Can we stop assuming that in-person learning is “better”?
A young person in my life (let’s call them Jamie, for the sake of anonymity) is currently dealing with a challenging situation in one of their courses. According to Jamie, their instructor is providing little to no direct instruction, providing little to no guidance about what to study, and students are mostly left to figure out what to do one their own using only the course textbook. Not much is posted within the learning management system (LMS), and there are no links to additional resources (or even course notes) to help students out. The students are regularly given high-stakes quizzes/tests with no preparation other than what they can manage to teach themselves, and no opportunities to re-take a test or do something that demonstrates that they’re learning from their mistakes. If they bomb a quiz/test, their mark drops substantially. Too bad, so sad . . . and the course carries on.
“Well, that’s a really poorly designed/delivered online course,” you might say. And, you’d be absolutely right about it being poorly done, but absolutely wrong about it being online. Jamie’s course is being delivered fully in person with no technology integration other than the sporadic use of the LMS.
In-person courses can be terrible, but we tend to attribute the terribleness to specific factors.
I’ve often said that if a person (like Jamie) has a poor in-person learning experience, they tend to attribute the negative experience to specific factors like instructor competencies or curriculum design. But, if someone has a poor online learning experience, they tend to blame the modality as a whole.
Both online and in-person courses have the potential to be terrible. They both also have the potential to be fantastic.
In-person learning is not inherently better than online, nor is online better than in person.
Better quality is better. A course with better instruction, better pedagogical design, better communication, and better assessment will always be a better experience for students, regardless of modality.
Online resources can also make a bad in-person experience better.
Going back to Jamie, what can they do to improve their situation? They can improve the quality of their learning experience by using online resources to fill in the gaps.
The fact of the matter is that Jamie is unable to switch instructors and needs this course as a prerequisite to continue on down their academic path (they need to get a passing grade to be able to take the courses they need to take next semester). One can hope that Jamie’s instructor will have a life-altering visit by a trio of ghosts overnight, or have some sort of other “come to Jesus” moment; however, it’s much more likely that the instructor will simply remain set in their ways and there will be no change. It sucks, but what the instructor chooses to do (or not do) is outside of Jamie’s control.
The good news? Thanks to the Internet and wonderful humans who have created videos and apps to teach almost everything imaginable, there is a wealth of student-friendly online resources out there to support learners in exactly this sort of situation. Is a patchwork compilation of videos and apps as good as a well-designed, well-taught course? Obviously not. But, compiled online resources are helpful nonetheless and certainly a better alternative to the non-existent resources that Jamie is getting from their instructor.
Using Jamie’s course textbook and ridiculously sparse course outline, I found a wealth of online instructional videos and practice activities on the concepts covered in the course for little to no cost. I recommended a couple of subject-matter-specific apps and also suggested that Jamie ask GenAI for help when stuck.
From Jamie’s perspective, their instructor has now been reduced to a test invigilator, which is really all that they were doing in the first place. Jamie, on the other hand, feels empowered and has the resources to access the instruction they need, whenever they need it. Essentially, Jamie has switched to a primarily online learning experience within an in-person course. Jamie updated me that they felt more confident and better prepared during their most recent test.
Turns out that a mediocre, slapped-together-in-a-weekend-by-me online learning experience can be substantially better than a sub-par in-person alternative. Go figure.
So where I am going with my ramblings here?
I acknowledge that this is a bit of a rambling post and my objective isn’t to rant about Jamie’s instructor (despite my empathy for Jamie’s situation and my frustration that our educational system still includes instructors who seem to care very little about good teaching practices).
I think this post really stems from my mental exhaustion after years of explaining that there is no evidence to support the general notion that in-person learning is somehow superior to online learning. An on-campus experience, where students and instructors are in close physical proximity to one another does not automatically result an engaging or fruitful learning experience. Jamie can attest to that!
Jamie’s story is not unique by any stretch of the imagination and, to me, it provides a good illustration of how the quality of a learning experience is unrelated to modality. There are great quality rubrics and frameworks out there, and this post will go on waaaay too long if I start getting into the nitty-gritty details of quality assessment. Simply put, the quality of a course can be roughly assessed by examining the basic things that can make a course awesome or awful:
The instructor’s ability to explain the concepts.
How the activities within the course are structured and designed (including opportunities for interaction and social learning) to maximize student success.
The nature of assessments and how well they measure the learning objectives.
How well instructional activities, assessments, and expectations are communicated to students.
It’s mostly common sense stuff and nothing that’s exclusive to any particular modality, which leads me to ask: When will people finally stop assuming that in-person learning is better?!
Nicole
(P.S. A big thanks to Jamie who gave me their permission to share their story in this post.)
Want to chat further? Feel free to reach out to me anytime, and we’ll connect.
The random photo I’ve chosen to accompany this post:
A picture of me in my early days in the field of education (fun fact: I started my career teaching sixth grade in the early 2000s). Learning how to keep a room full of middle schoolers interested and on task was one of the most valuable and rewarding experiences I’ve had. If you can do that, you can do pretty much anything! Also, if there are any areas where you need to improve as a teacher, eleven-year-olds will most definitely let you know and they will not be subtle about it.
