Information technology has disrupted so many industries and human activities that everyone expected it would disrupt education as well.
A few years ago, the Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) seemed poised to do that. One professor could teach an unlimited number of students because technology had dramatically reduced the cost of reaching them. A student on the other side of the world from a professor could access lectures and work through the material afterward in a digital discussion forum. Students in the poorest countries would have access to some of the most knowledgeable teachers in the world.
MOOCs have not as yet lived up to their promise. Dropout rates from the courses are high, and those who took them tended to be students who already had degrees and were brushing up or acquiring new skills. Those were the authors’ findings in the September 2015 Harvard Business Review article, “Who’s Benefiting from MOOCs and Why.”
About the time the MOOC hype started, the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University decided to try a different approach to utilizing technology, one that has turned out to be quite successful.
The Ashbrook Center began conducting a Master’s in American History and Government summer residence program at Ashland University in 2005. The program, which is tailored specifically for middle and high school history, government, and civics teachers, focuses on primary documents and discussion. Its purpose is to provide teachers with the knowledge of and an approach to teaching American history and government that they need to excel in their classrooms.
Working with primary documents is critical. With the guidance of a good teacher, reading these documents that shaped our past can force students to confront their preconceptions, open up their thinking, and escape the contemporary preoccupations and prejudices embedded in secondary literature.
Studying documents from the past, if well guided, also helps students think for themselves. Thinking for oneself—questioning premises, weighing evidence—is the true foundation of taking responsibility for oneself, and that in turn is the basis of both a well-lived life and good citizenship.
As future voters, students who study documents from the past come to see that political outcomes are not inevitable. Human beings, acting cooperatively or confrontationally in history, determine their own future. Moreover, students observe that self-government, forming majorities to rule and get things done, requires compromise, as well as the assertion of deeply held convictions.
A recent study by Grant Evaluations shows that the program has proven popular and effective. It draws students from across the country. Classes are small, capped at just 16 students. Tuition, travel costs, and room and board to attend the program, however, often strain the tight budgets of teachers. Taking two or three weeks to study in the summer also has proven difficult for teachers with young families.
Therefore, to serve teachers who found it difficult to get to Ashland, the Ashbrook Center decided to take master’s classes to them using web-based tools. It purposefully designed its online courses to try to replicate what made the program successful in residence.
The online program consists of small, seminar-sized classes based on discussion of primary documents, such as Federalist 10 or Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech.
Ashbrook also decided that its online courses would be part of a hybrid program: students are required to do half their coursework in residence. Online efficiencies allowed tuition to be 25 percent lower and teachers also save the cost of room, board, and travel.
The online program comes close to replicating in-house, small group discussions by using multi-point video web conferencing technology. Unlike the technology used to conduct a MOOC, this technology more closely simulates face-to-face interaction, allows for real-time active discussions between students and faculty, and gives students the ability to ask questions and get immediate answers.
The Grant Evaluations study noted above found that teachers considered the online classes almost as good as the residence courses.
The study determined that learning (measured by pre- and post multiple choice tests) was almost identical online and in residence. Grade point averages were almost the same as well. Four years into the online program the course completion rate is 98 percent. The time taken to complete the master’s degree has declined 50 percent since the online courses became available.
We believe the course completion rate is so high, certainly compared with MOOCs, because of the personal interaction that the model allows. Instructors were much more likely to express satisfaction with their online teaching for Ashbrook than were instructors in a variety of different online programs surveyed by the Gallup organization in a 2014 national study.
According to the Grant Evaluations analysis, the most important area where the online courses fell short was in the quality of interactions between faculty and students, and among the students. This is an important point, one that draws us deeper into understanding both the success and limitations of our web-based program.
The shared intellectual exploration of a small group discussion requires that the participants pay attention to and feel empathy for each other. Based on recent studies that are discussed in Professor Sherry Turkle’s book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, those requirements are met most effectively through face-to-face contact, when the full range of human experience and communication is directly available.
If the research results discussed in Turkle’s book are borne out by further studies, they will mark a limit to the effectiveness of online education. It will probably never fully replicate the results of traditional classroom education. It may turn out, for example, that critical thinking skills are most enhanced in face-to-face discussion, while fact-based learning can occur equally well in online courses.
At this point, research and our experience suggest that hybrid programs combining residence and online learning may turn out to be the best way to use the new information technology. The issue will then be figuring out how to blend the residence and online experience to get the most effective and efficient result.
Through these online and residence courses, Ashbrook is changing the way teachers teach American history and civics. Rather than teaching through boring—and sometimes biased—textbooks, the program focuses teachers’ attention on primary source documents, and through these documents deepens the teachers’ knowledge of American history and constitutional principles.
Teaching with original documents increases teacher and student knowledge. For example, one study of an Ashbrook program found that middle and high school students of Ashbrook teachers on average increased their history test scores by 10 percent. Advanced Placement student scores increased by 12 percent. Teacher knowledge increased 11 percent on average.
Teachers often say that the primary reason they became a teacher was to help their students realize their full potential. Teaching through discussion of the key documents of American history is an effective way to do this because it helps students take responsibility for learning and for themselves.