University Learning Online

Thomas Hopkins, April 26, 2010

In a few weeks, I will graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (uncg) with
a degree in Anthropology. This event, held to be one of the most monumental within an individ-
ual lifetime, compels me to reflect upon my time as a student, both recently and in my elementary
school days. There are a number of related subjects I have been wanting to write about for several
months, and, although I have plenty of academic writing I yet need to revise, I want to use this
retrospective moment to explore education-related issues.
When I selected courses for my final semester of undergraduate study, I knew that I needed to
choose a section of the fourth German course required in a standard four-course lineup, intended
to fulfill a foreign language requirement. Prior to course registration, I learned that my choice
would be limited to an online section of this particular class. My instructor for two previous Ger-
man language courses revealed that the German department did not plan to offer a traditional,
classroom-based version of German 204 in the Spring 2010 semester.
I was—and remain—intent that I will graduate in May of 2010, so I did not have any alterna-
tive when registering. Several classmates decided against taking this course online. Reasons varied,
but many expressed frustration at the notion that one could successfully teach a foreign language
class through the Internet, assuming that physical presence was integral to language comprehen-
sion. I admit that I was, if not in total agreement, fond of this argument. The immediacy that a
classroom brings, with its scheduled, face-to-face meetings, can be difficult to recreate within an
Internet-based class. Graduation was still more important when I registered.
Several of my friends have taken online classes at this university and many of them complain
about what they feel are inadequacies in uncg’s online courses. A friend of mine, another student in
German 203 last semester, complained that her online section of German 102—the level preceding
203—was abysmal, rife with confusing directions and, generally, poorly laid out. Perhaps I should
have heeded this warning when registering. Now that I am nearly finished with my final required
semester of German class, I feel qualified to say that I, too, am frustrated with German online.
German 204 is not the first online class I have taken, or, you might say, it is the first true on-
line class I have taken. A math course I took, for example, utilized a system called “MyMathLab,”
which provided a number of online assignments and quizzes, along with a digital version of the
prohibitively expensive textbook. (Anecdotally, this meant that students could choose to purchase
a MyMathLab subscription and thereby avoid purchasing a physical book.) Even my capstone
course in Anthropology (ATY 595 at this university) required students to write weekly postings on
a Blackboard-based forum.
I ultimately found MyMathLab to be useful. It provided a level of feedback and personally-
tailored assignments that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a single instructor to
provide to her several hundred students. German 204 has not been such a useful online experience.
It has created only a disconnect from the real value and joy of language learning, instilling in me a
sense of frustration when not ennui.
At least this semester, German 204 is divided into six course units, all of which bear a certain
topic or title, e.g. Zu Tisch! (roughly “dinner is served”) or Auf der Autobahn (“on the highway”).
A student is responsible for several tasks within each unit. You can divide these into two types:
Blackboard-based tasks and time spent in Tell Me More, a web-based speaking and listening ap-
plication built on Adobe Flash and, to a lesser degree, Sun Microsystems’ cross-platform program-
ming language, Java. Achieving course goals in Tell Me More require nothing more than time. The
only assessment of Tell Me More activities counts the number of hours a student has spent using it
at two points in the semester, half-way and the end, at which one must have reached fifteeen and
thirty hours of use, respectively.
Relegating Tell Me More to the place of a completion grade is a good idea for several reasons.
The program is, first, somewhat incongruous with the other course content that students are re-
quired to read and remember. At the beginning of each “section” within Tell Me More, there are
a number of vocabulary words. Frequently these do not at all coincide with vocabulary elsewhere
in the course. This is admittedly a poor complaint; vocabulary exposure can be useful even if one
does not associate a meaning with a particular word. Mismatching vocabulary is symptomatic of
the general incongruousness and fragmentation that keep me from being satisfied with the system.
When a student begins using Tell Me More, they must take a language placement test to deter-
mine the skill level at which their activities will begin. Once this is completed, Tell Me More estab-
lishes, for example, as it did in my case, that a student is at the “Intermediate+” level within Tell Me
More. Students then proceed to work with the program, completing exercises that are organized
into “units” of a sort. These exercises are often frustrating. Early in the semester, I attempted to
complete a word association activity. It asked that I connect synonyms or, in other cases, antonyms
by clicking each member of a synonym or synonym-antonym pair consecutively. This would cer-
tainly be a helpful exercise if I had seen any of the words before me. If I knew even one of them,
there is a chance that I would have been able to determine proper pairings through logic, using as
a guide what I know about word prefixes and suffixes in German. Sadly, this was not the case. Tell
Me More is not an inherently bad system. In fact, I would likely be more satisfied with it if did not
make numerous assumptions about my German abilities up to this point.
I haven’t been able to easily access all of Tell Me More’s content either. Thanks to browser in-
compatibility, I will not have an opportunity to experience the speaking comprehension elements
in Tell Me More. They function through an ActiveX control, and, thus, require Microsoft’s Internet
Explorer. I could explain why ActiveX is a technology that should go by the wayside—it allows for
a dangerous level of access to the underlying operating system—but it is enough to note that they
provide another sort of incongruousness to German 204. In truth this is a complaint with Tell Me
More itself. Online learning software must be compatible with at least the most popular Internet
browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari, Opera by Opera Software,
and Google Chrome. I was a little disappointed that I would need to use Internet Explorer to expe-
rience all Tell Me More had to offer. Still, I know that my complaints about Tell Me More are minor
and result mostly from personal preference rather than fundamental flaws. The content in Tell Me
More is, by itself, good.
Other course content is equally good. According to the syllabus and course learning web pag-
es, the current head of uncg’s German department developed web pages for the course or at least
wrote the content that appears within them. Allow me to better situate these web pages within the
class as a whole. For the Blackboard-based component of German 204, students click a link in the
course navigation bar that is titled “Units 1-6,” after which point they can view the web pages for
each of the six units. Each contains a certain amount of cultural information that sometimes is and
sometimes is not related to the title of each unit; it functions somewhat like bookends for the gram-
matical instruction in each unit, often appearing at the beginning and the end of a page containing
grammar explanations. These are mostly interesting if a bit disjointed.
Once a student has read and studied these web pages, they can move on to completing the
Blackboard-based assignments for the unit, including a quiz on the unit’s cultural information, a
vocabulary quiz, and a more comprehensive exam focused to a greater degree on grammar that
appears in the unit. Students must then compose, in German, a short—only 100-200 words—re-
sponse to a writing prompt and post it on the associated Blackboard discussion forum. Finally,
students must post a commentary (a “page-long” commentary per the forum descriptions) on the
course forums, in which they assess the cultural information and the Tell Me More activities they
completed during each unit. All of this is well written and well intentioned.
My problem with the course is thus more philosophical, or so to speak. For all these activi-
ties, the course caters to students who would rather complete coursework entirely on their own,
whether for personal preference or schedule constraints. There is little authoritative “teaching” per
se. Each unit’s activities appear as a litany of assignments that simply must be completed because
they will be graded. They do not compel students to be engaged in their foreign language learning
process; they compel students to provide the correct answers when required, without any care for
retaining learned information. Perhaps this is too personal a complaint, but I think it may apply to
other students’ experiences as well. The lack of a physical meeting space and open-ended timing of
coursework have served to shift my attention from learning and retaining information in German
204. I think this is the case for a sizable number of other students, though I cannot fairly claim that
a majority of students would agree. German 204’s relatively unscheduled nature has shifted my
focus from learning about the German language and Germany itself. As it stands I only pay much
attention to the course when due dates are imminent. My grades in the course put me within the
middle of the “A” range.
I am not arguing that there is no place for such freedom in scheduling. There are advantages
as well as disadvantages to this system. The lack of regular classroom meetings allows, for example,
students who work full-time to take the course. There is room for this sort of course. Nevertheless I
feel that, for all its good, well-written information, the class contains remarkably little teaching and,
in that regard, moves dangerously away from what I want a university course to be.
University study involves a certain amount of self-teaching and thereby intends to give stu-
dents an enhanced ability to continue their education beyond the traditional academic setting.
“Lifetime learning” is ultimately inevitable, but universities strive (or should strive, in my opinion)
to enhance and direct the natural human ability for learning so that we can, for example, grapple
with the complex topics that pervade everyday life in this society. As an anthropologist I must
recognize that education is never singular in purpose nor in result or effect. There are an infinite
number of reasons why we, in the United States specifically, make education mandatory up to a
certain age and effectively make “higher education” a requirement for most people. Though univer-
sity study compels a more intense student investment, the root of the system is teaching. Students
benefit from the combined information in their (often ridiculously expensive) textbooks and the
information that their instructors teach to them through whatever means.
I like this system because I like, or have at least become accustomed to, listening to lectures
or lessons in a classroom setting. There are plenty of subjects I have learned or learned about on
my own accord, through reading books and attempting to put their knowledge to use, but I find
the classroom experience, and the immediate feedback it can provide, immensely useful for certain
subjects. Foreign language is one such subject. The disjointed and discontinuous nature of this
particular sort of online foreign language class has radically decreased my enjoyment of language
learning because it asks for nothing more than giving the correct answers when asked. It does not
lead me to internalize or integrate the German language elements about which I have read.
Again, I do not even pretend that I can be authoritative on this point. There are students for
whom German 204 no doubt went very well; there are students who probably learned quite a bit
from the class. And, again, I understand that self-teaching is definitely possible. Self-teaching is
the way that I have learned and continue learning about, for example, computer programming and
typography. It is by integrating some amount of self-teaching that I have achieved a greater degree
of academic success. Make no mistake—this is an important element of university education.
I disagree with those who see university education as only another service for which we pay
and who argue that students deserve to have complete control over not so much what they are
taught but how teachers teach them. Good instructors have an expertise in that regard that we
should recognize. Still, I feel that German 204 has not provided me instruction as much as it of-
fered me online learning tools with the ability to receive academic credit for using them within the
appropriate time periods. If I wanted this experience, I would have purchased a German textbook
after consulting a department professor for book recommendations. Self-teaching is indispensably
useful, but I do not take university classes so that I can teach myself alone.
What I want to propose is a refashioning of online courses. The “online textbook” approach
that I have experienced in German 204 is not, in my opinion, the way that most students will gain
from an online course. It is difficult, but not impossible, to replicate the immediacy that an in-
person setting allows, but it is becoming easier with the rise of Internet video distribution. I suggest
that online classes emulate the in-person experience as completely as possible. This allows classes
to restore teaching to the forefront. How, specifically, can classes achieve this?
Internet video distribution allows instructors to record video of their in-person class sections.
Such videos could be uploaded to a video distribution website—even popular sites like Youtube
are applicable—so that students in online sections of a course could watch lectures and thus genu-
inely receive instruction. I know that Youtube in particular allows uploaders to control access to
uploaded videos; course instructors could use this ability to make lecture videos available only to
those registered for a course. There are also programs that more directly emulate the in-person ex-
perience of a classroom by allowing participants to watch live lecture video at scheduled times and
ask questions through voice, video, and text chat. These, too, serve to restore both the immediacy
and instruction that are present in a physical meeting place.
The possibility that universities will gradually offer many online courses similar to my Ger-
man 204 class is troubling because such classes undermine the interactivity and instructional qual-
ity that are present at least to a greater degree in in-person settings. There are ways to mitigate these
challenges. The Internet facilitates the use an increasingly interactive set of technologies, including
video distribution as well as voice and video chat. Online courses would do well to integrate these
to a greater degree into their syllabi. “Textbook-like” online classes still have a place, but making
them the only option does students an immense disservice.

Thomas Hopkins is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His interests include
anthropology, website design, computer programming, photography, writing, and typography. You can
contact him by sending an e-mail to hopkinsth@gmail.com.