When Students Prefer Traditional to Online Courses

"Inside Higher Education" reports on an intriguing (though very small study) of community college students' attitudes towards online courses.  Almost all students now take some online courses, but it would seem that they are starting to discriminate which courses work well in that format and which don't.  The most interesting point: 

community college students prefer face-to-face courses over their online equivalents in certain subjects, the study found, particularly courses they consider difficult, interesting or important.

That confirms my impression that online may work well for courses that are only about delivering relatively simple information, the kind of information that students can digest on their own.  But when more difficult types of learning - for example, not just memorizing data, but examining complex ideas or even one's own opinions - are involved, then the back and forth of a human conversation is needed.  It is also interesting that when "interesting or important" courses are involved, students want more direct interaction with teachers. Is the first point because in a course they find interesting students feel they can pursue their interests with a live human more than in an online chat, to say nothing of simple recorded lectures?  And what about the idea that students want a live teacher when the course is in their opinion "important"? Does this suggest that students think a live human somehow has more credibility than a recorded lecture?  Or is it that with "important' topics, the student really wants to get it right and that is more likely to happen with a live instructor than a canned one? In any case, the study raises some interesting questions to investigate further. 

Here is the whole article: 

The wholesale replacement of community college curriculums with online courses might not be the best idea, according to new research [1] from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

That’s because community college students prefer face-to-face courses over their online equivalents in certain subjects, the study found, particularly courses they consider difficult, interesting or important.

The researchers conducted one-on-one interviews with students and found the majority “felt they did not learn the course material as well when they took it online," according to the study. “For most students, this deficit was due to reduced teacher explanation and interaction.”

The study, which is part of a larger research project, was based on interviews with 46 students who were attending two Virginia community colleges who had taken both kinds of courses. While that sample is small, it still provides a good snapshot of attitudes at two-year institutions, said Shanna Smith Jaggars, the center’s assistant director and the author of the study.

Lessons from a Not so Silent Calvin Coolidge

Jason Stevens, a graduate of the Department and  now an adjunct in it, draws out the lessons for President Obama from two recent books on President Coolidge.  See his lengthy blog on the "Library of Law and Liberty" website.

Donald Kagan Retires

Donald Kagan, one of the country's most prominent classicists and author of one of the most popular Western Civilization textbooks used in History departments (see The Western Heritage), recently retired from Yale University.  In his "farewell lecture", as reported in the Wall Street Journal, he identified some important problems in higher education and in the Western world more generally.   For example: 

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.

College as Country Club

At latimes.com, Jonathan Zimmerman describes the "absurdly lavish goods and services" offered students at some colleges and universities, along with some of the consequences - the main one being high costs, and therefore large, long-lasting debts. Interestingly, one of the main examples is Oberlin College, just a few miles but several worlds away from Ashland. If any students are reading this, would you be willing to give up bouldering caves (what is that anyway?), climbing walls, tanning booths, nap pods, and luxurious housing in return for a sound education and much less debt? Perhaps a struggling university somewhere could make this its special niche.

Here's the full story:

My daughter is a junior in high school, so I've spent part of this spring making that upper-middle-class pilgrimage known as "the college tour." But as we were led across sweeping lawns by tour guides walking backward, I found myself thinking less about my daughter's looming college experience and more about how different her life will be after she graduates.

I've also been thinking about "Girls," the television series about four young women trying to make ends meet in New York. Three of them are depicted as recent graduates of Oberlin, which is also the alma mater of "Girls" creator and lead actress Lena Dunham.

And if you take a look at Oberlin, or at almost any college or university, you'll get a good idea of why these "girls" are struggling in the real world. Put simply, today's American colleges shower students with absurdly lavish bills of goods and services. No wonder it's so hard for them to pay their own bills when they get out.
To be fair, Oberlin's campus is less over the top than many others. But even so, it recently opened a $24-million music building featuring a glass walking bridge and a naturally lit "Sky Lounge." And the school's sport facilities include a 25-foot climbing wall and a 360-square-foot "bouldering cave."

History and Political Science Honors

The Department is very pleased to announce that this past weekend Dr. Patrick Campbell was awarded the Dr. Donald Reinhart Honor and Integrity Award and Dr. Jeffrey Sikkenga was runner up for the Taylor Excellence in Teaching Award.  Nice work!

Congratulations are in order also for our students.  At the Academic Honors Convocation, Erin Sutter won the Outstanding Senior Award, Joseph Griffith won the Junior Award, and Jaclyn Horn won the Sophomore Award.

Rebeccah Heinrichs Debates Missile Defense

How often does Ralph Nader introduce a graduate from Ashland University? In what is probably a first, in this video of a debate in his series "Debating Taboos", Mr. Nader introduces Rebeccah Heinrichs.  She opens the debate with a statement, starting at about the 8:30 minute mark.

Teaching Humanities to the Poor

This is Naomi Schaeffer Riley's review of The Art of Freedom: Teaching Humanities to the Poor, by Earl Shorris. In the book, Shorris describes his efforts to establish a set of courses to teach the core texts of Western civilization to people living in poverty and whose school experience had scanted the canon or skipped it entirely.  An impractical, even useless effort, right?  Not!  Here is one reason why: 

Shorris recounts the story of a young man in his first class—a 24-year-old with a history of violent behavior—who called him describing how a woman at work had provoked him. "She made me so mad, I wanted to smack her up against the wall. I tried to talk to some friends to calm myself down a little, but nobody was around." Shorris asked him what he did, "fearing this was his one telephone call from the city jail." Instead, he told Shorris, "I asked myself, 'What would Socrates do?' "

Peter Schramm a Power Line 100 Best Professor

Steve Hayward wrote this nice piece in praise of Peter Schramm (some other AU profs in History and Political Science are also mentioned) on the Power Line blog.  See here: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/04/the-power-line-100-peter-schramm.php.