The unbearable burden of online education
The way I understand education is that it is a multi player game. The fact that we’re in a class together with other people going through the same trials and tribulations is not a mere feature of the education system, but a pre requisite. The fact that any learner at any point in time studies alongside others is at the core of how we understand education. And no amount of technology aiming to stimulate classrooms and ‘bring people together’ can replicate that. It is about time we understand the fundamental truth about education - that it is not a single player game. Students cannot learn all by themselves, nor can they be expected to learn effectively when they’re alone and away from shared physical learning communities.
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College, relationships & education
I am a vehement supporter of physical classroom model of education. Honestly, before the pandemic I never thought about it because I never had to. After the pandemic, amidst Edtech platforms trying to upsell their services and educators who believe in the promise of self paced online learning - I realized why learning in person is so important.
The problem statement you encounter when thinking about the benefit of being in physical class in threefold. Firstly, what is the benefit. Secondly, what is the magnitude of the benefit. Thirdly, is it a mere feature or a necessary pre condition to education, much like say - having a teacher to teach, or a willingness to learn is.
Humans have evolved in the physical space. Our ideas and notions of what a community means is embedded in seeing, touching and hearing tangible persons around us. When you’re in a class, it feels like you’re in a community, that you’re not alone. That your problems are also the problems of others. That when a professor releases an unfavorable date for an assignment you can hear the collective dismay of all your classmates and see the discomfort on their faces. That you can hear them laugh when the professor cracks a silly joke. All of this is hardly replicable online, irrespective of what platform you use. We are not hardwired to place online communities at the same pedestal as physical communities. In many senses, the pre requisite to form communities i.e. forming interpersonal relationships is severely constrained in online spaces. I still do not know/haven’t talked to almost 60% of my own section - people with whom I have been attending the same classes with for the last year and a half. As opposed to that, in my undergraduate, despite my low attendance - I was familiar with almost 90% of the class. I could always bump into new people and wave at them in college. I cannot randomly text people I have never talked to or seen in my life. Online spaces are not spontaneous enough to foster randomized relationships.
It is also important to note that most collegiate relationships are hardly formed only by interactions during or around classes. They are formed outside of class and often college itself - during smoke breaks, movie outings, long chats around coffee and on walks where you rethink your degree. Online spaces are not accommodative or equipped enough to replicate these conditions to facilitate such bond formations. What ends up happening is that you either simply do not form these relationships, or form relationships of questionable strength.
Your relationship with professors is also highly diluted. Most professors are not as motivated by their salary to becoming better teachers, as much they are by their personal relationships with their students. Professors are more likely to put more effort into their teaching if they see their enthusiasm and effort being appreciated and replicated. Online education hits at the core of this motivation. Not only does it hamper the very forming of these bonds, but also actively hinders the sustenance of whatever bonds do get formed. Take for example the fact that if I were to see 80% of my classmates and professors in real life, I would probably not recognize them. I was taught a whole semester by a professor who only turned her camera on for a brief period of 10 minutes. Most professors won’t be able to recognize their own students even if they were to bump into them at a market. It is not just about the face, it is about the relationship. If you’re a professor who is teaching a class of 60 students and you cannot see even one person’s face, cannot gauge whether everyone is sleeping, or at the movies, or eating pizza - it mitigates your ability to teach. If every 5 minutes you have to ask your students if they’re even there, how can you focus on being excited and motivated about what you want to teach them? But more importantly, who is your student? Is Divyanshu Dembi even a person? Or is he just a name string with a voice he uses during the occasional question? The second part of the problem stems from this lack of relationship building. The way education works, or broadly how college works - is through networks. Consider you are professor X’s student. Professor X knows his old batchmate Y who is looking for an associate, so X recommends your name to Y for the position. Or, you are classmates with person Z whose sister is a professional with a company you really like. You put in the word with your classmate and an interview is arranged for you. Your favorite professor, with whom you wrote a paper in the after hours of classes in the library, writes a dazzling recommendation letter for your masters application. All of these scenarios can only happen due to strongly formed relationships during college.
So if you cannot form these relationships, or have a hard time forming them, then college instantly looses most of its utility. As Ashish has pointed out - college works only because it is LinkedIn, Starbucks and Coursera together. If people think that colleges can be moved online, or online education is as better as physical education - they’re missing our the point that online college is: Coursera, but only worse + LinkedIn, but with shallow networks + Starbucks, but nobody is really a good friend.
Having argued that the reason college derives any utility is due to the networks you form during your time there, and the fact that online education severely hampers the creation and sustenance of the same, online education is a lose lose for everyone. However I have often thought about what if all of this comes from status quo bias? The fact that I and countless others have only seen one type of education system, and have now created a bias towards it. Well it could be. But I have been studying online for the past year and a half, and there was not a single day on which I thought ‘huh, online schools is probably better than regular school’. Not a single day.
But that leads me to the central thesis of this piece i.e. is the physicality of the classroom a pre requisite to education, or merely an enabling feature? In the sense that is the strong sense of community and everything else associated with normative college education required for us to imagine a college degree? Or are they only ancillary structures that directly or indirectly help the students, and are not fundamental to the education itself. The other way to frame the question is, “Would we obtain the same, or even similar level of education if we were to move colleges online?” My honest answer to this question is no. This could be because of a mix of factors - the fact that maybe we are still coming to terms with the sudden seismic shift and are doing a bad job at coping, or the fact that we still haven’t discovered best practices, or professors haven’t optimized themselves for online education, or students like me are still writing pieces which maintain a culture against the online shift. It could be anything, or most probably a mix of everything.
However if we were to go back to the simple question of replicability of education on similar levels online, there is clear evidence (both with students and teachers), that the education level simply isn’t the same. Far from being same, online education is not even at a similar enough level as physical education. Students are lagging behind in all spheres, the technological divide effectively wiping out an entire school going population from their access to fundamental education, and teachers treating online education as if it is a vacation. Anyone who argues that online education is better than offline education probably has misaligned incentives, or is too ahead of their time.
But the real reason why online education can never replace physical classroom based education, is because education was never just about the syllabus and classes. It is and will always be about peer learning, relationships, lessons in youth - things that are not and can not be reflected in grades, experiences that you gather during college that you can never replicate in any other time of your life. Education is educating because you are with other people. With teachers, with peers. Online education is not education because every student is alone. Education was never meant to be a single player game that students play in front of their laptop away from their friends from 9 to 6.
All of us are under the unbearable burden of being alone in a time when we should’ve been with others. Gathering experiences and defining our lives. The most contemptuous thing online education has done is to make students feel apathetic, ignorant and spiteful of the very things we were/are interested in.
With rage, grief and contempt - yours truly.