The Problems With Online Math Classes

dcollins writes "As a college instructor specializing in statistics, I felt compelled to survey one of the massive-enrollment online education courses that are all the rage these days. This summer, it seemed a perfect opportunity when Udacity unveiled Introduction to Statistics by founder Sebastian Thrun (of Google autonomous car fame). Having taken the entire course through to the final exam, my overall assessment is: It's amazingly, shockingly awful. Some nights I got seriously depressed at the notion that this might be standard fare for college lectures encountered by many students during their academic careers. I've tried to pick out the Top 10 problems with the course structure and address them in detail."

I had the exact opposite experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I've taken both online and classroom survey-level math courses at my local technical college and have to say I would much prefer the online courses. Most of the instructors for the classroom courses basically just go through the problems in the book anyway, and don't contribute nearly as much as they think they do to the actual learning (I can read the book just fine myself, thanks). And the online courses not only save me on gas, but they're also a helluva lot more convenient. You can basically take the unit tests anytime before the deadline, meaning you can finish the course early if you put in the effort. Now those were survey-level courses. And your mileage may vary with more advanced courses. But my experience was generally positive.

Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course. Once an online course is in place, it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention. So I seriously doubt they're paid as much to supervise an online course as they would be to teach a traditional classroom course. What's more, there is also a matter of ego involved. Most of the instructors I've had love the idea that you are forced to come listen to them twice a week, and blanch at the idea that any course could be effective without their brilliant classroom contribution. It's funny how they don't notice that half of the students in the class are asleep or zoned-out through their "brilliant" lectures, and the other half are bored out of their minds (the students like me who can learn just fine without having you read to us from the book).

So I would personally be very wary of any evaluation of online courses from a professor or instructor. Keep in mind this is a guy with horse in the race, and a lot of reasons to hate online courses that have nothing to do with their effectiveness.

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[garcia]

I've taken both online and classroom survey-level math courses at my local technical college and have to say I would much prefer the online courses.

These aren't just online courses the article is talking about here, it's massive online courses, a completely different animal IMO.

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[stoolpigeon]

I agree with the cautions on trusting an instructor, yet at the same time a student is not a good judge either. If I am learning something for the first time, how am I to know that what I've been taught is good until I have a chance to put it to use?

He backs up his arguments with actual examples and provides a foundation for rational discourse about the class he took. I don't think one could ask for much more.

That said, all this proves in general, is that if all his arguments are valid then it is possible to have a terrible course on-line just like in the traditional classroom. And his worries at the end about the value of having finished the class really misses the point of free on-line education.

One bad course

[Hatta]

Sounds like the author took one bad course, and is blaming online classes for his bad experience. Any of these complaints could apply easily to a poorly instructed statistics class at your local community college.

Teaching Is a Two Way Communication Channel

[eldavojohn]

Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course.

How is an online course any different that a textbook? To me it has some benefits over a text book like you don't have to read as much, you can just listen. I like to be able to flip back and forth or scan chapters in a textbook -- that's a bit harder in a video lecture. So why aren't instructors and professors calling for the ban of textbooks and criticizing them? Why don't they lynch each other when one writes a really good textbook?

Once an online course is in place, it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention.

Listen, man, I'm glad this worked for you. But it's a one way communication channel. The way you say "it doesn't require much in the way of instructor intervention" is pretty indicative that you think teaching is someone shouting at you with your mouth taped shut and your eyes pried open. You should maybe read the article before saying the critique is biased, he talks about what I'm mentioning:

Throughout the course, lectures and exercises veer rapidly between utterly trivial and nigh-impossible. I think this is a reflection of the one-way communication channel, such that Thrun can't have any awareness of what counts as easy and what counts as hard to the students.

Yet you say:

Most of the instructors I've had love the idea that you are forced to come listen to them twice a week, and blanch at the idea that any course could be effective without their brilliant classroom contribution.

I'm pretty sure that's in your best interest. If you're one of the gifted students that hasn't ever needed a professor's help then congratulations but you're not the normal student. If what you're saying is true, the government would only need to dispatch sets of textbooks to each home and stop paying tons of money on public education altogether. But what you're saying isn't true ... anyone with an education given to them by several other humans will know that.

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[Culture20]

I teach at a university. I make the same for an online class as I make for one that is classroom based.

But once the lecture is recorded, the administration can hire anyone (even grad students) to teach (TA) the course. You're extraneous until they need an updated recording. Of course researchers would love that...

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[liquiddark]

He's made a lot of cogent points about the course he took. Maybe you should respond to those instead of resorting to character assassination. Instructors who actually care about the classroom are the right people to judge course material. Students have too many other concerns to evaluate objectively.

Awful perhaps but compared to what?

[cornicefire]

I've had math professors who could barely speak English because they were foreign countries. And the ones raised speaking English still had trouble communicating. It's a difficult subject and there are often big disagreements over the best way to present the material. Some think you should start from a high-level theory and work your way down. Others think you should start with basic examples and eventually get to the theory. Naturally, I've found that professors in one camp think those in the other camp are "bad". This guy just sounds like a tenured member of the college industrial complex who is deathly afraid that people will stop subsidizing his way of life. I wouldn't be surprised to find that 90% of the people taking college calculus don't need the material and never use it again. Math departments are kept afloat with distribution requirements. There's a lot of money at stake. If these big online courses catch on, the professoriate will be out on the street. Of course they're going to hate it.

Re:Misleading title?

[Ambassador Kosh]

Try to get natural feedback or face-to-face communication with an instructor in a class of 400 students which is pretty common now. For intro classes in any sciences this is no different than what students already have.

Smaller classes can definitely be better (they can also be spectacularly worse) but for the large lecture classes you have for intro physics, chemistry, biology, math through calc 1, calc 2, calc 3 and diff eq the online classes are really no worse.

Come on...

[wbr1]

The guy is in 'statistics', a sample size of one is all he needs.
Especially when his career is at stake!

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[NEDHead]

Not even remotely true. My wife is a professor at a community college, and if anything her on-line courses take as much or more of her time than the same course taught traditionally. Additionally, each time she re-teaches on-line course she spends considerable time revising and improving the content to reflect her learning curve.

The OA's plaint is doubtless valid, but does not really contradict the potential of the approach. The real goal is not some free part time implementation of a bad stats course, it is the hope for wider distribution of the really great ones.

Oh good grief

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Take a "World History 101" course at any large university, in a huge lecture hall with 350 of your closest friends, delivered by uninterested, overworked grad student TAs.

This just in: most undergrad education is overpriced, and low quality.

Excerpts from the article

[AdamHaun]

The overwhelming majority of the article is specific criticisms about Udacity Statistics 101, not a general criticism of online math classes. The specific criticisms seem valid to me -- I didn't take Thrun's stats class, but I did take the AI class, which had the same issues. I urge anyone who's interested in online learning to read the full article since anyone could make any of these mistakes very easily.

Here are the bits from the end of the article that talk about online learning in general:

So in theory, any of the problems that I've noted above could be revisited and fixed on future pass-throughs of the course. But will that happen at Udacity, or any other massive online academic program? I strongly suspect not – likely, the entire attraction for someone like Thrun (and the business case for institutions like his) is to be able to record basic lectures once and then never have to revisit them again. Or in other words: All the millions of students using these ventures will be permanently experiencing the shaky, version-1.0 trial run of a new course, when the instructor is him- or herself just barely figuring out how to teach it for the first time, and without the benefit of two-way feedback or any refinements.

Based on my review of the Udacity Introduction to Statistics course, I see some compelling strategic advantages for live in-class teachers, that will not be soon washed away by massive online video learning. Chief among them are the presence of actual two-way communication between teacher and students, such that the instructor can modify, expand, and respond to questions when appropriate (in regards to clarity of presentation, quiz questions, missing pieces, and rationalizing difficulty levels); and the ability to engage in a cycle of constant improvements and refinements every time the course is taught by a dedicated teacher. Also, I feel that written text is ultimately more useful than videos, being more elegant and precise, easier to search and index key terms and examples, suffering fewer technical problems, easier to update, and generally being truer to the form of mathematical written presentation in the first place. In addition to these, Thrun's lectures at Udacity have a stunning number of critical flaws (in regards to planning, sequencing, clarity, writing, and missing major topics) that leave me amazed if any actual intro-level student manages to make their way through the whole class.

Perhaps the upshot here is a restatement of the old saw: “You get what you pay for.” (Udacity being currently free, with a mission-statement to remain that way). Or else another: “Don't take a class from a world-famous researcher, because they don't really have time or interest for teaching.” Obviously, Sebastian Thrun is not just a teacher-by-online-video; he's also a Google Vice-President and Fellow, a Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, former director of the Stanford AI Laboratory, head of teams competing in DARPA challenges, and leads the development of Google's self-driving car program. How much time or focus would we expect him to have for a freshman-level introductory math course? (Not much; in one lecture he mentions that he's recording at 3AM and compares it to his “day job” at Google.) Some of these shortcomings may be overcome by a more dedicated teacher. But others seem endemic to the massive-online project as a whole, and I suspect that the industry as a whole will turn out to be an over-inflating bubble that bursts at some point, much like other internet sensations of the recent past.

My own summary would be "the current state of the art in online learning does not justify the hype, and probably won't for some time".

Not a job Threat

[Roger W Moore]

Of course, all the instructors and professors bad-mouth the online classes. Why? Because the online courses are a threat to their jobs, of course.

Online courses are not a job threat to faculty at research universities. We only spend a fraction of our time teaching and the rest on research and service. If online courses reduced our teaching load this would mean more time for research (which is a motivation for teaching online!). Opposition to online teaching primarily comes from the position that the quality and/or diversity of teaching will suffer. This is not an unreasonable concern.

Personally I am all in favour of online teaching but I think it is still in its infancy and we need better tools before jumping into wholesale online courses. For example a good solution for exams as well as labs needs to be found. My concern is that in the rush to go online important things like quality seem to have been forgotten. There is also the issue of interactivity. For higher level courses it is not enough to just present students with material for them to learn often complicated concepts e.g. Quantum Mechanics, require discussions with students to ensure that they understand. Yes, technically these can be done online but you loose the non-verbal communication and it is frequently the case that I will explain a concept to a student for them to say "yes I understand it now" while their body language indicates far less certainty. I can then either re-explain or test them by asking a question to see whether they really do.

Re:One bad course

[pesho]

Exactly! One could imagine that a professor teaching statistic would know better than to base conclusions on a limited data set (N=1).

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[Stumbles]

That's the sad thing of people who have never taught; once you create a lesson plan your good to go for eternity. Been there as an in-classroom instructor for the Air Force. Things are not as static as most people think.

exactly!

[batistuta]

Mod parent up, he's key on. I remember an issue with a professor in one of my C++ classes, which happened to include a large programming project. The project took about four weeks of intensive programming, and I was really proud of the quality of my code, comments, structure, etc. Only problem was that in one section we had to determine the actual type of an object using dynamic_cast after having received a base type object. We had like 10 derived objects and I've used copy paste to make life easier, but forgot to modify one entry with the appropriate type. That is, ONE word was wrong. My mistake failed in one of their tests (which I didn't have in advance), which cascaded four output missmatches. This ONE word cost me 40 points out of 100, ending up with a D for this project. One word, lots of effort. I've talked to the professor and his answer was a lame "if I fix your grade, I need to fix everyone's".

When I was a TA during grad school, I always looked at the work flow. If a student made a mistake in part (a) of a problem, I didn't simply give him zero points for parts (b) (c) and (d) that used it as a base. Instead, I've assumed that part (a) was right and looked at the process. It took me more time to grade, sure. But it is fair and if a teacher can't contribute with some human touch, let's just replace them with computers.

Re:Come on...

[serviscope_minor]

Seriously who mods this shit insightful every bloody time.

There is no big conspiracy of teachers wanting to make everything hard to maintain in iron grip on on some hypothesised education-industrial complex as one uninsightful poster named it above.

I'll let you on in a little secret about university lecturers. They generally fall on a spectum between two extremes.

1. Ones who really like research. Teaching gets in the way and anything which means they have to do less teaching (like someone else preparing online courses) is a serious bonus.

2. Teachers who like teaching (amzing that, really). Basically, they have a passion for the subject and letting others know about it. Anything which helps studenst get it is considered a bonus. Therefore good online courses are a real bonus because they bring more studenst to the world of their favourite subject.

But you know what, neither camp is in favour of por quality online courses. In the case of 1, that means fewer well educated students to act as future research monkeys. In the case of 2, the teacher will get sad at what passes for education and may well have to deal with the consequenes of confused students, or worse, students who have been put off and never cease to even be students.

Whenever education comes up, there seem to ca a carde of deeply cynical posters with a chip on their shoulder the size of Mt Rushmore who delight in wild education based conspircy theories and telling the world how they are so amazing that professors are unnecessary and they taught everything to themselves anyway and/or didn't even go to nuiversity but are amazingly super-awesome anyway and don't professors suck because they're in it for the money and want to keep the man down because professoring is such an amazingly lucrative career and they ave to hold onto it tight otherwise the money will become spread around or something.

It's crap.

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[cryptizard]

You have missed the point entirely. The chance that you will stumble upon the one True Lesson Plan the first time you write it is incredibly small. You will teach the class, note which things worked and which things didn't, revise your lesson and try again next semester ad infinitum.

Re:How much math do most people really need?

[cryptizard]

A bachelor's degree should be structured to enable the student to make more money upon graduation than someone without that degree (or at least enough additional money to cover their insanely high student loan payments). Do you really think that hiring manager considering you for a programming job cares if you took and passed a Sociology class which is so brain-dead easy as to have no value whatsoever?

You are right, we should all be cogs in a machine not people who try to understand the world around them. There is no profit in that. Best stick to our vain attempt to accumulate wealth rather than pursue things that can actually make us happy.

Re:Teaching Is a Two Way Communication Channel

[ByOhTek]

Actually, almost every lecture I've had with less than 150 people in it, and EVERY recitation I've had, the professors not only allowed, but encouraged students to ask questions. In one lecture (about 100 students), the professor wouldn't talk on a subject until the students started asking about it. He led the topic with the homework and assigned reading, but the lecture we 'directed' by the students so it could focus on what gave them the most difficulty. Knowledge of a subject, and being a good speaker, doesn't make one a good teacher. Knowledge of the subject is definitely important, but understanding how others think, and being aware of where they have difficulties, and spotting these difficulties, is much more important than speaking ability. If it weren't, we'd only need textbooks, and wouldn't bother with lectures, online or offline. And you can't correctly say offline courses are set up badly, as a general statement and more than you can say online classes are worthless. Every institution, even departments within the same institution, or lectures within the same department, is/are different.

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[SomePgmr]

Having taken a few of these free online courses, it would be better to let me decide if it's a small question that can wait for an (almost always poor) answer on a forum, or if I want to speak with a tutor right away.

So sell me a minutes pack. Say, $30 for 60 minutes (or some such). Then, if I'm really stuck on something that's important to the class and I need some help with it right away, I can do a Live Chat with a vetted tutor.

If they know the material, are familiar with that particular course, and can work in english, I'll have my question cleared up and be back on task in a couple minutes.

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[sapgau]

Please mod up +1
This is the whole point about online classes.
Students can pick the style that fits them for courses that cover EXACTLY the same topics.
Different teaching rhythms and speed will match the learning speed of different students.

A person should be involved when an expected minority finds challenges or is missing pre-requisites.

The rest is just politics & and inflamed egos.

Re:I had the exact opposite experience

[sasami]

Absolutely right. I have to correct this misconception regularly.

My lessons are never the same year to year because the students are never the same year to year. Sometimes the level of the class is higher or lower, but that's not where the greatest variation comes in. Instead, what you'll find is that this year's class will breeze through some topics that last year's class agonized over, and then utterly implode on topics that last year's class found easy. What's hard and what's easy varies constantly, almost randomly. It's mysterious, inevitable, exciting, and exhausting. Based on the peculiarities of each year's students, I spend as much time adjusting every lesson as I did preparing them originally. Sometimes, it even takes more time, if I have to restructure things in a way that affects many subsequent areas.