay with them while they study at home. For that, we need a full time stay at home parent or the parents are going to have to pay for supervision, a la daycare.
— Jennifer
38. August 19, 2009
10:38 pm
Link
We at http://www.nixty.com are creating a hybrid platform that supports traditional K-12 and higher education, but also provides space for informal learning communities to develop. Mr. Reiger is absolutely right in indicating that peer learning will expand beyond the classroom and be integral to learning and development in the future. It has to be. We simply do not have enough educators to meet demand. The trick lies in developing tools that facilitate this kind of context.
If you are interested in helping us create this platform, then please sign up to help us beta test NIXTY.
— Glen
39. August 19, 2009
10:51 pm
Link
Finally education is adopting the most important principle of most business- differentiate your product for each market segment. I have been advocating this and is potential in education through education technology since 1970.
The problem is not the technology but the status quo protectors who control both k12 and higher education. They fight every attempt at individualized, self paced learning, even when the data shows its productivity improvement.
A big part of the problem is that most educators, especially K12, both also higher education, are technology avoiders. It will take a lot of public pressure to implement educational technology as a productivity or transformational strategy.
I am a Professor of Business and Economics who has served on State Board of Education and on the State Board for Community Colleges.
— Ed Lyell
40. August 19, 2009
11:10 pm
Link
I think that a lot of people are missing the point here.
From the tables presented on pages 44-46 of the report it is clear that although the authors do include some studies concerned with K-12 and undergraduate level performance off- and on-line, many of the studies dealt more specifically with student performance in short courses, vocational courses, courses intended as professional enhancement, and course sub-units.
Studies included in the meta-analysis include results showing that physicians who took an online course in opioid and benzodiazepine prescribing skills showed better results than those who took a traditional course, that web-based instructional modalities were effective as part of a larger programing course, and that online tutorials for teaching hypothesis testing concepts showed positive results, among others.
While such results are interesting, they do not support the idea that online courses are in any way superior (or even equal) to traditional, face-to-face, primary or secondary education.
A list of the studies included is available on page 44 of the report; I hope people will refer to it (or perhaps even the report in its entirety) before drawing any conclusions.
— E.R. Land
41. August 20, 2009
12:49 am
Link
It was BF Skinner, building on the technology and experience of even earlier pioneers of self-paced, individualized learning, who realized nearly fifty years ago what he termed the “impossibility” of transmitting the optimal amount of information to each student in the traditional classroom. I’ve taught online since 1996 and I think that the nine-point difference in achievement stated in the report quantifies what I detect as the difference between my classroom students and my online ones. Online work compels, sooner or later, active processing by students: add to this the usually greater self-motivation of those who choose online instruction and there isn’t much wonder in that slight though significant difference. On the other hand, I can’t sit down with an online student on the tailgate and figure things out in conversation. At present, the first-year college students I encounter each fall, most of whom I know would benefit far more from the structure of the online course vs. the usually overcrowded classroom course, overwhelmingly choose to stay with the classroom course rather than take the course online. I believe they make this choice because they haven’t had enough experience with both methods to make an informed choice. My hope is that, within 10 years, to see 25% of my incoming intro psych students opt for the online version. I’m patient–I’ve waited 15 years to see online work get as many approving comments as it has in this set tonight. I think it will take at least until all the college instructors of my generation retire until the full potential of online education will be realized.
Dave D (55 years young–25 years in the teaching biz)
— Dave D
42. August 20, 2009
1:47 am
Link
I agree with that. The new generation kids mostly interested in online education. if the online education website teaching games or animation based lessons, kids will love that. it give fun experience to the kids.
— Jonam
43. August 20, 2009
2:35 am
Link
Why wouldn’t online courses be more INTERESTING thus
more effective for conveying information. The students
has access to photographs, film/video and animation clips,
virtual reality field trips QTVRs and sound clips to help convey the information and concepts instead of a teacher just standing and TELLING about the information. SHOW & TELL not just TELL.
— Larry Loganbill
44. August 20, 2009
3:03 am
Link
Well for me, online training is a no no. No interaction from the teacher, no response from other students, no ideas from other students. It’s different. Try working on the computer for atleast 2 hours, isn’t it boring? A child needs to be at school where he can play with other kids, interact with other kids for self development also.
Karen Davis
san diego computer repair
— Karen Davis
45. August 20, 2009
6:12 am
Link
This sounds like a study that hypothetically showed that people taking classes near Harvard did better, and using it to claim that there was something about the geography of Harvard that made students excel.
Obviously, there are brighter students near Harvard, so they would tend to do well. And computer-oriented students probably tend to be brighter — it’s like, nerdsville!
So I don’t believe that the Internet is somehow a better learning environment. On the other hand, it is certainly cheaper. For that reason, online education should be encouraged; it allows wide access to educational resources. But it isn’t inherently superior.
— Gene Venable
46. August 20, 2009
6:44 am
Link
As a former online student and a current online instructor, I will say that online learning is not for everyone. If you are a person who is easily distracted, not organized and definetly not organized - online learning is not for you.
However, one can feel just as part of a classroom online as one does in a traditional setting. If you have a good instructor who is truly involved then the experience is just as equal to sitting in the classroom face to face. The level of the student’s involvement also makes a huge difference. If a student is willing to dive into discussions, add extra to the topic, etc. they will experience an equal level of education as those sitting in the classroom.
I do believe that the study should have specified if those researched had specific reasons for taking online course though. If distance to the nearest college was an issue and online provided not having to drive, then that is one thing. You could easily compare online to traditional. However, if the reason for online was more to do with social issues, such as anxiety, then you can not easily compare the two.
all in all, though, I am excited to see that online learning is getting some rave reviews and legitimate research. While it will never replace the traditional classroom, it is a wonderful option!
— Bethany
47. August 20, 2009
6:45 am
Link
I believe there are certain subject areas which tend to lend themselves better to online instruction and social media. For example, we here at http://www.italki.com believe that foreign language instruction is a particularly good fit. Studies have shown that interaction with native speakers improve fluency, comprehension and accuracy when learning a new language. The internet makes it possible for someone to find a native speaker to learn and practice with no matter where they live or what language they’re studying. Online learning in this case is expanding human interaction rather than limiting it.
— Eric
48. August 20, 2009
7:16 am
Link
K-12 learners today have generally been immersed in an expansive and ceaseless information stream since birth. This immersion produces transformations in information processing responsiveness and receptivity (see Strommen, E.F., Constructivism, Technology, and the Future of Classroom Learning, Children’s Television Workshop, Bruce Lincoln, Bank Street College of Education, 1992 http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/livetext/docs/construct.html) and the technologies do have an expanding impact on student motivation to learn. Currently available technologies are serious tools that affect the lives of students with immediacy and with great potential for both good and harm. Thus, a pivotal component for learning with technology tools is that an educated person uses these systems and processes in an informed, ethical, and responsible way. This component of education is not referred to at all in the above article and it should be considered essential to learners. Scholarship is not only the application of learning tools to “do something meaningful and useful,” but also recognizing ethical, responsible use, and knowing how to make things of significance with those tools. Ethics and responsibility are centered in the affective domain and they should be addressed at the core of any educational model that relies on embedded information technologies. Education also needs to foster the development of skills and attitudes that address the social and ethical issues intrinsic to the technological advancements of our society.
— Barry Grant
49. August 20, 2009
8:01 am
Link
I teach at a small two-year college that offers a variety of online courses. We that teach the on-campus versions of the classes have noticed declining enrollment in some of the harder science courses, due to increasing online enrollment.
In talking to many people about this, the general consensus is that students like the online, because it is so much easier to cheat and get better grades.
.
While I have no doubt there are some solid online courses out there, I think a teacher can’t be replaced. Otherwise, I could read a text book and be a doctor!
.
Most of the studies of online learning ignore the cheating factor and I have heard people rationalize saying that looking up the info just shows that students know where to look. They know where to find answers, but that doesn’t mean they learn the material. I agree with those saying that it doesn’t teach thinking skills or how to evaluate the answers they do find for accuracy.
.
Bottom line: Online is not equal to classroom learning in many cases.
— Face-to-Face Teacher
50. August 20, 2009
9:04 am
Link
the sad part of both studies is that students fell into the 50th percentile. Why aren’t we addressing that?
— Luise armstrong
From 51 to 75 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
51. August 20, 2009
10:04 am
Link
In response to Arthur and others I too have setup an online educational technology website that can be customized for any school at no cost and generate revenue for those schools. It is totally free, we host, you admin through our employee - so no cost again. It is user generated content and has daily updated news, music, video, sports,research, etc.
Many schools are spending tremendous amounts on LMSs and student portals we offer it for free and share in the eight streams of revenue with each school. Please review the Website and see what I am talking about.
http://www.theCampusCenter.com
— Patrick Aievoli
52. August 20, 2009
10:18 am
Link
OF course, someone has vetted SRI International and they are completely free from influence by the online education industry.
— HT
53. August 20, 2009
10:45 am
Link
Interesting read. Often, a traditional classroom is hindered by the fact that it must move at the pace of the weakest student. You can imagine the issues of having a large foreign language class - some of mine in high school and university have had more than 20 students! And if the instructor does NOT to slow down and allow each student to understand the material… confused students don’t have the chance to catch up later.
Online education, at least in the language-learning field, has the advantage of helping each person by moving at their own speed. With technology advancing and people finding more ways to socialize (and learn) on the internet, there will be better ways for students to supplement their learning… by learning local slang and idioms with native speakers, for example.
— Crystal
54. August 20, 2009
11:09 am
Link
KV makes a good point: online studies require self-motivation and self-discipline in order for the course to work. Did the study take into account the self-selection factor? That is, students who don’t have the motivation to do well are often advised, at the college level, not to enroll in online courses, or they try one and find out it is not for them. If the study were to take a random sample of students, enrolled one group in online courses and one in traditional classrooms, I suspect that we would see different statistical results. RB
— Richard Baskin
55. August 20, 2009
11:37 am
Link
This is a classic case of falsely taking correlation for causality. As I know from my experience teaching online and in person, online students are more motivated on average. You would have to be more motivated to sign up for online classes because they offer less than in-person classes. As the student who wrote above said, they are drudgery. The people who take them do so because they are forced to by their schedules and they really want to learn. Contrast this to in person classes where a percentage of the students usually comes because their parents convinced them to, or they think it’s easier than finding a job, or it’s what you’re supposed to do at their age, etc. Of course the highly motivated students learn more–but this is despite the handicaps of the medium, not because of them.
— professor
56. August 20, 2009
11:55 am
Link
So kids learn better online but they waste a boat load of time online…. quite a catch 22. Here’s what I’m referring to: http://kiwicommons.com/2009/06/what-exactly-are-kids-doing-online/
— Ashley
57. August 20, 2009
12:01 pm
Link
What comes to my mind when reading this article is that computer usage among kids, teenagers and adults has become so commonplace that they are more used to using a computer than personal interaction. Are we really given any background on the students themselves?
Furthermore, I think there are certain subjects that just cannot be supported by online learning alone, i.e. lab sciences.
I agree with the fact that learning in a community is such an important influence. Obviously, there are more nurturing environments to benefit from than others. However, among younger kids, personal interaction and the ability to understand different points of viewed must be realized in a classroom setting and not as text on a computer screen.
I do not doubt that online learning has positive qualities, but as more and more people enroll because of tuition hikes, it is a concern for the communication skills of the next generation, especially those that are essential to suceed after one’s education.
— Richard
58. August 20, 2009
12:13 pm
Link
I have 3 children enrolled in an online charter school in grades 7, 4, and 2 who have never attended a traditional brick and mortar school. They excel in online learning, and are learning incredible life skills such as time management. They are all required to take standardized state tests; and score advanced in nearly all sections. Two of my students are working a full grade level ahead in math. This is such a fantastic education option that, while only fits a small percentage of the population’s schedule abilities, works!
We attend a parent co-op group for science, art, and music, as well as many field trips. This provides them with more projects as well as social opportunities.
We are able to adjust our schedule to optimize time with dad. He works on Saturdays, so in the winter, we ski on Wednesday, and study on Saturday. What a good motivator to get homework done!
Three cheers for online education!!!
— Jennifer
59. August 20, 2009
12:15 pm
Link
Much can be learned from glancing at the report. For example:
“Despite what appears to be strong support for online
learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is
superior as a medium, In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the
online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was
the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included
additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that
produced the observed learning advantages.”
Also:
“A systematic search of the research literature from 1994 through
2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies comparing the
learning effects of online versus face-to-face instruction for K–12 students that provide
sufficient data to compute an effect size.”
Finally:
“In addition, although the types of research designs used by the studies in the meta-analysis were
strong (i.e., experimental or controlled quasi-experimental), many of the studies suffered from
weaknesses such as small sample sizes; failure to report retention rates for students in the
conditions being contrasted; and, in many cases, potential bias stemming from the authors’ dual
roles as experimenters and instructors. ”
It is not clear that self-selection has been well-controlled in this work. I will just mention that of the more than 1,000 studies reviewed, only 51 passed muster to get into the authors’ meta-analysis. Good for them for having such standards–even though problems remain, as they recognize. This is a sad comment on the quality of the original work, just 5% of the published studies making it through the filter.
— Dataman
60. August 20, 2009
12:18 pm
Link
If adults spend so much of their “work” in socio-tech environments, why wouldn’t children also find the unique benefits?
But I can’t help to wonder if this marks a point in our history when the school as we know it ends. As the 20th Century models finally starting to reach the 21st Century….
I mean really it is almost 2010.
— R. Harris
61. August 20, 2009
12:27 pm
Link
With Web Based Virtual Classrooms like WiZiQ, online learning is now an excellent, if not, preferred choice for many. Universities like UCSD (University of California San Diego) are using these web based VCs to aid in tutoring and online collaboration.
— Mark
62. August 20, 2009
12:30 pm
Link
@Richard Baskin:
If you click through to the report, you will see that the study is a meta-analysis and only considered studies that used random-assignment or quasi-experimental designs which, if done right, should take care of the self-selection problem.
— WF
63. August 20, 2009
1:27 pm
Link
Yes, you can throw technology at people and it is no assurance they will learn. But I know if you throw a really horrible instructor at a student in a traditional learning environment it is a guaranteed failure probably for more than just that one class too.
I think it’s time we quit throwing money blindly at education and begin holding the institutions and even the unions accountable for the failures of our systems. If it takes something like online instruction from at least average instructors to shake things up then I’m all for it!
— PA
64. August 20, 2009
2:20 pm
Link
I did a complete online sociology course in college. I decided to make it a sociology experiment. I did nothing. Never logged on. Never communicated in forums. Never read the materials. Purposely cheated on the exams. And so on. I got an “A” in the class. Then I asked as many of my classmates as I could about the experience, and learned we all did the same thing, and all of us got an “A.” At my University, there was a procedure for challenging grades. The handbook did not say it had to be a bad grade. So I challenged the “A” that I received. I informed the Dean of the college, and the Provost of the University, about what happened. I was disciplined for exposing the professor and the fraud of online education. The “A” remained on my transcript.
10 years later, I still think online courses are a fraud.
— MC
65. August 20, 2009
2:29 pm
Link
Reading the comments I note several points:
First, online education is not less expensive than face-to-face. Online is more labor intensive than face-to-face, hence online courses tend to serve small numbers of students. Most of the studies examined in this meta-study concerned 25 students or less.
Furthermore, the network and server infrastructure supporting online ducation is extremely expensive. Programs like Blackboard and WebCT require banks of fast servers and dedicated systems programmers together with 24/7 tech support. Students require home computers and a robust as well as reliable connection to the Internet.
Third, online courses not only self-select stronger students, they also self-select stronger instructors. In fact, a reader might draw the conclusion that active learning is more efficient than passive learning, and that active web-based learning systems are as effective as face-to-face active pedagogies. Since most instructors who work online employ significant active learning techniques (asynchronous discussion, role playing, goup writing projects) and most face-to-face instructors lecture, the results of this study of studies are not surprising.
— Marc Cooper
66. August 20, 2009
2:39 pm
Link
From my experience, I have received FAR MORE from online classes then I had when I was sitting in a classroom. I did part of my undergrad in the classroom with the rest of it online. Now, I’m working on an MBA from the University of Wisconsin completely online, which still required me to meet a satisfactory GMAT test score (same as classroom requirement) just to enroll.
Someone mention that you don’t get the analytical thinking online. On the contrary, I write nothing but analytical papers and have to use the same reasoning via the discussion boards. I’m guessing those that are oppose to it have either never taken a real class online or have some stake (such as those on the government dole) in why they don’t want online education to succeed…perhaps it threatens their job security for being lazy ???
— danny
67. August 20, 2009
2:42 pm
Link
Here is the “purpose” of SRI International, taken directly from their website:
Our founding purpose (since 1946): SRI, a nonprofit corporation, is committed to discovery and to the application of science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace. SRI has a broad charter that encourages us to make a difference in the world through basic and applied research, research services, technology development, and commercialization of our innovations.
Does anyone else see a potential conflict of interest?
— Dave Flatley
68. August 20, 2009
3:56 pm
Link
With 18 plus years as an educational instructor, I have one concern that has not been mentioned. With online education, students have a plethora of resources at their disposal during tests or while writing essays/ etc. It’s all open book. In the classroom, if the activity is closed book, all they have to rely on is themselves.
So is this 9 point gain truly a measure of what students learned and remember, or is it a measure of how well they can use resources to complete a task?
— Lisa
69. August 20, 2009
4:04 pm
Link
Important quote from the abstract of the study:
“This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se.”
The majority of the studies included in the meta-analysis looked at situations in which students met face-to-face but received additional instruction time online. These students often received more total instruction time than did the students who received only face-to-face instruction. This is an important point that the blog should have highlighted.
I believe that online instruction has tremendous potential and my experience teaching live online has been wonderful. The most effective instruction addresses topics through multiple angles and modalities. Teaching online allows me to highlight information and processes in new ways. In many ways it allows for more participation and teacher interaction than the live classroom does. Face-to-face classrooms can feel to students like a public speaking event and that can be intimidating. Hybrid instruction is likely to prove most effective in many cases . Students get the best of many worlds.
— Kim Crowley
70. August 20, 2009
4:16 pm
Link
Luise,
Percentiles don’t measure overall learning; they indicate how well people did compared to others. No matter how well students do, half of the group will always be above the 50%ile and half of the group will be below the 50%ile by definition.
The percentiles in this study (as reported in the original document, not this blog) indicate that those who received (usually) additional online instruction landed on average, a little higher within the overall group compared to students who did not have access to online instruction. We don’t know whether that had anything to do with the additional instruction. Perhaps those students had more access to other supportive resources in life in general.
— Kim Crowley
71. August 20, 2009
4:51 pm
Link
I am the CEO of a company that provides web-based ethics training for universitiy classes (EthicsGame.com). Over the past year we have reached about 3,000 students in a variety of settings. We are just beginning data analysis and our preliminary research shows that the on-line students who completed our one hour module did considerably better than those who completed the module in an on-the-ground setting. We were surprised because we had expected the reverse. Clearly we have some more work to do in the analysis. However, I can attest to the fact that our experience seems to match that which is reported above.
— Catharyn Baird
72. August 20, 2009
4:58 pm
Link
I wish the press reports on this report were as modest in their claims as the report itself. And that the authors had been more cautious when talking to the press, which likes a sensational headline.
The research is far too weak to draw the conclusion that teachers can be replaced with online instruction.To their credit, the authors admit this up front:
“The most unexpected finding was that an extensive initial search of the published literature from 1996 through 2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies that both compared the learning effectiveness of online and face-to-face instruction for K–12 students and provided sufficient data for inclusion in a meta-analysis.”
What were the limitations in the existing research that led the authors to this gloomy conclusion (which did not come across in the press reports)?
I) Internal validity
Out of 1000+ studies the authors reviewed, 33 were randomized trials, and 13 were comparison-control with decent controls. The RCTs did show pretty big positive effects (0.2 SD), however, and we know that research is not democratic. So, what’s the problem?
..which leads us to…
II) External Validity
a) Just one of the 33 randomized trials (and four of the 13 comparison-control studies) took place in a K-12 school. The rest were in colleges or training programs for medical professionals.
b) None of the (five) K-12 studies compared face-to-face instruction with online learning, which is the comparison the we all have in mind when we read the media reports. Rather, the studies compared 1) face-to-face instruction with 2) face-to-face-instruction PLUS online learning. No teachers were taken out of the equation for the treatment or control group.
The bottom line (which did not come across in the press reports…) is that this research tells us nothing about whether online learning and face-to-face instruction in K-12 are substitutes in the learning process. It does provide us some evidence, however, that they are complements.
— Susan Dynarski, University of Michigan
73. August 20, 2009
5:07 pm
Link
From the executive summary of the original study (a meta-analysis):
“An important issue to keep in mind in reviewing these findings is that many studies did not attempt to
equate (a) all the curriculum materials, (b) aspects of pedagogy and (c) learning time in the treatment
and control conditions. Indeed, some authors asserted that it would be impossible to havedone so. Hence, the observed advantage for online learning in general, and blendedlearning conditions in particular, is not necessarily rooted in the media used per se and may reflect differences in content, pedagogy and learning time.”
My opinion: When online learning works well, it’s because an instructor/designer has used the tools to encourage intimate interaction with the learning materials. Interaction beats ego-based lectures hands down. When online instruction fails to engage, it’s usually because a technology expert has simply broken a droning lecture into tediously small components and dropped the pieces onto rows and rows of ticky-tacky, sleep-inducing slides.
— Kim Crowley
74. August 20, 2009
5:16 pm
Link
I’d like to see the full study and what other conclusions were drawn besides what was published here.
A few other things I suspect contribute to this “increased achievement:”
1) Student engagement. It’s harder to tune out a self-directed computer program than it is a teacher, particularly if the teacher isn’t very good at gaining and maintaining students’ attention
2) Less disruption. Many of our classrooms are noisy, undisciplined, and unproductive. Where is it easier for a child to focus: in a classroom where others are continually distrubing the learning environment or in a room by yourself where you have nothing else going on but “learning?”
This is not a “ha, THIS is the answer” type of conclusion. The biggest complaint employers have today about the young people that they hire is that they lack the interpersonal skills - the LIFESKILLS — they need to succeed in business. That means social interaction, communication skills, etc. Online classes will NOT be able to teach that or expose kids to the real world.
Our kids are already spending too much time watching TV, playing videos, networking and surfing the ‘net. While tech is a good thing, it is NOT the only thing and it’s serving to decrease their interpersonal skills. Just like the current “Kindle in Every Backpack” moment the DLC is pushing, you can’t — and shouldn’t — turn everything into a tech problem. There’s more to education than just merely academics. We shouldn’t lose sight of that as we look to better ways to deliver that education to our youth.
— CorinneGregory
75. August 20, 2009
5:16 pm
Link
From a social constructivist point of view, I have problems with a curriculum based entirely on Internet instruction. Students benefit from constructing their own meaning from the world with guidance from instructors and collaboration with peers. While collaboration is somewhat possible with chat rooms, the venue is more artificial than sitting side by side with another student and working through a math problem or science experiment using hands-on materials.
Many online courses that I have seen isolate the student and compel him or her to work alone. The primary mode of delivering instruction is telling basic knowledge which requires lower level thinking skills and may develop procedural knowledge rather than conceptual understanding.
On a positive note, Internet instruction allows access to the incredible wealth of online information in a lively and interesting display. A motivated student can extend his/her learning on a particular topic beyond what is available in a typical classroom. Certainly the benefits of individualizing instruction and the vastness of content available will lead to more Internet instruction both in an out of the classroom.
A combination of classroom and Internet instruction may be appropriate in the future. Consideration needs to be given to the age and maturity of the students. Younger children probably need more classroom time and older children and adults may require less face to face time.
I
— Susan Whited
From 76 to 100 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
76. August 20, 2009
5:23 pm
Link
The only trouble with “virtual.,” “asynchronous” learning is the issue of student questioning — and listening to other students ask questions simultaneously (in real time).
This Q&A, Call-and-Response style is the way some of us (dinosaurs, Digital Immigrants) learn best. It is the one major drawback to on-line education, as I see it.
Sincerely,
— Gus Patukas
77. August 20, 2009
5:37 pm
Link
The headline of the article is deceptive. From what I’ve been shown here, this study was no experiment, so no cause/effect conclusion can be made. It’s possible that there’s a difference in the kind of person who takes an online class and one who takes a brick-and-mortar one.
That said, I think there is real value in online education. As a math teacher myself, I’m sure there are many aspects to our curriculum that could be taught via computers just as if not more effectively than through my organization of activities, lecture, and discussion.
I think where online work is best is in facts and skills. Where in-person work is best is in the transformation of one’s approach to the material. An online course, even with moderated discussion, is not as fruitful in developing a statistician’s approach to data.
But I don’t have an experiment to back this up.
All this said, I worry that too much online learning will further erode our species’ ability to listen and pay attention to others for any length of time. Soon we’ll be texting each other from 5 feet away, “How you doin’?” No matter the educational efficiency, in-person contact has benefits all its own.
— David Ellinger
78. August 20, 2009
6:40 pm
Link
Many young people, while “wired” with i-pods and cell phones and laptops, seem to lack basic social skills and responsiveness to other people in person. And not just young people. There’s a diminishment of courtesy and kindness in general; but it’s more pronounced in the young, who at times seem literally blind to those around them.
While it would be an oversimplificaiton to lay this failure of social-skill teaching completely on screen-based technologies, I believe that the isolation involved in them, and a concurrent temptation to solipcism are certainly one cause of the problem.
If we teach young people facts and processes of fact-acquisition and leave out the warmth and mutual contact of human interaction, we will lose a vital part of real education for life.
— jb, ok
79. August 20, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
One other point: The technological revolution that was touted as a means to greatly increase students’ learning and skills has not so far produced students who have superior skills in knowledge, communication, or analysis. As a teacher of over twenty years, I have seen a general decline in vocabulary, awareness of facts, and critical thinking, instead.
The answer may not lie in more technology, but in parents and teachers who personally instill a love of learning–by loving learning themselves, right in front of the young.
— jb, ok
80. August 20, 2009
8:04 pm
Link
How do we know that what is being measured is a change in the over all environment in which the students live? How do we know that we are seeing improvements that fail to take in the possibility of a sinking baseline for what constitutes learning? What I’m driving at is that the period in which the studies covered is against the backdrop of a growing dependency on wired communication. Trying to reach students today with blackboards and face-to-face group discussions may be hampered by such students’ lack of situational awareness outside a digital context. Do we know that traditional learning is actually less effective or simply that it is easier not to swim against the current in today’s environment?
— Anthony Davis
81. August 20, 2009
8:26 pm
Link
I do not trust the study. There are numerous reasons why people take online courses, and these, not the online courses, could be the cause for the statistical difference. The people who take online courses are generally the people who are more interested in learning. Online courses are often voluntary whereas school is required for everyone. The kids who do not care about school or learning are unlikely to bother taking an online course. The people who want to learn will generally do better on tests, and are more likely to attempt extra, learning.
— Eliot
82. August 20, 2009
8:49 pm
Link
I work for the online campus at a career college in Kansas City, MO called Pinnacle Career Institute. What I have come to find, is that most of our students are people who have tried traditional college and it didn’t work out; never tried college and would like to; and or people who financially never could, but now that they work….can. Our students are in online classrooms and can in fact share with each other and talk and message back and forth. They post pictures of themselves and they can and do learn together. We have an online graduation where friends and family all over the world can log on to see their diploma and a personalized message written by them regarding their graduation. These students do in fact make friends and build relationships all online. In these types of classrooms the student is much more in control of their pace of learning wether that be faster or slower then the average student. At our school, we have seen enormous growth and expect to see even more expansion over the next few years. To me, it does not really matter which is a better education online or classroom, what matters is that there are different options for different people and that some doors may be open with online learning for someone that wouldn’t otherwise have the means to receive a higher education.
— Valerie Kindall
83. August 20, 2009
10:13 pm
Link
I have been taking online courses for a long time, and I’ve tried them at about six or seven universities. I absolutely do not agree that online education beats traditional classroom.
One thing, very often the curriculum doesn’t cover as much stuff. When I took business law online at UT,they only covered like ten chapters, when I know the on-campus course covered more. Same for my business writing course at another U.
Second: the grading is a LOT easier. I’m amazed how I manage to get A after A even though in business law, I never got an A in an assignment or exam. Reason: it was curved.
Yes, there’re many motivated students who can learn on their own, and they take online courses for that reason. But I know many of my online classmates took online courses just to get the course requirement over with asap.
Just to show you how easy it is to cheat online : look at this online academic fraud story:
‘Gross academic fraud’ at UTB-TSC rocked Office of Distance Education
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/articles/online-100590-utb-employees.html
— PLan
84. August 20, 2009
11:32 pm
Link
“Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.”
To conclude that “on line learning beats the classroom”, presumably for all students, based on a study weighted thusly is to assume that children learn the same way as adults and have the same motivations, desires, and ability to attend. They don’t.
Television was measured as an instructional media after WW II and also found to be more effective than classroom instruction - until the novelty wore off.
— Tom Hill
85. August 21, 2009
2:31 am
Link
This article does not mention the question of grading leniency which could easily account for the 9 point difference. in my college experience, most students take online classes between semesters where a 4 month session is condensed into 5 weeks or so. i was told flat-out by a professor during a winter intersession class that he will not assign any time consuming projects that also need to be graded because there simply isn’t enough time.
i had a horrible experience with a 300 level online history class where the professor expected everyone to do all of the work in that 5 week time frame. after the first week several students realized that it would be impossible to do the assigned reading so we asked about that fact. the professor told us she wouldn’t hold us to the dates but neglected to mention that the final day of class was non-negotiable. the system locked me out at midnight on the last friday and then she refused to acknowledge her statement about the dates - i offered to email all of my work to her in word documents and she didn’t even reply to me. my impression was that she simply didn’t feel like being a teacher since she didn’t have to look me in the eye. she got paid the same either way and technically wasn’t breaking any rules.
i can see that professors might make the classes more lenient once they become experienced with the time frames. the intersession professor that i had in a real classroom cut down the workload by a large amount.
how does that factor into the statistic?
— jake
86. August 21, 2009
7:33 am
Link
Hmmmm…. I’m skeptical. Granted I’m a 20+ year veteran high school teacher, so may be biased, but I’m also the tech-coordinator and a Google Certified Teacher, so I’m convinced of the power of technology to transform education. And it needs transformation. I’m just not sure an online environment is the panacea, especially for teens who thrive on social interaction.
Students in online courses already tend to be intrinsically motivated. Moreover, as the study focused predominantly higher education, the more non-academically oriented students were already removed from the equation.
I developed an online component for my film studies class last semester–all handouts were online, I posted videos to the site for students to watch, along with an online discussion group. Kids–juniors and seniors–whined constantly. “Can’t you just email it to us?” “Why can’t we just write and turn it in?”
There’s a conventional wisdom myth out there that this is the tech savvy generation. Not so. This is the social networking generation, but they’re clueless about how to use technology in a thoughtful, academic way.
It would be interested to see a similar study that focused solely on K-12 education.
— Jeri Hurd
87. August 21, 2009
7:51 am
Link
I have a 15 year old grandaughter who just finished High School and is presently at ABAC , a local community college. She is taking 16 credit hours this semiester and loving it. She was homeschooled in the 7th and 8th grade and then enrolled in the Ashworth University High School distance learning program. She did not have to deal with all the problems of a public school and could learn at ther own pace. I taught in the public school system for 18 years but I would recommend this type learning to anyone that wanted to succed. Thank you.
— Lutrelle Greene
88. August 21, 2009
9:21 am
Link
Here is an article about long-term research on Online instruction. The actual study is at http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
— June Rosenberg
89. August 21, 2009
12:40 pm
Link
I agree with the apples and oranges comment. As a lifelong educator, I would submit that the goals of online education and the goals of face-to-face education often overlap, but they are essentially not the same. The populations cited as learning “more” online are indeed populations whose goals more closely align with what online courses have to offer.
The question that we who grew up without online learning need to answer concerning those who are growing up possibly overexposed to it is this: what are they missing? In general, today’s K-12 students spend an inordinate amount of time living and learning in a virtual world. I feel sorry for them, and I think we owe them more than that.
— Jill Thorne
90. August 21, 2009
4:40 pm
Link
As an online instructor, I have two comments:
1. I was forced to pay a lot more attention to pedagogy - how would I convey this information, invite the student to learn, maintain the student’s attention - than I had in recent years, when I began constructing online courses. This also helped improve my face-to-face teaching, but I think my online courses are better done.
2. Online college students don’t last long enough in an online course to get a grade if they are unprepared in reading, writing, and computer skills, or if they lack motivation and self-discipline to complete the coursework. The bottom of the grade distribution usually drops the course in an online class.
— Carol
91. August 21, 2009
6:41 pm
Link
My online students may have in fact learned three times as much as in a regular classroom, but they have put in three times as much effort in the first place! If I dedicated as much time to teaching face to face as I do to teaching online, I’d simply be doing not much else but teaching twenty students for the duration of that one class. No one wants to talk about how labor-intensive online teaching can be. It’s a matter of both the student’s and the teacher’s motivation, self-selection, independent (and collaborative) thinking abilities and creativity, and dedication to the topic at hand. However, as much as I have succeeded in both teaching and learning online, I would NEVER want a student in social work to sit in his or her high-end suburban home to wonderfully learn all there is to know about life in the Projects without having ever set foot into the lives of their future caseload. Unless online learning is combined with real-life empathy and experience with the full engagement of all “real” senses we are in great danger unless we are preparing the student for a simulated isolated and fully sanitized and controlled life in a space capsule heading for Mars. As well, that self-selection leaves out of our studies all the students who drop out because they don’t have the discipline and initial knowledge to cope with the issues always apparent in a learning environment.
— Dineh Davis
92. August 22, 2009
1:34 am
Link
“on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.”
Modest?
I could be wrong, but doesn’t that mean about EIGHTEEN PERCENT BETTER? In many schools, that’s the difference between an A and a C.
— Smadaf
93. August 22, 2009
10:52 am
Link
We sell an online business collaboration tool and while we don’t actively market to schools we were surprised to find how many have incorporated our product into their teaching techniques. The most innovative are not just broadcasting the instructor to a passive audience but engaging the students with individualized live and recorded audio, video and graphics. A good example is Paso a Paso, which employs instructors in Argentina to teach Spanish to people in Japan. Using video the students can see hand gestures and facial expressions better than they could from the back of a classroom, the teacher can correct pronunciation, and a rich set of visual materials at appropriate places in the lesson.
http://vsee.com/blog/?p=223
— Christopher Herot
94. August 22, 2009
2:25 pm
Link
Yes, it seems like the “traditional” classroom model actually deprives our now wired students of their connectedness. As more and more students have the internet on hand held devices, does it make sense for teachers to force them disconnect and listen to us, or can we find better ways to blend the world our students live in with what we’re doing in the classroom? I think we can and we have to.
http://howtobeateacher.blogspot.com/
— Rob Ross
95. August 22, 2009
8:50 pm
Link
“Driving to class after work to listen to a bored adjunct for 90 minutes, then driving home is a waste of time.” I agree.
17 years ago I went back to the University of South Florida with the idea of taking some pre-med classes.
I drove an hour and sat through a week of listening to a grad student from India attempt to teach a subject in English, his thick nearly unintelligible Hindi accent impeding most of the learning on my part.
One lecture had 200+ students, again not an ideal learning situation.
Still another class was taught by an American female grad student who used the captive audience to try out her wannabe comic routine. She said we were a tough room. Then I drove another hour to get home.
Nearly a decade later I picked up a degree in computer network engineering, taught mostly by teachers reading PowerPoint slides and on the computer learning in week long cram sessions. This was before similar material was available on the internet.
With the exception of classes taught by one outstanding technical math and digital electronics instructor, I could have done most of the work by myself when I am less distracted.
This happens to be around 2:00 am, but the info was not available at that time. In fact, you could not even get into the computer lab except during limited daytime hours. Apparently they were worried about someone stealing the expensive ram chips.
I listened to the in class programming lectures but had difficulty keeping my focus. This time the instructor passed around a bag of candy and just bullshitted about everything but programming during that evening class. So a month into the class I switched to another campus with a more serious teacher and basically started over.
Finally I found a solution. Just listen in class, don’t take notes. At home, late at night or early in the morning, get an overview of the problem while sitting at the computer. Go to the couch, lay down and formulate a solution in my head. Go back to the computer and fill out the answer as required.
I still think my best thinking is done lying on my back with my eyes shut.
— Larry Vaughn
96. August 23, 2009
12:02 am
Link
Could it be that students are scoring higher on easier tests? Nope that is just crazy talk. The online courses and face-to-face courses give the same tests right? Nope.
Also, where are students more likely to engage in academic dishonesty: in front of a teacher or in front of a computer screen? Yep, you know the answer.
— Brandon
97. August 23, 2009
12:56 pm
Link
Online learning is streamline and is specific for a determined, motivative learner. I agree with several comments provided: It is self selected; It is convenient; an abundance of resources via media is always available; lastly, I believe that in order for an online student to be “truly” successful (able to apply the learning to real-life), the student needs to be self-disciplined and focused on their goals (whatever they are). Though that may sound like a description for any traditional learner, it’s really not!
Online learning fit the lifestyle of a “mature” learner and adult. A learner who has experienced enough life to sacrafice the traditional “social circle;” and, someone who knows exactly what they need to advance to the next level for their life or career, but find it too challenging due to work, family, or other time consuming events. Perhaps, k-12 students are not truly ready to sacrafice their youth and social interaction for that experience. K-12 students still have a lot to learn from each other, which will eventually help them to develop who they will become as an adult. That said, because education is the process of learning, it’s probably a good thing to introduce, and initiate k-12 students to this phenomenon now (an online class every semester), to prepare them for when their lives (eventually) become consumed with adult or “mature” life.
cdw
— Chris Washington
98. August 23, 2009
4:22 pm
Link
The journalist who wrote this article should have done better homework. Reading the review essay, a half-dozen of the studies referred to in the review essay, and the abstracts for twenty-some more of the studies, I see that the SRI authors do not sustain their early division between purely online and blended learning. According to the SRI review essay itself, purely online courses remain statistically no better than face-to-face courses; however, blended learning courses, which enhance face-to-face instruction with online elements, are statistically somewhat better than purely face-to-face courses.
Other features of the review essay need to be
pointed out. First, the advantages of online learning were clearer among students in technical fields who were studying to pass examinations as part of technical training; the SRI authors even point out that one such advantage was that students got to take and retake examinations in most of the studies they cited.
Second, the advantages of online learning were clearest when the online learning provided a diversion (in the sense of divergence rather than distraction) from face-to-face instruction; for example, clear advantages were shown in the many studies that tested the use of online tutorials for a single unit in an otherwise face-to-face course, using the rest of the face-to-face course as the control. Such diversions–that is, those that break a routine for students and of which students are aware–can be explained in part by the Hawthorne effect, as one of the authors of a study summarized in the SRI study pointed out.
Third, in some of the studies summarized by the SRI review essay, investigators broke the course or module into separate elements. For example, in one study, nursing students who took online tutorials in a respiratory assistance module, with the opportunity for taking and retaking practice exams, did better on a standard exam than face-to-face students who had no practice exams; however, there was no difference between groups in the practical work of inserting a temporary, artificial airway.
Finally, SRI International is not a disinterested researcher in matters of online instruction. It was founded to advance technological innovations; furthermore, although SRI itself is a non-profit entity for tax purposes, it has continuing financial relationships with its many for-profit subsidiaries, all of which are technology companies. How does a non-profit have a for-profit subsidiary, such as the Sarnoff Corporation? Maybe a tax lawyer can explain that one. The journalist sure didn’t.
— Kevin
99. August 24, 2009
1:10 am
Link
I’m actively taking online courses and find this type of learning more productive than my classroom experience for many courses. However, I see advantages to face-to-face education when lab work is a critical part of the course (chemistry, etc).
Another factor lacking from online education is the face to face social experience. My BS and MS were completed in face to face classrooms. The face to face networking adds a difficult to measure factor. The old saying is true, it isn’t always what you know, but who you know. I’m not sold that remote, online “friends” are equal to people you went out having a happy with after a rough exam.
However, as an adult learner with a family and a great career, I can’t beat the online system. I feel that I learn more because I can pause lectures when I am having trouble comprehending a topic in a lecture and use Google to quickly find supporting information and get a grasp on the topic before moving forward. In my undergrad and masters programs I would write down topics I didn’t fully understand, but I rarely went back to study them.
Overall, my personal view is that online is a good alternative/supplement for masters and some doctorate degrees. But, the experiences of post-high school college is much more than simply learning.
— Jason
100. August 24, 2009
11:46 am
Link
A good deal of the importance of traditional education is not about the rote memorization of facts, or absorbing and being able to repeat knowledge. Critical thinking and interaction with peers is a vital social skill which is learned in a classroom setting over time.
With the growing rates of children with autism, asperger’s, and other socially limiting conditions, I have to wonder how much might be attributed to a lack of early creative play, and a growing focus on non-creative, goal based education.
A child’s brain does not work like an adult’s. Education ought to reflect this fact.
— Molly Malone
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From 101 to 108 of 108 Comments
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101. August 24, 2009
3:04 pm
Link
It’s alarming and depressing how many commenters in this thread are totally unaware of what constitutes great online education–and how much it has changed (for the better) with the advent of online social media tools.
These folks need to do some serious online research. Posting uninformed opinions based on personal assumptions (and even personal experience in teaching online without creating extensive interactivity) is…not cool.
— Liz Dorland
102. August 24, 2009
3:26 pm
Link
I think it is great that people can learn online in the comfort of their homes. I believe many people learn better because of lack of distractions such as class clowns etc. Being in a room full of other students may be intimidating to the person afraid of asking a “dumb” question.
I also see a problem. The problem would be for those who cannot afford a computer. There are alot of people that will not be able to take advantage of online courses. Online course only work for those who can log on and those that can afford them.
— O
103. August 24, 2009
3:29 pm
Link
My son took four online courses this summer while home from college working in an internship. The classes were a joke! The testing was even a bigger farce. I was amazed a person could get an entire degree with nothing but this level of online instruction and testing.
— Chuck
104. August 24, 2009
4:13 pm
Link
— sara wrote
“I’m very disturbed by Hetty Greene’s comment. Wikipedia may provide answers, but a college education is designed to help people ask questions and to analyze. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it does not teach analytical or critical thinking.”
Thank goodness you’re not teaching my children You clearly missed the point of Hetty Greene’s comment. Her mentioning Wikipedia was not as on-line education, but rather that it is NOT solely for profit as the content provided is contributed by users free of charge. She contends much of college on-line learning is driven by profit, NOT educational reasons.
— Robert
105. August 24, 2009
4:19 pm
Link
Amidst the debate of the finer points of the meta-analysis and anecdotal evidence supporting/against online education, I offer this as a way of critically assessing headlines like “…online education beats…”:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
— student
106. August 24, 2009
8:14 pm
Link
Duh…
— Dr. Michael K. Clifford
107. August 25, 2009
5:43 am
Link
Many people who take online courses are already mature adults. They are motivated and already bring a lot of life experience to the course. I totally agree with JS17 that a great deal of education and learning comes outside the classroom at a college and inside the classroom while interacting with other students and professors. To have a junior high student staying at home and not developing social skills scares me. Fitting into society and having social skills is a huge part of future employment.
— lindyf
108. August 25, 2009
10:31 am
Link
If the quantitative measures of effectiveness were themselves taken online (or on a computer), as I suspect, then the study is flawed because online learning will translate to better online test results. I couldn’t gather from the article whether the testing was computer-based or not.
— duh
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