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“This is not the story of how online education -- by now a well-established system -- is finally taking over the traditional classroom. Rather, it’s a story of how faculty members and administrators are struggling to adapt their courses to an online medium.”
Peter Kastor, history department chair, Washington University in St. Louis
The Washington Post, "These Washington University faculty had rejected online classes -- until coronavirus. Here’s how they made the switch," April 4, 2020
Almost three decades ago (1991), I graduated as a history major from Washington University. From Wash U, I went on to grad school and got a Ph.D. in sociology, concentrating in social demography. About two decades ago, I shifted from pursuing a traditional faculty career to focusing on online education.
Kastor’s article in The Washington Post hit close to home. His writing about how it was only a global pandemic that pushed the Wash U faculty into teaching online was a reminder of how far my academic career has come from its beginnings as an undergraduate history major in Busch Hall.
Kastor writes,
All of that preparation still hadn’t answered the fundamental question. What would it mean for faculty members who’ve never studied online education to conduct classes online? And what does it mean for students to suddenly find themselves taking classes online?
Those questions are all the more perplexing because Arts & Sciences expressly rejected distance learning. The medical school and the business school at the university have their own distance learning programs, but Arts & Sciences does not. After all, Washington University’s strength lay in the close connection that occurred in the classroom and on campus. We were committed to the notion that every student would “be known by name and story,” and most of us believed that we could do so best through direct contact in the classroom and face-to-face meetings with students outside of class.
As a Wash U history graduate, and as someone who has spent most of his academic career in online education, this explanation from Kastor as to why his department has never explored online learning is revealing.
For the Wash U history department, online education is a method of instruction that precludes “close connection.” The idea that online learning is antithetical to the goal that every student should “be known by name and story” was the accepted wisdom of the A&S faculty of my alma mater.
For anyone who has taught in or helped to run a quality online program, the reality that these ideas about online education continue to persist in 2020 is dispiriting.
If I had been able to return to pre-COVID-19 Wash U, and speak to my old history professors (some are still around), I would have tried to convince them that online learning can be as intimate, relational and experiential as face-to-face classes.
Perhaps, if I had been able to return to Wash U, I would have shared stories of what can happen when a professor can collaborate closely with a learning designer in the development and running of a course.
Would my old history professors have been surprised to learn that online education can provide an opportunity to integrate research-based instructional methods into course design and teaching?
My idea of what a good college education can be was formed in the history seminar classes that I experienced as an undergrad at Wash U. It is at Washington University that I became a lifelong believer in the power of a liberal arts education, one build in close relationships between scholar-educators and learners.
The model of a Washington University Arts & Science education is the one that I’ve tried, throughout my career, to place at the core of every online educational program in which I’ve been involved. The history professors at Wash U may have believed that online learning could not possibly conform to their educational philosophy.
The irony is that it is this philosophy of education that every student should "be known by name and story" that has guided the work of those who have been working to advance online education.
How do you think COVID-19 will change the thinking -- if at all -- of faculty at traditional residential institutions?
