Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”
Mr. Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher.
Mr. Hamilton, 18, is among the expanding ranks of students in kindergarten through grade 12 ”” more than one million in the United States, by one estimate ”” taking online courses.
This is what happens when you demand a diploma for every job imaginable.
This is not education. It is “paint by the numbers.” No mental ingestion of knowledge, analytic thought process, no imagination and no educationally useful effort.
It does however allow a bandage to be placed on the defects in the products of our current educational system. It provides society with a person who can think that he has accomplished something because he has a high school degree.
What is the next expectation of a person who has completed a process that has provided him with an ersatz diploma? Will he expect to be an important person in his first job? Does he expect to drive to work in an Audi wearing a tailored suit? Does he expect a corner office with a good view?
Online larnin’ at the fraction of the cost of a real education!
Well, you gotta say this about American ed, it teaches kids how to cheat. Now, THAT’S larnin’. What I want to know is, what did his teacher do and what happened (if anything) to this loser. I dunno, maybe he will grow up to be the Governor of Maine. Larry
There is nothing inherently wrong with online education. As long as the delivery system is effective and the student wants to learn, it is no less useful than traditional classroom settings.
This writer does a terrible job of setting the tone for the article by starting out with the tale of a student cheating (it seems) in his online class. The article is not about cheating, but about the growing number of online courses, especially in the high school grades, and questions of their effectiveness.
I’ve got experience with this, and can say that it’s unfair to dismiss the concept so easily without considering the context. Of course online learning can be abused by students, and administrators may have mixed motives for using it. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be effective or appropriate.
I’ve got a son wrapping up his senior year at school, but the administration refused to give him credit for the 9th grade, in which he was homeschooled. (As an aside, it wasn’t a question of lack of documentation of his curriculum and grades, they simply refused to even consider it.) So they set him up with an online learning provider for “credit recovery” of the entire 9th grade core… in his own time while he completed 12th grade. Yes, it’s not as thorough, but he had already learned most of the material previously! I’ll acknowledge the shortcomings as well: Literature was a particular problem with this course, because evaluating poetry (for example) isn’t a good fit for the “fill in the text box and click Submit” model.
My youngest daughter continues to be homeschooled, but is taking two of her subjects online with a Christian organization. This is actually an interactive, instructor-led class using “Go to Meeting” type teleconferencing capability. These are her most demanding courses, as it turns out. As in most middle schools, part of her grade depends on “class participation”, and she’s had to make presentations to her internet classmates.
It’s interesting that most criticism seems to be coming from the education unions, rather than the parents. I think it’s hypocritical of them to charge the administrators with having impure motives (even if partly true).
This kind of copy-paste shortcutting of actual study can be caught and penalized with the same software that searches for plagarized portions of research papers, newspaper and magazine columns, etc., if properly configured.
On-line education is just one of the options we should be looking at to enhance the level of literacy in our population. Just as there are varieties of learning styles, there should be a variety of means of delivering education; on-line is just one. The reality is, those pupils who are home-schooled are probably exposed to the biggest variety of education delivery systems–and they thrive from that!
#6, you are in the unfortunate position of having an education system that demands a one-style-fits-all approach. I would be willing to bet that your son learned more and will respond better to on-going education than any of his “classmates” in public–or even private–schools.
I have 6 home-schooled (fully or partially) grandchildren and I would pit them against any public school education; they would definitely come out ahead both in knowledge AND socialization!
I have a few parishioners here who have to teach online classes, and they absolutely despise having to do it because they say you basically cut what you can normally cover in the classroom in half. The quality is therefore degraded, but the irony of it is that the schools can make a fortune offering online classes. This may be the only phenomenon in Western capitalism where a greatly inferior product is more highly sought after by consumers who are knowingly and willingly paying substantially more for the inferior product.
And, my goodness, they are getting such a great education at $40,000 a year plus in a regular classroom.