Fast-Food or Gourmet? Choosing from the Online Learning Buffet

Jeffrey Schwartz, Director of Digital Learning and Innovation, Loyola Marymount University

Jeffrey Schwartz, Director of Digital Learning and Innovation, Loyola Marymount University

Before the pandemic, most universities treated online learning like a side dish. At many institutions, students were welcome to sample distance learning via a summer course or one-credit prerequisite seminar, but mainstream, for-credit online learning remained peripheral for most universities. While a lot of instructors understandably still prefer the confines of the traditional classroom over online options, the truth is that post-pandemic, students are demanding more opportunities for hybrid and online coursework, and for good reason. Today’s students are hungry for the convenience, accessibility, and flexibility that quality online learning affords, and hybrid or online graduate degrees have quickly become more of an entree as a result.

For starters, any online instructor worth their salt will tell you that there is nothing magical about a traditional classroom. Brick-and-mortar buildings with desks and whiteboards do not guarantee high-quality instruction or learning. If we pause for a moment and reflect on our own academic experiences, it is not hard to conjure up a power lecture with an instructor who talked ‘at’ students for 90 plus minutes without pausing. This lecturer of memory may have been a brilliant mind and an expert in their field, but they may not have been much of a ‘teacher.’ While it’s true that the classroom offers inherent opportunities for community, collaboration, and access, there is no guarantee that any of these opportunities will be seized or capitalized upon by faculty or students. Similarly, distance learning need not be “distant” at all. Thanks to video conferencing, messaging apps, discussion boards, social annotation activities, cloud computing, virtual reality, and a host of academic technologies designed for teaching and learning with technology, online instructors can create meaningful opportunities for community, collaboration, and individualized instruction, all while engaging students beyond the geographic confines of campus or constraints of time zones. The truth is that course modality has little to do with the overall quality of teaching and learning or the student experience in any given course. Simply put, the secret sauce is course design.

Post-pandemic, many students came to realize the power and convenience of well-designed online learning experiences. While poor quality ‘Zoom-school’ instruction was the typical knee-jerk response as classrooms were suddenly forced into remote instruction in Spring 2020, many faculty have since come to embrace baseline elements of hybrid instruction, including thoughtful use of learning management systems to manage calendars, communicate information, collect assignments, provide feedback, and track grades. Better yet, many instructors have come to appreciate the importance of backward design and using learning outcomes as the proverbial north star when crafting a syllabus and designing a course experience, rather than simply portioning a subject-matter-driven buffet of information into weekly servings over a semester. Likewise, most students have learned how to better collaborate and communicate online with peers and instructors (skills that will surely serve them well in the post-college marketplace,) and they have become more adept, and perhaps more self-disciplined online learners as a result. These dynamics have led to a significant increase in demand for quality, hybrid, and online courses and reimagined graduate degree programs designed for adult learners. Increasingly, the challenge for academic leadership is determining how and where universities should take steps to meet this increased demand, rather than whether or not online learning should be on the menu at all.

“The adage of quality over quantity will surely regulate the online learning marketplace as student demand for flexible learning continues to increase. And our students will continue to choose whether they want to consume proverbial fast-food learning or something more farm-to-table when perusing the menu of online educational offerings across the web.”

Given the limits of on-campus space and enrollment challenges facing many traditional institutions, universities see dollar signs and want in on the action when it comes to online programming. To that end, some colleges have elected to expedite entry into the online education marketplace and have attempted to launch as many online learning opportunities as possible. This is often accomplished by partnering with an online program manager (OPM) or some third-party course design firm to rapidly create content and online programming to bring to market on a short timeline (oftentimes with student recruitment support available for an additional fee). While this path has merit from a business perspective, it often does little to convey the unique faculty expertise afforded by campus instructors, and in some instances creates a more generic “canned” product that varies little from university to university or program to competitor program. While learning surely happens in these programs, if the content and degree outcomes are largely comparable between competing universities, the cost will likely drive student choice and registration when deciding to pursue distance learning endeavors. That said, you typically get what you pay for and cheaper may not translate to better.

The COVID years reinforced the fact that the college experience is so much more than a series of courses strung together to earn a degree. Whether onsite or online, a meaningful university experience should showcase and instill institutional values, provide students with access to individualized services and resources, create an authentic sense of belonging and community, and offer unique, rigorous, accessible, and engaging curricular experiences to all participants. While higher education is undoubtedly a business, the business of education is truly teaching and learning while supporting our students on their journey. If we genuinely wish to create high-quality digital learning experiences, faculty subject matter experts must be provided with substantial support for course building and instructional design for their courses, so that their creativity and expertise can be reimagined and delivered for today’s online learners across varied modalities. In the long term, institutions that properly invest in online instruction and choose to institutionalize instructional design and academic technology services will distinguish themselves from their higher ed counterparts, creating superior programs that highlight strengths in areas where their institutions are already distinguished. While it may take some time, the adage of quality over quantity will surely regulate the online learning marketplace as student demand for flexible learning continues to increase. And our students will continue to choose whether they want to consume proverbial fast-food learning or something more farm-to-table when perusing the menu of online educational offerings across the web.