problems with online education

It’s fair to say that I have more experience than the average person being a remote student. From 2013 - 2015, I completed the CFA program, which requires self-studying something like a master’s degree worth of material in preparation for three sequential exams. From 2017 - 2019, I completed Georgia Tech’s Online Masters of Computer Science (OMSCS) program. Remote learning has many promises (scale, flexibility, cost), and while I learned a lot from both the OMSCS and CFA, I also learned about the problems that these types of programs have. In this post I’m going to discuss those problems.

lack of student to teacher interaction

In-person lectures allow you to easily raise your hand and communicate with your professor. Student-teacher interaction in an online forum just isn’t the same. Usually lectures are pre-taped (sometimes by a different professor than the one teaching your class) and you ask questions of the professor by posting in an async discussion board. The answering of these questions is usually passed off to TA’s. While I did have a few exceptional TA’s, many of them were underpaid, unprepared and unmotivated to answer any non-trivial questions.

lack of student to student interaction

In remote programs, hanging out after class is replaced with online forums. Most Georgia Tech courses did have an online discussion forum, but participation was usually optional, or only worth a small fraction of the grade. In most classes it would be very easy to ignore the discussion forum and still get an A in the class.

The forums were usually dominated by a few active posters, with the majority of students lurking. This is very different than in person classrooms, where the professor will often call on students at random to provide input, and will limit the contributions from the ‘raises-hand-every-5-minutes’ students, who I assume are the ones who dominate discussion forums in online class settings.

This lack of student to student interaction also hurts networking (often one of the most valuable parts of school). In-person classrooms naturally facilitate in-class discussions, which lead to out-of-class study groups, which morph into grabbing food and drinks, and real relationships. All of a sudden, you have a valuable network. This is almost entirely absent from online programs. Even if multiple students from your online course live in your city, they are likely widely dispersed, rather than all within reasonable distance of a campus.

This lack of camaraderie not only decreases the value of education by weakening the network, but can also make school much more depressing. The negative mental health aspects of grad school are well documented, and it’s hard to imagine that being physically isolated does anything other than exacerbate the problem.

the downsides of scale

The promise of online education is one teacher educating infinite students. But the problems discussed previously usually grow with the student:teacher ratio. Scale also causes other problems.

mechanical grading

As the student:teacher ratio increases, instructors have to create more assignments that can be mechanistically graded. The CFA consists almost entirely of multiple choice questions. This benefits those with good rote memorization, not necessarily mastery of the material.

Georgia Tech assignments were mostly project based, but the projects were designed to be easy to grade on a rubric (more quantitative, less qualitative). Disputing grades usually involved messaging some faceless TA, and hoping that they would get back to you. Assignments ultimately came down to whether or not you were able achieve some indisputable objective (did function F produce Y when given input X). While these types of problems are easy to grade, they don’t necessarily demonstrate mastery of the material, nor do they allow for much creativity in the process. These types of assignments are also very susceptible to cheating.

All of this can harm both the outcome and spirit of the educational process. It impacts the outcome by tilting the odds of success in favor of those who are good self-learners, and who don’t particularly care for human interaction. It impacts the spirit by pushing the educational process away from the ideal of the Socratic Circle, and towards a mechanistic assembly line: Watch the lecture of a professor who retired years ago, do the practice problem graded by some algorithm, make one half-hearted post per week in the discussion forum to fulfil your participation requirement and you can graduate without ever having to see another student’s face.

scale and exclusivity

Traditional educational institutions derive much of their prestige from their exclusivity. Thus, prestige usually decreases as the number of graduates increases. Any remote learning company will be incentivised to increase the number of students in order to increase their revenue, thus decreasing their prestige. If a remote learning company decides to ‘stay small’ (to increase their exclusivity), they will likely have to increase the cost of their program, pricing out those who might benefit from education the most.

how are current programs countering the class size <-> prestige problem?

Both the CFA and OMSCS have the philosophy of ‘make the program easy to start, hard to finish’. The idea is that everyone should be given a shot, and that those who can’t cut it will drop out.

While this philosophy has good intentions, I witnessed first hand the negative impact it had on some Georgia Tech classes. There were many students who had absolutely no business being in a graduate computer science program. These students kept the TA’s busy answering extremely basic questions, complained about the difficulty of the course, and in more than one case succeeded in getting the instructors to lower the assignment requirements. While OMSCS was still quite difficult to pass, it became clear during my time there that the rigor of at least some classes was decreasing as time went on. In many cases I was able to verify this by looking up syllabuses and assignments from prior semesters and comparing them to the current semesters.

The CFA society keeps its prestige in other ways. The CFA society encourages people to put “CFA” after their name. Seeing people in Senior positions at firms with “CFA” on their business card gives the credential power. The CFA society also operates chapters in most major cities, and regularly holds local networking events and high quality continuing education programs.

how are employers responding to increasing numbers of graduates?

In many fields, professional credentials (CFA, CPA, RN) can matter more than school (hiring managers may not know the reputation of the school you went to unless it’s a top 10, but they almost certainly know the reputation of your industry’s chosen professional certifications). It makes sense that as the number of degree programs increases, the value of the degree decreases, so now you need not just a degree, but a degree and a professional certification.

On the other hand, many tech companies are claiming to not care if you have a degree at all. Instead, they focus almost entirely on your ability to perform on interview day “whiteboard” testing. These companies tend to discount almost your entire resume (degree, work experience, portfolio), the downside of this of course is that it nullifies the hard work that engineers put into good grades, hacking on personal projects, and previous jobs.

solutions?

Remote education has many problems, but it’s here to stay, which means that there is lots of opportunity for smart people to create cool products and services to make it better. I’ll leave you with a few ideas:

• encourage and enable in-person study groups and networking for online students
• build AI technology that enables scalable grading of qualitative work
• tools to help employers better evaluate students and job seekers on their individual skills