ARE ONLINE CLASSES REALLY THE FUTURE?

Totally-online classes just might be the future of higher education.

I mean, think about it: With an online class, you don’t have to waste time and gas money to travel to a physical campus. You don’t have to worry about scrambling together group projects with people you’ll never see again. And you don’t have to try not to fall asleep while your stuffy professor talks about their kids each class.

In a world where people are getting busier and busier, it seems like more people will opt to save their time and energy by taking only online classes. Lots of in-person classes already include a bunch of online material, so it seems natural that we can all easily make the jump to having every class be online… right?

Well, as much my socially awkward self would love to never have to interact with other people while learning things, I don’t think that all classes would benefit from being totally online – and that some would even be less helpful without the in-person relationship of classic brick-and-mortar education.

First of all, online classes are already almost entirely dependent on a person’s time management skills, definitely not everyone’s strong suit. Your success in them is almost totally up to your ability to remind yourself to do things on time and check every day to see whether you have things due. Even for people with pretty good time management skills, the different setup of online classes makes it rather easy to overlook or miss an assignment because you weren’t looking in the right place. Personally, I’ve missed several assignments in online classes before because there were so many other things due each week that items were hard to keep track of, even with the help of the syllabus.

Of course, if this were the only thing I believe is challenging about today’s online classes, then I really wouldn’t be that skeptical.

What I think is really missing from the online class experience is the face-to-face opportunity. Now, obviously, this is a no-brainer. Clearly if a class is online, then you’re not meeting face-to-face – that’s the whole point of the class!

What I’m trying to get at is that I feel many types of classes really shouldn’t be online – at least, not completely. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) classes, for example, have key concepts that students often need a long time to grasp. Some students might be geniuses who can just learn complicated formulas immediately, but for most others, the rapid pace of learning and the difficulty of the classes leads them to spending multiple hours a week in the tutoring center or visiting during a teacher’s office hours – which kind of defeats the point of taking an online class if you’re doing it to save time by not having to be on campus. If that class you’re taking is a lab science class, then you’d still have to come to campus anyway to do your lab, which I know I’d find inconvenient.

Some professors are going to virtual office hours, through websites such as Zoom, but this is still pretty far from being practical as being able to meet your professor and talk to them in person to discuss exactly what it is that you don’t get.

Also, don’t think STEM classes are the only ones that can’t be done online. Communications and public speaking classes, by their nature, have to be done in-person to be effective. And what about the trades or medical fields? Would you want someone working on you car or filling your cavities who has never actually had any physical practice?

That said, I’ve taken several classes online that I found to be far more practical and convenient than their in-person counterparts. HPE 295 (that one health and PE class that everyone at MHCC has to take for an associate’s degree) was much more favorable online, I thought, because you aren’t required to use the ACT room to do your workouts, making it much more flexible.

I also took an online creative writing class, of which I was skeptical at first but shortly warmed up to, after realizing that by having all our responses and criticism of each other’s writing done online, we avoided the awkward anxiety that comes with sitting there uncomfortably waiting for someone to read a physical copy of our story.

In the end, I still think that totally-online (or at least, mostly-online) classes are probably the next step in higher education. After all, pretty much every other aspect of our lives is online, so why not school? And while I think that many classes, mostly electives, can benefit by the online formula, in order to make other STEM classes and some others really work, we’ll need to rethink how these courses function in-person, and how to translate that to online without losing valuable in-person experience.