Should We Offer On Campus Students Online Self-Paced Courses As A Scheduling Option?

This post falls in the category - you can't fight city hall.

I am overwhelmed in teaching the one undergraduate class I have.  Part of that is me, where in the last year or two I've become a complete alte kaker, so am kvetchy much of the time.  Yet before the course started, I still had some idealism in me. I thought I could open the eyes of some of the students to change the ways they go about things and encourage them to think more deeply about what they are being taught, making introspection part and parcel of their regular process.  For the most part, that now appears to be a pipe-dream.  There are several factors I'm encountering with the students that are blocking this outcome.  The blocking is what I mean when I say you can't fight city hall.  If you take those factors as givens, and largely unchangeable, then you might ask a different question.  What can you do to make the lives students lead easier as they go about their coursework?  It's not as noble a goal as getting them to learn more deeply.  But it may be more realistic under the circumstances.  Let me give some background.

The class I teach is an upper level undergraduate course intended primarily for economics majors.  It's called The Economics of Organizations.  I do not require attendance in class.  And I allow students to submit their homework past the deadline and still get credit for it.  As one former student has said, I try to treat the students as adults.  It's their responsibility to perform that way. Many are seniors who are interviewing for jobs.  They expect/hope to get a position where they are treated as a working professional.  Yet the performance of many in my class is anything but professional.

The class has 38 students on the roster.  I would guess that no more than 10 of the students regularly come to class and get their work done on time.  With one notable exception, these students tend not to speak up in class.  Last week I polled those present on whether they'd register for this class if it were offered totally online.  In response, one of the quiet students who sits near the front responded that he would not take it.  For him, coming to class was important.  In behavioral economics terms, it is a nudge.  Coming to class gets him to take the schoolwork seriously.  Several of the other quiet students agreed with that.

There are 10 to 15 students who mostly come, but not always.  They try to keep up with the homework but sometimes get behind on it.  And then most of the rest of the students do not attend much at all.  Truthfully, I can't tell whether they are slower to do the homework.   Then there are two or three students who are still on the roster, but otherwise don't seem to be part of the class at all.

If the student learning was evident, the lack of attendance and being tardy with the homework wouldn't be that big a deal.  The thing is, however, students don't seem to be getting what I'm intending them to learn.  There's a variety of evidence to support this proposition.  The most recent one happened yesterday in class when we did a bargaining experiment to test what our textbook calls The Efficiency Principle - parties to a bargain will achieve an efficient outcome.  For about half the class, the experimental results supported what the textbook claimed.  But the other half either were irrational or didn't understand what they should have been doing in the experiment. My thesis is that there is a significant group of students where not understanding what is being taught is ongoing for them.  They go about their homework to get through it, but do not wrestle with the ideas at all in a way to internalize the ideas.

This is not a new thing for me.  Looking for the Excel workbooks I used to produce the experiment, I stumbled upon this video, which I made for the class back in 2016.  The first half of the video talks about the issue described in the previous paragraph, though the evidence it uses on which to base the conclusion is somewhat different.

If I set the bar in the class so that only students who did get it would pass, there would be a lot of flunks or a very high dropout rate.  That would be inconsistent with the other economics courses these students are taking. Given that, my idealistic aspiration is to encourage students on their own to try to clear the bar, but then not punish them grade-wise if they do not.  However, my course is but one of many that these students take.  Their patterns in doing homework and attending class are shaped by the overall environment they encounter.  So my encouragement has a very limited impact.

There is one more factor that bothers me.  I surveyed the students on this.  Among those who responded, the bulk said that if they miss class they use the class Website as a way to catch up (as distinct from asking a classmate about what happened in class).  But the intent in the course design now is for the class Website to supplement the in-class activity, not to replicate it.  So those who don't attend miss things.  As long as they can get through the homework, missing these things doesn't seem to bother them.  Just yesterday, a student who missed class unabashedly emailed me about the homework that is due tonight.  He was stuck on a particular problem.  Earlier in class, I gave students a tip so they wouldn't be stuck on that problem. Should I have to repeat that tip online?

Actually, each week I have a post about the homework and students are supposed to ask their questions about the homework there.  Indeed, there is quite a thread about doing this.  The thread demonstrates that many students don't have competence to work through the algebra and/or they don't understand the tutorial I had them do earlier in the semester about how to enter answers into the Excel so it will say they have the right answer if their formula is correct.   It is hard to teach economics on this level when students seem so uncomfortable with doing the math.   Getting back to that thread, students have to know it is there and they have to read through my responses, not just the panicky queries by the other students.  For students who aren't coming to class frequently, they probably missed these instructions about how to get help on the homework.

So, the title of this post is asking whether we should accommodate those students who aren't attending regularly nor getting their work in before the deadlines by making the class entirely online and self-paced for them.

My background with self-paced classes is limited.  Back in fall 1972, as a college freshman, I took multivariable calculus in self-paced mode.  The textbook was Thomas' Calculus and Analytic Geometry.  You could attend lectures given by George Brinton Thomas himself.  (I still remember his humorous explanation - it takes two hands to multiply matrices.)  Then you could go to a testing center at any time to take competency tests on the subject matter, six in all.  This space was staffed by upperclassmen, who would grade the test on the spot.  One of those I had to take a second time around.  Nevertheless, I recall finishing the last test about a month before the end of the semester, which allowed me to concentrate on other courses then.

The only other experience I have is in supporting Jerry Uhl, one of the founders of the Calculus and Mathematica approach on campus.  At the time they had already started to teach an online version of C&M , which was called NetMath.  Jerry's idea was to do a Netmath version of differential equations,  offer it only to students who had already dropped the on ground version, do this in the spring semester only, and if necessary give the students an incomplete grade, letting them finish up the course in the summer.  Jerry did this as one of the projects among The SCALE Efficiency Projects.  It seemed quite effective except for one serious caveat.  Most of the students taking differential equations were in Engineering.  When some of the administration in Engineering heard about this offering, they got upset.  They thought it was an unfair advantage for students to be able to get an incomplete.

That was 20 years ago.  I have no idea where current thinking on campus is on this matter of granting undergraduate students incompletes.  But I can report it now somewhat common for students to tell me they have to miss my class because they have a midterm in another class that day.  This makes sense because....?  If we acknowledged that students are over programmed, in general, and then episodically the stress levels amp up even more, as high stakes tests in courses take their toll, we need to find some way to release the pressure.  In that way of looking at things, granting incompletes makes sense.

There is still a different issue to confront.  I like to use Socratic Dialog in class, partly as a way to get students involved in the session, and partly because it models how people (should) think and I want to give students a method they should aspire to in their own thinking.  But economics students are mainly getting straight lecture in their other courses.  So that is what they are used to.   Micro-lectures can readily be delivered online.  I am reasonably proficient in producing them.  I already have micro-lecture content for some parts of the course.   Would students who aren't coming to class now watch online micro-lectures?

My guess is that if they could do the homework without watching, most would go that route.  That would parallel the current behavior that I'm seeing with those who skip class.  On the other hand, online viewing when and where the students wants to do that is clearly more convenient than going to class at a pre-scheduled time.  So on the fundamentals of this admittedly theoretical analysis, it could go either way.  Further, if we really considered the current reality on the ground, then we shouldn't be such purists in considering the student behavior we'd find acceptable.

In other words, online self-paced offerings for on ground students as an option should definitely be thought of as a second best solution. A first best solution would address the idealistic concerns I sketched at the beginning of this piece.  I do have some other posts with suggestions in the more idealistic vein, which of necessity would have to be implemented much earlier in the students' trajectory through their school years.  In the spring I wrote, A Summer Camp for Teaching College-Level Reading and Learning to Learn.   A few years earlier I wrote, The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution.  Each of these offers a fairly drastic solution for addressing the underlying issues. Yet these solutions seem so speculative and unrealistic that one should ask what can we do now that is do-able?  That's how my the idea in this post should be considered.