In her Monday Morning Memo last week, President Cruzado said that the online education program at MSU “allows us to offer high quality academic programs in a flexible format.” Flexibility is an important element in the curriculum, but should not be a driving force.
In order to maintain excellence in education at MSU, the administration must put the highest priority on the quality, not quantity, of courses offered. Cruzado claims that MSU’s online courses will maintain a high quality; however, looking past the optimism portrayed in her memo raises the question of whether these new courses can match their older, more traditional counterparts.
The first facet to consider when comparing these two modes of education is the significance of the student-teacher relationship. The rapport developed between an effective instructor and a pupil often enhances student satisfaction. Teachers create a connection with each student at the commencement of the semester that develops throughout the course of the class. That connection is strengthened through individual instruction during class and office hours; face-to-face interaction allows students who would have ordinarily struggled further chances to learn. Student-teacher relationships and communication play a huge role in education.
Online classes exclude these important mantras; the delayed interactivity and ineffectiveness of online education and communication frustrates and confounds students. To those participating in online classes, teachers represent little more than a part of the machine.
The online environment cheapens education; it provides students with modes to distract and cheat. A student has every opportunity to surf Facebook or check answers to quizzes and tests online. These deficits cut to the core of the inadequacy of online education. Many students choose the easy route and simply go through the motions of the course; they take it for the sake of credit, not education or self-improvement. While this is certainly a trend of education in general, online education catalyzes this shift. Classes that take place online offer students credit, but rarely in-depth understanding and knowledge.
Attempting to sell this new initiative, Cruzado advertises these online opportunities as ways to fulfill Core 2.0—a quality many undergraduates may find attractive—effectively tainting the goal of a program aimed at educating students in a variety of subjects. Initiatives such as these bear evidence to the quantity-over-quality dogma to which the MSU administration seems to have subscribed. A look at the problems currently facing the university quickly sheds light on the administrative advantages of online education: A high rate of growth coupled with low funding means the administration must find means to save money and space on campus. Online education solves the problem of space while actually making money for the school by allowing people across the state to enroll.
So what do online classes mean for MSU? The administration would like us to believe that they mean wider academic possibilities, but more accurately, they mean poorer education for the same price. Online education represents a way to spread the funding and resources currently available to MSU thinly over a wider area.
