On-line Courses Might Make Us Human.

I have this little tickle telling me to start by saying, settle-down people, it’s alright. I know On-line classes are increasing in popularity. And although I’ve only taught (or better, ‘monitored’) one of them, I can see why. They certainly offer all kinds of flexibility to commuter students—those with jobs, kids, marriages and so on. Not that traditional freshman don’t have lives beyond the campus, it’s just that, for the most part, traditional freshman don’t have lives beyond the campus. And that’s great. My Miami University students have very little to do expect figure out this kaleidoscope of a world in the company of new (most likely life-long) friends, new ideas, and the strange people they call professors. At IUE things are different, and while most of the students there make strange faces when I use the phrase ‘On-Line Class,” they’re all bound to use them at some point. Their schedules will demand it, and the administration keeps offering more and more of it’s courses in an on-line format. What I think is most interesting, and probably most surprising, is that whatever the on-line class they’re forced to take, these students are going to engage in the material in ways that a teacher simply would not have provided.

Look, the notion that a professor/teacher (maybe at any level) is still viewed as a spouting source of knowledge that students need to sit before, open their heads, and collect as much precious information as possible is over—can I get an amen!? Not only are facts, figures, diagrams, ‘how-to-videos,’ explanations, and histories all available on the web, so are interesting discussions about what these things might mean, how they connect, and matter. This year I’ve learned to think much deeper about our political system, for example, by reading and commenting (engaging) on blogs, watching arguments made with images (often posted on youtube), and piecing together differing pages of differing websites, than I ever did in a semester of ‘American Politics 101.’ What’s more, I’ve been completely in control of what I've learned and how I thought about it—no one was demanding I puke particular bits of the information back up on a test. That is to say, it’s mine. And it didn’t require face-to-face interaction with a teacher.

What I did need (and still do) is some kind of human experience to give what I learn both relevance and complication. While learning on-line finally gives power to the person who needs it most—the student, it’s still an environment that lacks lots of real humans. I’m not saying that teachers and students can’t build some kind of cool intellectual relationship on-line, they can. They do. I did. But it’s not wholly satisfying, and if the concern about on-line classes is that they will somehow usurp the brick-and-mortar classroom, then , it seems to me, people charged with teaching can rightly start worrying about why their physical presence is so important. Put another way, the on-line class (and the web itself) just may force the blowhard in front of the lecture hall to pipe-down, really listen, and realize they’re probably not disseminating divine information. This may be easy for me to say—none of my ideas are new and half the classrooms I teach in are digital spaces. At the same time, I still blunder my way through most classes not because a lecture fell flat (they always do by the way, I don’t care what expressions our students wear while we’re talking). Rather, I blunder all over the place because of what I hope is an inexperienced attempt to create both an engaging and very human classroom. Of course “we” all do, right? As Alex Reid writes, “asking a room of faculty if they don't want to provide engaging experiences for their students is somewhat like asking a room of people to raise their hands if they are racist.” Any teacher/scholar worth their salt wants to engage their students. But if we’re not offering a place were things happen that couldn’t happen on-line, why even show up (especially if you’re a student). I can read PowerPoint slides on my own. I can memorize a professors notes and spit them back out on a test all by myself; I wouldn't need to leave my house or dorm room for that. What I can’t do on my own is generate relevant knowledge in the presence of other faces that not only challenge that knowledge with their words, they can do it simply with their presence—that is if teachers acknowledge that physical presence as everything that matters.