The Online Education Hydra (Part II)

In August, I argued in my blogpost that online education has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, that our dependence on distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to over-emphasize online courses even as we emerged from the worst parts of the pandemic. I argued that we were funneling students who did not want to enroll in online courses into them because we offer so few in-person courses. This month, I’d like to briefly look at other negative consequence that our over-emphasis of distance education has on students, particularly those consequences associated with screen time and electronics use.

It is important to note that I am not entirely against distance education. Online classes can round out a student’s schedule, especially when required coursework conflicts with other courses or obligations, and distance education can be an important tool for non-traditional and rural students who do not have access to our campuses. However, as noted in August, many community college departments are almost entirely online. But is it really a good thing to require our teenage students to spend even more time on their computers and devices than they already do? Are we contributing to the mental and physical health problems that are already compounded by our students’ non-academic use of electronics? For instance, Wang et al. (2019) found that people who had just two hours/day of screen-time “were more likely to have depression” (p. 4). This finding confirmed similar findings by Hamer and Stamatakis (2014) and Teychenne et al. (2015).

This is concerning, as a typical 3-unit course requires nine hours/week of work (since typically, in a face-to-face class, three hours are spent in lecture and about six hours are spent on homework and other out-of-class assignments). In an online class, all nine hours are spent doing a variety of tasks from discussion boards and online assignments to watching videos and doing readings. In other words, much of these nine hours are spent in front of a screen. For a full-time student, this becomes 36 hours/week spent on lectures and homework, which is five hours/day. This doesn’t even include the students’ time on screens to check email/texts, to browse the internet, and to engage with social media. This is wreaking havoc on our students physical health, including eye strain, fatigue, and obesity (Alabdulkader, 2021; Mitchell et al., 2013).

And we’re fooling ourselves if we think our students are dedicating all their attention to school work during these hours. Ask yourself, do you ever dedicate all your attention to a Zoom meeting? I don’t. I am often checking email or doing something else online. And we’re the one’s that are supposed to have more impulse control. All of us are addicted to our technology (Horvath et al., 2020). And as Cal Newport (2016), the Georgetown professor who studies technology and society, notes, this addiction is rising as our attention spans are declining, leading to more and more distractions and the inability to do “deep work.” In other words, we’re putting our students in positions - in front of computers, tablets, and phones - where they are tempted by their technology addictions, and we’re expecting them to actually do their work. At least in face-to-face classes, we can, at the very least, control for technology use and attention in the classroom.

As mentioned earlier, I am not completely against distance education. It is a net positive for students who cannot access college, like working adults and parents and people who live in areas unserved/underserved by physical campuses. However, I am very much against compelling students who want or should be in classrooms to take online coursework. In August, I wrote about how my college’s psychology and sociology departments offered only one (1) and zero (0) fully in-person classes this fall. Well, it is exactly the same next spring even as my college’s in-person enrollment is up by double digits. There are still several departments at my college, CSM, that offer required college courses without a single fully in-person class next spring. I harp on fully in-person classes because hybrid courses contribute to the same issues above - mental health and physical issues, addiction, and decreased attention spans. And I didn’t even get into the social engagement that online students are missing in the virtual classroom. Discussion boards and Zoom will never replace the important face-to-face interactions students have in classrooms, hallways, and dining halls.

As the pandemic gets further and further in the rearview mirror, the memories of online education during the pandemic will become fuzzier. I believe that the students in the first couple freshman classes after the pandemic were intrigued by online education. They may not have liked it, but they got to stay in their pajamas and lay in bed as their professors lectured. But our incoming students are increasingly accustomed to in-person learning, to the point that we’ll have a freshman class that will have never been in online courses by 2034 (those who were in kindergarten in 2020). It is time for us to recognize that online education has a place in our colleges, but it is not the place in our colleges. If we are still offering a majority of our classes online in 2034, it will be clear that the priority was never students but our own preferences for staying at home in our pajamas to teach our courses.

References

Alabdulkader, B. (2020). Effect of digital device use during COVID-19 on digital eye strain. Clinical and Experimental Optometry, 104(6), 698-704.

Hamer, M., & Stamatakis, E. (2014). Prospective study of sedentary behavior, risk of depression, and cognitive impairment. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 46(4), 718-723.

Helander, M.E., Cushman, S.A., & Monnat, S.M. (2020). A public health side effect of the coronavirus pandemic: Screen time-related eye strain and eye fatigue (Issue Brief No. 24). Syracuse University, Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. https://surface.syr.edu/lerner/50/

Horvath, J., Mundinger, C., Schmiegen, M.M., Wolf, N.D., Sambataro, F., Hirjak, D., Kubera, K.M., Koenig, J., & Wolf, R.C. (2020). Structural and functional correlates of smartphone addiction. Addictive Behaviors, 105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2020.106334

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Grand Central Publishing.

Teychenne, M., Costigan, S. A., & Parker, K. (2015). The association between sedentary behaviour and rick of anxiety: A systematic review. BMC Public Health 15(513). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-015-1843-x

Wang, X., Li, Y., & Fan, H. (2019). The associations between screen time-based sedentary behavior and depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Public Health, 19(1524). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7904-9