Lately, on college campuses across the nation a new trend has been emerging, increasing the amount of course material online. Indeed, many colleges are now completely online, allowing people to earn their bachelor degrees from the comfort of their own home. A simple internet search can yield thousands of these online university websites, some promising you a degree in legal studies and the like, while others boast such sketchy offers as allowing you to receive a PhD in psychology within five years.
Regardless of these universities, the internet trend has not only spread to, but has rapidly been growing here at the University of Wisconsin for the past few years now. Not only do courses offer notes, worksheets and study guides online, but some offer sound and video recordings of lectures, and others are completely online with no classroom lecture aspect at all. While the posting of notes, study guides and other materials online can be extremely beneficial to students, streaming videos and audio recordings of lectures are detrimental to the academic and social aspects that make collegiate life so enriching. The online teaching medium should be discontinued by the University of Wisconsin.
A recent study by the UW E-Business Institute surveyed roughly 30,000 UW-Madison students asking for their opinions on online lecture recordings that would accompany actual class lectures. Over 7,000 replied to the e-mail survey, with an overwhelming percentage (82 percent) indicating that they would prefer courses with lecture material online, and a considerable amount (60 percent) saying that they would even be willing to pay for such online material.
While this kind of recorded lecture content would be beneficial to students who miss class, or in preparation for exams, the availability of this material online encourages students to skip class. Although some students are willing to only use the online lecture material as a side resource, many more will undoubtedly use the course content on the internet as their primary source of learning. This is basically taking a course with only online material.
Courses with content only available on the web are, arguably, effective. According to a study from the Journal of General Internal Medicine from July 2002, medical school students who received only online lectures were able to perform basic diagnostic procedures just as well as those who received actual lectures. However, these classes lose much of the social aspects of actual lectures. It is much harder to meet fellow students online as compared to sitting next to them in a classroom.
Without these interactions, students must rely more heavily on their individual skills to complete assignments and study for exams, whereas forming study groups and getting together with fellow students is much easier in an actual classroom setting. Although a select few may be able to perform exceedingly well without any help from others, almost all of us learn better when working in a group, and these kinds of interactions are just easier to accomplish in a classroom.
In addition to the lack of social networking amongst fellow students, online courses also offer other downsides. With online material, while you may learn and understand it, it is much more difficult to become personally vested in it. Online lectures are much more impersonal than actually going to a lecture hall and listening to a professor. Sure, some of our professors can be a tad monotonous and dry, but it is near impossible to connect to the material on a personal level if you are only watching a video streaming onto your computer from the internet.
A lot of the experiences you can only witness in an actual lecture hall are what make college the enriching journey that it is. While these streaming lecture videos may be useful if you miss a class, that's what online lecture notes and study guides are for. Plus, with only lecture notes and other supplemental course materials posted online, students are much less tempted to constantly skip classes, preventing their classes from becoming impersonal, antisocial online courses.
UW-Madison lecturers should avoid posting such video and audio recordings online to stop this internet trend from destroying the social and academic experiences students can only gain by attending an actual lecture.
Ryan Dashek is a junior majoring in biology. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
