In 1993, as Louisiana State University made its first steps toward online instruction, its student newspaper, The Daily Reveille, issued a stark warning about the future. “A university is a place where the knowledge of one generation is passed on to the next, and this cannot be done by machine,” the paper declared. “Information can be found in a computer, but only by the human touch is the knowledge of generations transmitted.”
Was the paper right? Nearly 30 years later, we still don’t know. But this year’s biggest news story provides us with an opportunity to find out, if we’re wise enough to seize it.
I’m talking about the coronavirus crisis, of course, which has led dozens of institutions in recent weeks to cancel in-person classes and replace them with online instruction. An important question is whether the move to online learning is good or bad for students, and we will soon have tons of new evidence that we could use to answer it. But do we even want an answer? To me, that’s the biggest question of all.
Since the LSU newspaper issued its warning, online instruction has become a staple of American higher education. By 2016, roughly six million students — or about a third of all students in the United States — were taking at least one online course.
A smaller but growing number took all of their courses online. Almost half of the 1.4 million students at for-profit institutions were enrolled exclusively in online classes. But so were 11 percent of the nearly 15 million students at public colleges and universities.
What were they learning? It’s hard to tell. In the 1990s, the first set of studies found little difference in academic achievement between people who took face-to-face, online, and hybrid courses. But this research was marred by the problem of self-selection: Students who chose online courses were probably more comfortable in that format and tended to perform better in it.
In 2014, two Columbia researchers looked at the grades of over 40,000 community- and technical-college students in Washington State over nearly a half a million courses to compare how the same students — not different ones — did in the classes they took online versus face-to-face. They found that all students performed worse in the online classes, but the drop-off was sharper for African Americans and for students with lower grade-point averages. In short, people with less academic opportunity and skill were likely to suffer more from online instruction.
Yet even this sophisticated study failed to get around the self-selection problem, because there’s also evidence that students choose to take courses online when the subject matter is of less appeal. “If there is a class you don’t want to take, take it online and get it out of the way,” a student assistant told Steven Brint, a professor at the University of California at Riverside, during the research he conducted for his recent book on higher education. “That way you can save room for the courses you like or for your major. They aren’t selling online courses because they are good education. They are selling them for convenience.”
Indeed, when students are surveyed, they point to convenience as the most positive attribute of online instruction: You can tune in at any time, sandwiching courses around work and family duties. But faculty members question whether they’re good education, and with good reason. There just isn’t enough solid evidence to know.
That brings us back to the coronavirus, which has created a set of unprecedented natural experiments. For the first time, entire student bodies have been compelled to take all of their classes online. So we can examine how they perform in these courses compared to the face-to-face kind, without worrying about the bias of self-selection.
It might be hard to get good data if the online instruction only lasts a few weeks. But at institutions that have moved to online-only for the rest of the semester, we should be able to measure how much students learn in that medium compared to the face-to-face instruction they received earlier.
To be sure, the abrupt and rushed shift to a new format might not make these courses representative of online instruction as a whole. And we also have to remember that many faculty members will be teaching online for the first time, so they’ll probably be less skilled than professors who have more experience with the medium. But these are the kinds of problems that a good social scientist can solve.
Are we interested in solving them? Again, that’s the real question here. So far as I know, no college has committed to using this crisis to determine what our students actually learn when we teach them online.
And maybe we don’t want to know. If it turned out that students learned less online, as some recent research suggests, colleges would have a harder time justifying their enormous investments in the format. But if students showed more gains from online instruction, professors who teach face-to-face classes — like I do — might find their own jobs in peril.
Still, we owe it to our students — and to ourselves — to find out. Refusing to do so isn’t just a lost opportunity; it’s a violation of our most sacred trust. We are scholars, and our job is to know. Shame on us if we fall down on it.
