Editor’s note: Jakob Hollenbeck contributed to the creation of this column.
Our professor cuts his sentence short and puts down his syllabus. “You can read this online,” he says, sighing, “This situation is…not ideal.” Growing louder, he confesses that lecturing flies in the face of his teaching philosophy. We listen, entranced, as he explains that colleges treat us like empty bank vaults to be filled with an hour of dry lecturing. “That is not the way to learn,” he contests. And yet, for most of the class, he lectures. We don’t blame him; the trying circumstances call for a little hypocrisy.
You might think that we’re talking about our first online lecture. You’d be wrong. This was our first college class at the University of Oregon — two years ago. While the challenge used to be engaging 200-some students, today, professors must do the same but online. In both cases, the university resolves the challenge with lectures. Now, we still take notes as our teachers flip through slides. We read, take quizzes and write essays — all on our own. The parallels between our education then and now reveals that COVID-19 has changed everything. Except our education.
Our professor was right. Education is sick. The disease is the commodification of information. We demand universities educate the public but grant them limited public resources. The university, then, runs as a business that aims to output as many educated citizens given paltry inputs. The lecture optimizes the allocation of the university’s resource — information. By lecturing, a professor can “teach” as many students as the room can fit.
Online education even removes the space constraints. With enough exploited graduate students, these lectures can reach a near infinite student body. Professors even fear that recorded lectures could render them obsolete. When information is regarded as a commodity, online instruction becomes education’s inevitable telos.
Even before COVID-19, the University of Oregon hired a vice provost to revamp the University’s online course offerings.
This push for online education often starts with good intentions because it increases access to college, especially for the state’s vulnerable. Some colleges, like Texas A&M, have even moved popular major requirements online without offering an in-person alternative. The proponents of the change concede that online education pales in comparison to a thirty-person seminar, but given their need to educate tens of thousands of people, online education is the best of bad options.
Increasing access to information is unequivocally good. After all, neither of us is a stranger to a late-night Khan Academy binge. But shouldn’t universities offer something other than Khan’s dissemination of already-created knowledge? Today’s universities don’t think so. They would rather increase access to their education — no matter how bad it is.
Students want more, and the University of Oregon knows this. In April, administrators and faculty presented the board with nationwide evidence that students self-report to thinking critically with competency “somewhat often.” “Somewhat often” is how you want to describe your sex life at the age of 60, not a six-figure-priced education.
The university pays lip service to the problem but keeps the purse strings tight. They called for “improved pedagogy,” but their accreditation goals (where they actually put their money) paints a bleaker picture. They outlined three goals: “Improve student progress towards degree, increase faculty capacity to submit grant proposals, and contribute to the economic vitality of the state and region.” Two goals concern economic vitality. Their only monetary commitment to students is increasing the output of graduates — a valiant goal but one that does not change the school’s lack of critical thinking.
The school knows there’s a problem but cannot solve it. With tens of thousands of vaults to fill and dwindling funding, seminars become impossible. The question, then, becomes: Is seminar education worth the trouble of major structural change?
Yes — it has to be. To start, the lecture is failing at its own objective. Studies find that, after only a couple days, students remember as little as 10% of the lecture. We pay the university hundreds of thousands of dollars for information that fades within days. Our bank vaults — both literal and figurative — are left empty.
Even the best banking education sets us up for failure. Harvard Professor Erik Mazur, a self-proclaimed excellent lecturer, came to condemn the format after a journal article prompted him to test his physics students’ ability to apply basic concepts. Real-world examples stumped even top students. Lectures prepare students to absorb information and output answers in a given fashion. They do not foster creativity. Our political science classes, for example, span contentious topics ranging from climate change to white supremacy. The lecture, though, rewards memorizing factoids instead of producing ideas. Recalling Samuel Adams’ take on democracy or the difference between the European Commission and Council beget classroom success. After that, we can return to our lives, complacent and complicit with the current issues we face. If regurgitating information could solve the world’s problems, we’d turn to parrots. We can’t, however, solve the problems of tomorrow with the answers of yesterday.
Soon, COVID-19 will hopefully be a thing of the past, but it threatens to cement the trend towards online lectures. Students already walk out of classes not inspired, but instead disillusioned by the fact that we are in tragic amounts of debt in exchange for a glorified reading list. COVID-19 ought to remind us that the moment that we consider replacing the classroom with the chatroom, education has failed us.