Lessons from a Semester of Forced Online Teaching
By Ravi Rao, former Master Inventor IBM*
This month, May 2020, marks the end of the largest exercise in online learning in the U.S., India, and the rest of the world. Due to the .spread of COVID-19 , the gears of education, at least in most colleges and universities, kept grinding onward with new formats for courses, teaching, homework, student-teacher meetings and office hours, testing and grading being developed by teachers, many with little or no online technical skills. In turn, students took courses and those graduating took part in numerous virtual commencements, including one last night with former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, while receiving their degrees via postal mail.
Some critics, who earlier mocked online learning or said it couldn’t work, now see its value. However, the criticism, especially about online education in institutions serving poor and low-income students, is valid. Many less-affluent households do not have laptops or computers and internet connections to even access the digital courses and tools. In some cases, a household has what is needed, but the technology has to be shared among several family members – thereby reducing a student’s frequency of access.
Learning to swim by being thrown into the pool
Faculty and students can be proud about what was achieved, especially since the move from brick and mortar to virtual schooling was unanticipated and abrupt. Like it or not, everyone in academia was forced to adapt - students, teachers and administrators. The key accomplishment is the speed at which the transformation took place, overnight one morning in March after the lockdowns arising from the spread of COVID-19. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
As one teaching computer science in the U.S., I too was forced to switch to online teaching. The boring part of the story, at least for me, is that it is an incremental shift to an old tradition of self-learning. While immersed in trying to figure out what to teach and how to teach online, I began reflecting on how I benefited from taking a correspondence course, an earlier version of distance learning. In fact, using that tool enabled me to get access to a world-class education.
Using postal mail to prepare for the IIT exam
In 1978, as a sixteen-year-old living with my parents in Pune, India, I sent a money order for Rs. 500 (about $60) to Agarwal Classes, in Mumbai, to enroll in their correspondence course which helped prepare for the entrance exam for admission to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT.) I was fascinated by science and technology since childhood, as my father was a scientist at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune. I completed several science projects in high school, including building a radio by soldering components together. The IITs are the top engineering schools in India, with a global reputation, and so like millions of Indian high school students, I aspired to study there.
The selection exams for the IITs continue to be the most competitive in the world, with admittance rates of less than one percent. I had about a year to prepare for the exam. Ten days after I mailed the money order, I got a large package through the mail service. It contained seven hundred pages of summaries of topics in math, physics, and chemistry, all of which are assessed by the exam. Agarwal’s teaching methods were similar to the test preparation courses now offered online by Kaplan in the U.S. and Byju’s in India.
Failed early practice exams but persevered
I was already familiar with most of the topics covered in the notes since I had studied math and science at Loyola High School, a Jesuit institution in Pune. Each day I spent four to eight hours studying the notes, which were concise, logically presented, and filled with lots of practice problems similar to those on the exam.
The IIT entrance examination consisted of three examinations, each three hours long in math, physics, and chemistry. There were no-multiple choice questions. Instead, you had to figure out how to solve a few extremely challenging problems. A good analogy would be the type of problems found in a Math Olympiad contest. So, it was important to have a good grasp of the topics and be familiar with various question types to be able to answer them quickly. Writing down the correct answers to almost all the questions was the key to passing the exam. Hence, as part of the course, I took self-timed practice tests and mailed the answers to Agarwal. They would grade my answers and send their grades and comments back to me. The turnaround time was about a fortnight, and I would eagerly wait for the female postal worker who went around on a bicycle delivering mail.
I was disheartened by the results from the early tests since it showed I was weak in mathematics. My mother would look at me, tell me to eat the dosas and sambar and then go out and play cricket with the other kids in the neighborhood. When I got back from the game, and after I showered, my mother would gently say “you should figure out what you are doing wrong and resume studying for the tests.” Though my father was always available to help me, I preferred to figure problems out on my own or discuss them with a few study buddies.
Eager to climb the Mount Everest of engineering
In 1979, after passing the entrance exam, I was admitted for a degree in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur. I was excited when I got to the roughly 1,000-acre campus but also realized a lot of hard work remained ahead. The IIT degree, in turn, enabled me to get into a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which opened the doors to a 25-year career at IBM Research in the U.S., in the area of artificial intelligence.
In the late 1970’s, we had no telephone at home. The personal computer would not be available to consumers for another five years. Like me, several of my fellow IIT classmates had prepared for the entrance exam through self-study. Some of my high school friends also got degrees in social sciences, offered by universities through correspondence courses. There were also students who enrolled but gave up along the way. The correspondence system worked, at least for me, for three main reasons. Good teaching material, a motivated student, and a standardized test with a fair selection process.
Unable to gauge student interest
Since online learning cannot compete with in-class learning, it is futile to bemoan the differences. As teachers, we must accept that online learning will likely be an integral part of all education in the future, even after a vaccine puts the threat of COVID-19 behind us. So, while we explore and embrace new digital education solutions, we will face challenges and may also discover pleasant surprises.
For example, I was surprised to find that my students in online courses had near-perfect and on-time attendance and submitted shorter assignments by the deadlines, unlike when classes were held on campus. Perhaps this was because they had more time, since they did not have to commute to the campus. They may also have felt an urgency to keep pace with the work in each online class for fear of falling behind.
However, students were reluctant to speak or be seen on video. This may have been because many of them were likely in shared living spaces. Some of them may have been multi-tasking, doing something else while I was lecturing on their video screens. Even if they could be seen on video, I found it difficult to gauge which of them were following what I was saying and which were not.
Lab work and fair student assessments
Many students used the chat box link to communicate. Since I have to stop teaching to read the messages, it slows down the class significantly, especially in mathematics and computer programming. For courses requiring laboratory work, online learning can work if the equipment required is simple, portable and cheap so students can complete the lab work in their homes.
Overall, lab-oriented courses like engineering, medicine, and the hard sciences, suffer the most since there is as yet no substitute for expensive, heavy equipment and safety standards. But if necessary, and COVID-19 persists, such work could be done in a campus laboratory with strict social distancing rules in place.
Another challenge is conducting fair assessments of students. Since the submitted work is done from home, it is not clear whether it was done by the student or by somebody else. This is a big problem with no easy solutions. Conducting oral examinations is a work-around, but difficult to implement when the class sizes are large.
Skills testing by employers will likely increase
This brings me to the most important question: What did the student learn, and who decides? Last semester universities were reportedly very generous, with many offering pass/fail options. So, everyone can declare success, feel happy, and pat themselves on the back. But what happens in the job market for those who graduate?
It is very likely that companies will adjust by tightening their hiring standards and vetting candidates more extensively. Already Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other big companies are requiring potential recruits to take tests in order to assess their technical skills. Expect more employers to develop their own tests to rigorously screen for new hires. Also credentialing by professional organizations and industry certificate courses will rise in importance since they provide standardized tests to evaluate candidates.
Importance of a good education foundation
The other issue I began pondering, after the recently concluded online semester, was why are we unable to widely replicate the success that some of my IIT friends and I had with correspondence courses? After all we live in the internet age, with blazingly fast content delivery, video screens, real-time interaction, and easy access to the knowledge of the world through portals like digital libraries.
The answer perhaps lies in a simple issue: the education foundation of a student. Education is a sequential process with your understanding of the material at a given grade level influencing your subsequent understanding. Unless both parties – teachers and students – are brutally honest about putting in the time and effort required to build a good foundation, a student’s potential education will be unstable and collapse when faced with even a small amount of stress. This was the case with students who dropped out of the correspondence courses in the 1970s and 1980s and is also the key factor that explains why students do not finish their high school and college education, assuming they have the financial resources to do so.
In my case, I was fortunate to have excellent middle school and high school teachers who pushed me to first learn the foundational materials thoroughly and only later try to expand my knowledge. As a teacher, I now realize that the correspondence courses I studied helped me pass the IIT entrance exam, only because I knew the required basics in math, physics and chemistry.
Online education can help low ranked schools
This simple observation explains the big divide in higher education in the US, India, and other parts of the world. The top ranked universities take in students with strong foundations in content and build upon that. The middle tier and lower ranked universities take in students with varying foundations and so produce mixed results. Some students can adapt to rigorous university curricula after going through remedial courses, whereas others cannot.
In academic terms, the top 10% of the universities have and will always do well. They don’t need any reform. It is the middle and lower tier universities that need more attention. This is also where the biggest difference can be made to the largest segment of the population. The recent online education explosion is offering new insights on how it can help both widen access and improve the quality of much of education in the U.S., India and other countries.
Free, top quality courses online
Now that all students have been forced to adapt to online learning, some of them will figure out that there is a wide range of courses that provide both foundational and advanced skills. They include Khan Academy, backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, which provides free, high-quality self-learning modules and practice tests in math, science, history and English grammar, from kindergarten to early college.
In the U.S. in 2017, about 3.1 million students, that is 16% of those enrolled in a college, were pursuing degrees exclusively online. Post COVID-19 demand for online high school, college and post-graduate degrees will rise rapidly since students are now used to studying online, the cheap price will be more appealing given the 20% plus unemployment rate and since many more reputed institutions are offering them. In the U.S., the total cost of online college and master’s degrees is about half that of on-campus programs, after deducting costs for campus housing and food and including discounts offered for online classes. Already nearly 400 accredited colleges offer a wide range of online degrees, including nursing. Ohio State University, Columbus, and the University of Illinois, Chicago, are among the top three, according to a ranking by The US News & World Report. Online Masters degrees at Purdue University in Indiana, including in engineering, are ranked among the best, offering both good value and high quality.
Parents, and maybe college counselors, will help students select a college. It is important that the parameters include foundational competence, the rigor of the online curriculum, the reputation of the offering institution, the cost, the ability of the student to graduate based on the standards of the institution, and the market acceptance of the skills imparted through online learning.
The spurt in online education is also giving a boost to EdX, Coursera and other platforms. They were set up by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to offer cheaper courses and degrees, as an alternative to paying $70,000 or more in annual fees and other costs to attend a college. These enterprises achieved limited, if any, success as businesses.
However, they created an enormous treasure for the world—hundreds of free courses, taught by engaging academicians and researchers, some of which attract millions of students. These courses were produced with far more thought and care than the hastily assembled material of the past semester. Students can significantly improve their knowledge by instantly accessing and studying these courses. Also, they don’t have to wait two weeks for a postal service employee to show up on a bicycle with the results of their practice tests, like I did 42 years ago.
*Ravi Rao, a former Master Inventor at IBM with 29 patents, is an author or co-author of four books on computer science. He is a full-time faculty member at Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey.
The author thanks Mary Leer for her input on this article. The author has no existing relationships or financial interests with the institutions mentioned.