The pandemic and the rush to online teaching in higher education has produced fierce debate about this form of teaching and about whether it is effective. I have been teaching history courses online since 2003 and have gone through various platforms used for teaching of this kind; over the years I have harangue my full-time colleagues to learn how to teach online. Awed by its technology and mostly set in their ways I inevitably got a cool reception. My colleagues saw online teaching as inferior, taught only by adjunct professors having no scholarly credentials, who usually were failed wannabe aspirants for entrants into the fiercely competitive academic world.
Over the years I felt stuck in the proverbial wilderness arguing that technology was not the important feature of online teaching, that it was the expertise of instructors in their own disciplines and the integrity and quality of their courses—the same as in face-to-face classes. I pushed practicality as a major feature of online teaching. Students who had to start jobs in other parts of the county and had to finish up one or two classes to get their degree could take them, as was the case with one my students who had to take a job in California. Study-abroad students could take them from foreign countries, as did some of my students from Turkey, Argentina, and Spain in my classes. A professional basketball player took one of my classes while travelling to different American cities to play. Soldiers took courses from me while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Students who have physical challenges could further their education, I argued, pointing to a quadriplegic in one of my online classes. These courses allow students from different, faraway, universities to take classes on subjects that interest them and are not given by their institutions. Online teaching benefits full-time professors like me as well, because they can teach from anyplace in the world while doing their research. And, I argued online is essential in case of an epidemic.
But they could not create a community, was the retort! This is where I usually cited one chat in which two students who did not know each other discovered that they had earlier been in a face-to-face course together. In another chat that I unexpectedly missed and listened to later, I heard: “Where’s Di Scala, he’s usually on time?” Some pleasantries followed, then one student said: “Well, he’s not coming, so let’s have the chat by ourselves.” It was one of the best chats on history I have heard, so much so that I contemplated setting up chats that I would not attend. But then I discovered that students were chatting among themselves anyway.
Another great benefit of online teaching is that it keeps professors intellectually active. In my case, I would have retired many years earlier had I not had the stimulus of online teaching, and had I continued to teach the same old same old. I have kept doing my online courses post-retirement as cuts forced courses on important topics to go untaught.
The problem of online teaching in this pandemic is that it is not online teaching. The pandemic descended rapidly, and my colleagues who argued against online had to teach “online” overnight. Because of the learning curve and the work to prepare real online classes, this was impossible. What most faculty who had not taught real online courses before was to use Zoom or similar tools; these may be suitable for meetings and telehealth, but not for teaching complex college classes. Online platforms allow for the presentation of material in many creative ways that benefit college students, not only by recording lectures and posting assignments, but by presenting material with links to primary and secondary sources, posting interesting articles at the last minute in various parts of the course, by holding discussions in ways that encourage all students to participate in them—not just the couple or so that tend to dominate in f2f courses, by stimulating reading and teaching writing, which our students need so much, and by making them easily available to stay-at-home moms and to physically challenged students.
Administrators make the distinction between “remote” learning and “online,” with remote using programs like Zoom, necessarily synchronous. that mimic face-to-face teaching. Zoom cannot do this well, and the public is becoming increasingly aware of its failures, even if faculty can more easily adapt to the program. Instead, truly online platforms like Blackboard are much more versatile, can convey subject matter in greater depth, and allow greater access for working students, young and old, physically able or not.
Undoubtedly, online education is more work for faculty and students, but it can save higher education.