My Thoughts on Online Classes

I just dropped out of online college. I was going to a school that calls itself a university but was going for an associate’s degree. The associate’s degree is through a “college” subsidiary of the university. I consider this a glorified community college. The problem here is that the price per credit of the “college” is the same as the price per credit of the university. This doesn’t seem right at all. If community colleges did this, everyone would take their basic classes at the universities instead.

Monetary reasons weren’t the only reasons for dropping out, but they played a very large part in it. The online college I was attending had a class discussion forum with class discussions every other week. The instructor would interact with the students a bit during these discussions, but other than this interaction and grading papers, the instructors were not really involved in the learning process. I had to read my text “books” on my own, figure out how to do my assignments, and motivate myself to complete them and turn them in. If a student has a question about how to complete an assignment, they can submit the question in the class forums and hope the instructor reads it before the assignment is due. The instructors almost seemed put out by these questions. I can understand this though. These instructors are people with full time jobs who teach these online classes for supplemental income. Just trying to grade weekly assignments would be tough enough without having to answer questions.

The instructor for one of my last classes treated assignments like we were in graduate classes. Every assignment had to have a cover page, a reference page, and be written in APA format. They also had to include an introduction or abstract and a conclusion. I don’t think this instructor realized that we were taking classes toward an associate’s degree. Making sure each paper was written in the proper formats was more difficult than coming up with what to write. I did appreciate that this instructor actually seemed to read assignments and gave constructive feedback. The instructor for the other class did not put even close to as much effort into grading assignments. You could tell that this instructor had some preformatted feedback that was just copied and pasted into the grading forum. I received the exact same feedback on several assignments. My final assignment, worth 25% of my grade for the class, was graded and turned back into me within a day of turning it in. I was confused on this assignment and know that I made mistakes yet I got a perfect grade on it. Somehow I don’t think any time was actually spent looking at this assignment.

This brings me to the final point. Are online classes just buying credits and a grade or are students actually learning anything? Since students are basically teaching themselves and many of the instructors are just in it for a paycheck, I would argue that very little actual learning goes on. The only possible learning is what the students are teaching themselves. Do people actually expect to learn anything from online classes or are they just in it for the credits and/or degree? While looking at the forums about the pro’s and con’s of online learning, I noticed many people talking about how they just wanted a degree to further their careers. Perhaps this is the online point, the money. I enjoy learning and I’m sure there are others out there that do as well, but we are getting less common.