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A male student, photographed from behind, works alone on a laptop at night; the room is dark, save for the illumination provided by two lights and the glow of the laptop screen.

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As with other corporations and institutions during the coronavirus pandemic, American universities turned to virtual means to maintain their vital functions. Consequently, though synchronous and asynchronous classes first appeared more than twenty years ago, they metastasized when students and faculty were either locked down or leery of returning to their campuses.

Virtual instruction might not have been the best of worlds for teachers and students, but for more than a year—a year that seemed to stretch over an eon—it was our only world.

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The world has since returned to a new normal where virtual teaching is no longer an exception but, instead, is increasingly the rule. During fall 2022, slightly more than half of all students took at least one online class, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. While this represents a drop from the heights of pandemic enrollment, it nevertheless dwarfs pre-pandemic numbers. In 2018–19, for example, about one-third of students enrolled in at least one such class.

These classes are taught either synchronously—when students and instructors meet virtually and hold class in real time—or asynchronously, when students, who may never meet their professors, watch the lectures in their own time. Predictably, surveys—which are usually done by companies that specialize in online education—find that students overwhelmingly prefer asynchronous courses to those given synchronously. In one survey, 37 percent of respondents preferred fully online asynchronous learning, 21 percent plumped for synchronous online learning, and just 13 percent favored fully in-person classes.

It is perfectly rational that students prefer the flexibility of asynchronous classes. This is especially true at universities like my own, the University of Houston, where some of my students are commuters who hold part-time or even full-time jobs. In a student’s daily scramble to meet their many obligations, meeting in a classroom with peers and professors rarely pops up at the top of their list of priorities.

But it is also perfectly ethical to question the motivations of some other students who take these courses as well as administrators who make them available. I wager that my own experience with such a class is all too common and raises important questions about the desirability of asynchronous teaching.

A brief history: Two weeks before the start of this semester, I was urged by the chair of my department to teach an asynchronous class on world cinema. His urgency was understandable: More than 90 students had signed up for the course, which was about 75 students more than had enrolled in my upper-level French literature course.

The math was as decisive as it was simple for a department struggling to maintain its enrollment numbers. A colleague and I agreed to divide the students into two sections, and I chose existentialism as my organizing theme. I planned to use films like The Seventh Seal, Ikiru, Bicycle Thieves, The Sacrifice and, yes, Blade Runner to exemplify key concerns for existentialist thinkers, ranging from abandonment and alienation to absurdity and angst. (And that is just for A’s.)

Halfway through the semester, I think we can now add asynchrony to this A list of existential threats. In a classroom, students and professors engage with one another not just in real time, but in real space—a privileged moment during which we are, well, in sync with one another. The ping-pong of questions and answers, the exchange of interpretations, the spontaneity of reactions, and, if you are lucky, the suddenness of an insight all happen when a group finds itself in sync.

In an asynchronous setting, however, students and instructors are out of sync. While the term literally means that teaching and learning occur at different times, it practically means that neither teaching nor learning truly occur. Studies reveal that my experience is not unique: learning outcomes in asynchronous classes are persistently lower than in online synchronous or in-person classes. Students perform less well in online courses in general: based on a recent survey at University of California, Irvine, the nonprofit education site The Hechinger Report concluded that students who took online classes graduated more quickly but “tended to get lower grades in their online classes—a sign that they’re learning less than they would have in a traditional class.” 

They might well be learning even less at places other than UC Irvine. While highly selective universities attract students with greater “self-regulation”—the self-discipline required to attend to the videos and study the material in a timely manner—this is less often true at less selective state universities, not to mention community colleges. Moreover, the prospect of earning three credits to watch movies whenever they wish—along with taking a biweekly multiple-choice quiz and tossing a comment into the discussion board once a week—would tempt even the most self-regulated of students.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of my students seem to be using artificial intelligence to write their comments. More dismaying, though, is my discovery that AI could as easily teach this class as I can. Apart from the discussion board—the virtual depot for mostly indifferent or impenetrable remarks—these classes offer no possibility of contact or connection between students and teachers. Posting a video is like tossing a message in a bottle into the virtual sea of the internet, wondering if it will reach ever wash onto another shore.

This is a pity not only for those few students who seem genuinely engaged by the films, but also for those many students who might become engaged, but who lack the spark that class debate and discussion—or even the experience of watching the film together on a large screen, rather than alone on a smart phone at home—could provide.

All this weighs little in an era where higher education is no longer viewed as a transformational experience, but instead as a transactional exchange. In their 2023 book The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be (MIT Press), Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner unfurl statistics and interviews attesting to how students increasingly see themselves as customers and their diplomas as the means to a job. According to Fischman and Gardner, 45 percent of students enter university with a “transactional mindset,” while a mere 16 percent bring with them a “transformational mindset.”

These numbers are shocking. And yet, rather than combat this mindset, public universities like UH instead abet it by increasing their graduation numbers while decreasing the value of the diplomas they hand students. Hence the expansion of their asynchronous offerings: universities are determined to follow the Amazon model and offer what their customers want when they want it. In my own department of modern and classical languages, the number of asynchronous courses will nearly double, from five classes to nine classes, from this semester to the next.

In sum, students who care about their education, along with professors who care about their vocation, are experiencing a truly existential moment, one that is as absurd as it is alienating.

Robert Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston. He is now completing a book on how reading Stendhal can change your life.

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