Teens lounge on cozy couches while tapping away at their cell phones, chatting and online shopping. No, these are not kids idling at home during snow days or a summer vacation. They are students currently taking online classes: and the relaxed scene is not rare in the corner of the library where they work—some for multiple class periods each day.
One explanation for the laziness is that the online classes do not challenge students enough and, in fact, elicit boredom. Many online classes are given an “honors” weighting, but they do not reflect the honors-level work expected in conventional classrooms. Numerous tests in online classes are open-book and open-note, and students can attempt tests multiple times to improve their grade. With little in the way of accountability, students look up answers to assignments on the internet instead of applying their own brainpower. Teachers serve as little more than “tech support,” and there is hardly any interaction—not to mention collaboration— among students taking the classes from behind separate screens.
Nicholas Cantin takes online Mandarin II. He thinks the standards are lower in that class than others.
“In this [class] we’re barely doing work every day, and a lot of the time I just go over vocabulary once; there’s not a whole lot of activity going on there,” Cantin said.
Though he says that his Mandarin teacher helps him with pronunciation, he agrees that online class instructors serve primarily as technical support.
“The lead instructors just set up the website and just have you go at it. I would definitely not say that they are teachers,” Cantin said.
Many students engage in online instruction because they hope to skip past lower level classes when they get to college. But planning ahead gets more complicated when one reads the fine print. Multiple, separate organizations, like CCCC and NCVPS run the online classes, and each organization is governed by different rules and expectations about transferring credits. One online class may transfer to a certain four-year university, whereas another does not. Students of all grades and abilities seem to have difficulty finding out the specifics of each class’s transfer potential, and have trouble planning their high school schedules accordingly.
As with the lion’s share of issues such as these, there are a few positive points that should not be neglected. Online programs mimic the college schedule and are largely self-led. This gives students a leg up in their preparedness for college life and studies. Also, North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM) correspondence courses are indubitably more challenging than most online courses, and should not be measured with the same stick as their community college and NCVPS (North Carolina Virtual Public Schools) counterparts.
We are not suggesting that online classes have no merit, but rather that students should lower their expectations when they sign up for such classes. In other words, don’t expect that you will master Mandarin with a semester of online study, or that your credits will easily transfer to your chosen college when the semester comes to a close.
The editorial board of The Omniscient agrees that most online classes offered at Northwood have a lack of rigor and interaction and are thus not conductive to optimal learning.