As someone who was was an adjunct before and during the pandemic, I can tell you from first hand experience that a lot was lost when transitioning from in-person to remote learning.

The most obvious impact was participation. Even at the college level, when students aren’t physically in the classroom they are less focused on the class.

However, even beyond that there are a lot of things that suffer:

• The ability to just walk over to a student to see how theyre doing (whether they want you to or not).
• In class exercises and group collaboration.
• The ability to easily dive into questions and tangents (drawing programs online are very hit or miss).
• Not to mention audio and video issues.
• Ability to read the classroom (going to fast, something wasn’t clear, etc.)

It may not sound significant, but it really adds up. Not to mention that the impact from covid in education is very visible at all levels of education.

Look at it this way, I paid £3,290 per year in tuition fees to attend university back when I went. The price of tuition has since nearly trebled to over £9k.

If I paid £9k per year for online courses and was denied the student experience of actually attending a university campus (as many teenagers who went to uni during COVID had to), I’d be fucking livid!

My education credentials: I am a flight instructor.

Classrooms are a terrible place to teach. Laboratories are better. I can give you a 9 hour lecture on the aerodynamics of maneuvering flight, with a lengthy powerpoint presentation with pictures and such…or I can give you a half hour briefing and a one hour flight lesson and you’ll come away knowing more than you would have from that 9 hour lecture.

A degree you earned from sitting in a classroom watching powerpoint presentations and doing homework on paper is going to be useless. They’re going to teach you how to fill a page of paper with calculus or an MLA formatted essay. No one actually does those things. Maybe. Maybe. something like computer programming or the like where the student can bring their own computer could be done entirely from home, because a laptop is sufficient lab equipment for that field of study. I can think of very few other degrees that should be granted based on listening to a professor talk and answering trivia questions about what he said.

Biology majors need to cut a creature open. Engineering majors need to design and build things. Psychology majors need to talk to people. Chemists need to mix shit together. Aviation majors need to fly a fucking plane. If your degree program doesn’t include a fair amount of practical lab work like that, you’re either in a diploma mill or you’re majoring in business. Either way, just unenroll.

As someone with ADHD, I do horribly when I try to learn online. If it’s not being forced to the forefront of my mind by going to a classroom every few days, I never get any assignments done and I end up failing.

Things like lectures I agree are actually better online than in person, but there’s a lot about university learning that can’t really be replicated online.

The most obvious thing being physical demonstrations and hands on projects, which I had in several physics and engineering classes.

Also I think in-person works better for discussion sections or office hours, where talking it out and writing it on a board is often easier to do in person than online (although there are tools for these things online).

Another big thing you’d miss out on by studying online is the whole social aspect of living away from your parents and with other people your age and making friends and going to parties and such.

People learn many different ways. Online learning is not right for everybody.

I’ve got a master’s degree and I’ve also been a teaching assistant and I strongly disagree with the notion that online teaching is more effective. Putting all materials online is useful, but explaining something to someone is way more effective when you’re standing next to them.

Institutional inertia

I can’t even get my postgrad course to record class sessions for the english as a second language international students.

The MSc Sustainability from Cranfield University is all online besides a 4 day residential each year.

Seems to work really well for them.

As with remote work, it really depends on what you’re doing. Some jobs and classes are tailor made for remote, some are nearly impossible to accomplish remotely. COVID inspired some really creative uses of technology but at the end of the day, it was an augmentation not a drop-in replacement.

I think online courses should be available as much as possible whenever practical, but what we all have to realize is that designing an effective online curriculum is expensive and difficult. We also have to realize that certain activities will never transition to online and we just need to accept that. Taking a lecture with 300 students? Put that that thing online. Learning an instrument? You need to be in-person for your lessons and ensembles.

What needs to change is how in-person workers are compensated and how institutions support the development of online programs. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

Some classes translate to an online format much easier than others. How do you effectively translate an upper level chemistry lab to be done online? Even if you could do it in such a way that the student gains the theoretical knowledge, it wouldn’t give them the hands on practice that they’ll need for real lab work.

Also money. If it was all free to get the paper online, who would pay to get it in person?

Your experience is not representative of the majority.

What are your metrics for “effective?” As someone who is both teaching and taking classes currently, I can tell you engagement is pitifully low in online formats. Education is not just about memorizing facts and going through the motions to get a good grade. There’d have to be some amazing innovation in online education practices to convince me it will be the default anytime soon.

In practice, online education is worse. Discussion boards are a shallow replacement for real shoulder to shoulder conversations, many students speed through video lectures, and the entire experience seems flattened and gamified. It feels more “effective and efficient” but that feeling doesn’t necessarily match reality.