Senior history major
At 9 a.m. Saturday, while most of you undoubtedly slumbered after a night of revelry, my research team and I were busy giving our Gemstone thesis presentation to friends, family and a number of scrutinizing but ultimately supportive experts in the emerging field of online education.
For those unfamiliar with Gemstone, it is a four-year undergraduate research program affiliated with the Honors College and composed of about a dozen teams per class with quirky acronym names such as RODENT (Reducing Obesity and Disease with Effective Nutritional Therapies), SWAMP (Superior Wetlands Against Malicious Pollutants) and ours, ONLINE (Observing the Nuances of Learning in Non-traditional Environments). Clever, no?
Online education, and the study thereof, has exploded in popularity the past few years. Massive open online courses, called MOOCs, and other platforms such as Coursera and Khan Academy offer ways to supplement students’ education for free and could conceivably replace traditional brick-and-mortar universities one day.
The implications of these emerging educational websites are tremendous, so my team decided to start here at this university to determine whether students would learn as much, or think they learned as much, in an online setting as they did in a traditional classroom.
Thanks to a few intrepid professors willing to guinea pig their students for a single lecture period, our team was able to conduct an experimental study in which we split up a class into several groups: One would stay in class, while the others would watch a video of the lecture in a variety of online settings.
All of the students would then return the following class period to take a test designed to measure retention and recollection of the material and to fill out a survey intended to measure their attitudes toward the lecture they viewed.
The results we obtained from three years of this experiment were interesting, and in many ways they contradicted what we researchers had thought (or in my case, hoped) we would find.
I am very much a traditionalist, often struggling to find the beauty in change, while focusing on the wonderful yet inevitably diminished charms of the past.
From the onset of the experiment, I expected to see data supporting my prevailing notion that there was no way students would learn just as effectively from watching a video than sitting in a physical classroom with a teacher only feet away.
However, based on our research, even I am willing to concede that perhaps online education should have a role in the future of higher learning and learning at all levels.
Our data indicate students retain just as much information in an online setting as they do in a traditional classroom. Interestingly, though, students feel they don’t learn as much in online settings; in technical terms, the online students’ perceived learning scores based on survey responses were significantly lower.
Our results speak to the stigma of online classes in our society: We love the idea of their vast capabilities but are not quite ready to accept their sudden explosion on the educational scene. Team ONLINE encourages college administrators, professors and students alike to give serious thought to how online courses can and will play a role in this university’s future, especially as enrollment increases and teachers are faced with overcrowded classrooms and tight budgets. In order to secure its future, the university must assert itself as a leader in this educational revolution and learn how to implement online courses in the manner most beneficial to its students.
Neal Freyman is a senior history major. He can be reached at nfreyman3@gmail.com.
