Canadian students in a lecture hall - not my students, but students nonetheless

Some of you might recall a little over a year ago when I wrote about how I was getting a little suspicious of the online learning environment and its influence on student achievement. In short, that blog entry talked about how I was unimpressed at the amount of classes that the online college I work for allowed their students to take at a single time. Further, I’ve been continually unimpressed by the inability for my online students to write in an academically acceptable manner or conform to basic academic formatting standards. Frankly, my students are not great writers nor do they give a damn about the required academic formats (APA, MLA, etc) when submitting their papers.

And still – as aggravating as those issues may be to an educator, believe it or not the focus of this article is something different! Today, my unnecessary complication is the with the attitudes of my online learners. To put it succinctly, these students don’t understand the first thing about the teacher/student relationship! Actually, there is a second annoyance that I’ve been encountering with my students which has to do with their inability to comprehend the nature of the online learning environment, but let me bitch about the teacher/student relationship first!

I’ve been continually amazed at how poorly prepared for the advanced learning environment some of my online learners are when my classes start. Now granted, I’m not talking about the entire class of students nor am I referring to even half of the class. However, at least 10% to 15% of each class that I teach is comprised of students who do not understand their role in the teacher/student relationship. Let me define that a little bit more…

I do not expect my students to be rote learners like we’re all stuck in the 1950’s or something. Instead, I expect my students to understand that they are not my customers – they are my students. This is a big topic of discussion in the higher education circles: whether the people who sit in the classrooms are customers/consumers or students. And, to my great disappointment, the trend is pushing more towards students being viewed as customers instead of seekers of knowledge or impassioned learners.

This is a big problem.

Defining a student as a consumer puts the student in a position to believe (incorrectly) that they can control the flow of work in the class (homework and weekly assignments) or the requirements for passing the class (grading metrics and evaluation rubrics). Why does this happen? Well, it happens for the same reason that, as a consumer, you can bitch and moan to your local auto mechanic and get your bill lowered. Namely… the customer is always right!

Exacerbating this problem is that this customer/teacher relationship just doesn’t work well in online learning (or higher education in general). In fact, it is the job of the college to tell these “customers” when they are dead wrong. At some point I hope to write a longer piece on this blog about how creating the customer vs. student scenario has led to the painful destruction of what should be a great American academic system. For now, though, my focus is on how some of my students believe that they can dictate my grading schedule. It’s outrageous! I had a student e-mail me two weeks before the class ended to tell me that he expected his final grade to be completed within 12 hours of his final paper being submitted (which was due the following weekend) because he needed to report his grade to the company that funds his education. After laughing out loud, I e-mailed the student back and explained that there is a ten day period between when the final student work is submitted and the final grades are due and that he should expect to see his final grade at some point towards the end of that ten day period.

He began e-mailing me every single day about his final grade. The student started contacting me one day prior to the class ending through the middle of the ten day period, which was when I had completed my final grading and submitted his grade for posting. Luckily, the online university was on my side in this debacle because – believe it or not – the student had been contacting the university daily, too!

For the last course that I taught, I had five or six of these unnecessary student complications. Again, all of this stems from the idea that the student is a customer and not a person being evaluated for his or her academic capabilities.

To finish up, the other item that annoys me about the online learning environment is the lack of online learners to understand how this arrangement is supposed to work. The best example that I can give is the students themselves – these are good people who, for one reason or another, could not attend college during the traditional time in one’s life where they would attend college (right after high school or a few years after high school ended). Maybe they started a family, maybe they took over the family business, maybe they had a job in the trades and are only now going back to get a degree – whatever the case, these folks are typically hard-working, already employed people on crazy schedules.

And I totally respect that fact. In fact, I encourage more people who are not of the traditional college age to seek out methods to procure college degrees.

What shocks me, though, is that these online learners don’t take a minute to do the least bit of research on the people who teach their classes because if they did – surprise, surprise – they’d find out that their professors are in the same boat! We’re typically teaching at two or three universities and, in my case, I’ve got a variety of jobs and volunteer positions that take up all of my time. In other words, when I have a “customer” student complaining that they want their grade to be submitted first and ten days earlier than the rest of the class, it makes me want to punch the wall. There’s an arrogance – an ignorance of reality – in that request. There’s a certain, “I’m in charge and I’m paying you for my degree so fork over what I want, when I want it – NOW!” in that type of request.

It’s unacceptable and I hope that my fellow online teachers are approaching these problems the same way that I do – with the knowledge that we have an obligation to uphold the academic standards of our institutions and thus we need to be sure that the teacher/student relationship as well as the teaching environment are both preserved and respected.

But the point of this entry is that I’m beginning to grow suspicious of this all-online university setting and I’ll tell you why…

A few months ago I popped into an online discussion board populated by professors from this all-online university. Among the many interesting and engaging discussions was the poor writing quality of the student population, in general. This was a problem that I noticed in my classes, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it because of the demographic composition of my students. They’re mostly older students that ended their education during or immediately after high school and then entered the working world. Then ten, twenty, thirty, and even forty and fifty years later they decide that they want to get a Bachelor’s Degree and enroll in the all-online university where I teach some classes. With that type of background, the class instructor (me) needs to be able to process and ultimately comprehend a different writing style.

I’m fine with that – believe me.

But reading through these discussions (and the one cited above, particularly) led me to start thinking about what type of student was actually enrolling in this school. However, as with most “deep thoughts” that I’ve had recently, I put it aside and worried about the work at hand that I needed to complete before whatever deadline hit. Most of you know how it is with deadlines.

But then I began teaching another section of my course and within two weeks of the class starting, half of the students were not responding to e-mails or participating in the online discussions. When you’re enrolled in an all-online university, you must participate in the online discussions – it’s how you’re graded for goodness sake! Like any educator would be, this lack of engagement made me pretty concerned. I tried contacting each of the students that chose not to participate in any of the assignments and I received three responses. Two of the students said that they planned on completing all of the work, but they were a little busy at the moment and to stay tuned because they would submit all of their work on-time. I didn’t hear from them again until, well, read on. The third student, however, was a real eye-opener for me. The third student told me that she was enrolled in 54 credits through December.

Repeat: FIFTY-FOUR CREDITS THROUGH DECEMBER!

Folks, that is absolutely obscene. For this all-online university to allow a student to register for 18 classes in a five month period is disgusting. For comparison’s sake, in a bricks-and-mortar college semester (which is about three and a half months) the typical student takes between 4 and 6 classes. And those students who opt to take 6 classes during the semester know that they are getting themselves ready for an extremely busy three and a half months! Yet, the all-online university where I teach some classes allowed a student to take three times the amount of classes that a traditional university would allow.

That’s ridiculous and the all-online university should be ashamed of itself.

I advised the student to drop my class since it was not feasible for her to submit the required information in an appropriate timeframe. She agreed and dropped the class and actually thanked me for giving her such good, sound advice. Look, I should probably be advising students to stay in my classes because then I get paid more, but I couldn’t do that to the student. It’s just not right.

That was about six weeks ago when the class was just getting started. Now let’s fast-forward to last week when the class ended. Guess who I heard from all of a sudden? That’s right – I heard from those two students who told me that they would have everything submitted on time. Since they didn’t complete all of the required work during the required timeframes (or even the grace periods), they scored a “0” on each item which led them both to fail the class miserably. However, two days before the class was scheduled to end (I’m not exaggerating, it was two days prior to the class ending) they contacted me, separately, and asked if they could submit all of the past due material.

My mind when I read those e-mails: “Really? Really? You didn’t have time to do the required work during the two months that the class was in session, but now you’re going to do two months worth of work in two days? Really? Do I really have a sign on my virtual forehead that says, ‘Moron!’? Really? You’d have been kicked out of the course already in a bricks-and-mortar university.”

However, one of the tenets of this all-online university is that we cater to our students’ professional lives and personal needs. So I had no choice but to tell these students that I would accept their late work and grade it, replacing their “0” grades with whatever they earned. But I have to tell you this – the work they submitted was rushed and really poorly done. They didn’t score well at all and, in truth, they should have been removed from the course as soon as they didn’t submit the required work on time (or a day or two late).

So this latest experience mixed with the generally mediocre-at-best writing skills of my students has me growing more suspicious of this all-online university stuff. I’m not sure where this is going to put me at this particular institute of higher education as I continue to build and expand my professional teaching resume, but at this point – I’m very concerned about my students and whether or not they are capable of the type of quality that the job market expects from a Bachelor’s Degree holder.

This fall (and for the first time since I’ve been teaching) I was scheduled to teach Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights for about an hour and fifteen minutes each night. Typically, I teach only Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday so this arrangement was new for me and definitely more of a challenge. However, at the last minute (late last week) my classes were rearranged and it turns out that instead of teaching each night of the week I’ll probably only wind up teaching on Tuesday and Friday mornings. This, of course, is a big change for me.

In order for me to be even able to teach the morning class I had to get approval from my job (which both my direct supervisor and the President of the company approved enthusiastically – they love that I teach). So once that was taken care of, I had to think about my schedule for the coming semester and I think that this could work out very well. You see, to date the university has only canceled my Monday / Wednesday class which means that there’s still a chance that I’ll be teaching on Tuesday / Thursday nights. I’m fine with that since the Tuesday / Thursday night class starts at 6:00pm and I’ll be home by 7:45pm each night (if not slightly earlier). That’s fine with me! Plus, I was thinking that what I might do is schedule myself to have meetings with clients for my day job on Tuesdays in the late morning and early afternoon. That way I can avoid traveling from West Long Branch to Trenton and then back to West Long Branch at night, you know? At least if I have meetings during the day, I can schedule them within a reasonable distance of Monmouth County and not drive myself crazy driving all over God’s Creation.

Anyway, that’s what the face-to-face teaching schedule is looking like for the coming semester. In addition to that, I might be teaching another few sections of online courses for the state’s online college. One way or another, I’ll certainly be pretty busy in the coming months…