The title should be “The problem with online school (in its current state)” because everything I’ll talk about here can be, and should be, fixed. Also, I am currently a senior in college who lived through the transition from in-person to online school, so I feel I am the most credible source for this information because I am on the front lines.
The problem with online school originally stems from the fact that online school makes a lot of sense for both schools and students. It financially makes sense for both: schools are able to reproduce and distribute content/support more easily, while students are able to access these resources from anywhere in the world. Also, I believe that I learn much better online than in person, and that experience is only getting better. But the subjects that I learn effectively online are taught through my own research and curiosity rather than a required course. I have learned very little useful information in school. I guess I would relate it to a puzzle. Let’s say that an expert in an industry is a completed puzzle. A class in school, at best, is designed to give you a piece or two, or maybe the outline of the puzzle, or at best, can show you a picture of the completed puzzle and throw the pieces at you to maybe encourage you, but not exactly set you up for success. While I will say that learning on my own provides an internal motor where I actually ‘want’ to learn compared to being forced to.
For this writing, let’s assume that I ‘want’ to learn in school as much as the things I research outside of school.
Let’s begin by stating the common arguments for why in-person school is better than online:
Learning
Firstly, a teacher would say that in-person school allows for students to raise their hand and ask questions whenever they have a question, providing the student with immediate access to the source of knowledge (the teacher) for the class content. I would say this is no longer true. Like it or not, students don’t always raise their hand when they have a question. I would argue that they raise their hand less than half of the time they have a question due to anxiety, often putting them behind in a fast-paced class or with a teacher who is hard to understand. This means that students typically search for the answer to their question on their own. A good trait, I must say, because that is how you find answers in the real world.
With LLMs like ChatGPT, there truly are no dumb questions, AND you are met with friendly, immediate answers that are typically more accurate than those of the teacher (depending on the school). You can easily ask follow-up questions and search the internet for more information if needed. Although there are some cases where the teacher’s answer is superior to the internet’s, I have found that case to be rare.
I would say that this is the biggest edge that online learning has compared to in-person from a learning perspective. Being able to pause a video, open a new tab to search up a term I don't understand, and then resume the video is the ideal way for me to understand a new subject at my own pace.
Collaboration
I would be very surprised if there was a world where collaborating and meeting people online would be superior to in-person. I don’t think it will be, and I don’t want it to be. I know that this is a big problem for corporate companies that offer work-from-home options, but their company’s culture is at risk because none of the employees are friends with each other!
In regards to collaborating and meeting people: In-person: 1
Online: 0
Cheating
This section should be emphasized for how big of an issue it is.
I would like to believe that schools are aware of its severity, but their actions don't support that. I feel that they have done just enough to allow boosters and funders to believe it is being taken care of, but the people implementing these protocols are out of touch compared to the savviness of a 20-year-old who grew up using tech and playing the online learning game. To the dismay of every 16-22-year-old in America, I will be unveiling many of the secrets I've found throughout my life of online school on how to cheat. I'm doing this because I believe that people don't want to cheat. They want to actually learn whatever the class was designed to teach, but the class is being taught in a way that's unenjoyable, hard to understand, too hard, too easy, too boring, etc. I believe that the way school is taught now, with an underqualified person talking in front of a board, is the wrong method of learning (but that's a conversation for another day).
So how much do kids actually cheat these days?
You won’t be able to find any reliable data online because it’ll only contain the ones that got caught. For a basic assignment, you cannot cheat in person with pen and paper. But for that same assignment online, there are typically no barriers stopping me from copying the question and pasting it into Google or ChatGPT.
Yes, a majority (~80-90%) of everything outside of exams falls under this category. I mean, how can you really expect a student to try to critically think through a question when they can just copy and paste the question into Google, getting the answer in seconds and without using any brain power? Then how do you expect that student to perform when they do that for every single assignment for a year? Then see how smart that student is after doing this for 5 years. That is what my generation is made up of.
Let’s pull some data: Chegg: Chegg allows users to post a screenshot of a question and pays experts to answer the question along with an explanation. It’s usually used for math questions and will cost the student $15/month. Chegg was the go-to for many students in my high school and early college days, but ever since ChatGPT came out, we just use that for essentially everything. Despite this, Chegg’s numbers have still risen by over double due to the transition to online learning during and after Covid in 2020.
These are the numbers of subscribers by quarter for Chegg over the past 5 years. Are we just going to ignore that millions of students blatantly cheating on assignments are driving a billion-dollar industry of providing answers?
Quizlet: Quizlet was also a ‘go-to’ service for getting answers and had the benefit of being mostly free, but the downside of being incorrect more often than Chegg because it was essentially open-sourced flashcards. To find the data on how much Quizlet is used, we will have to refer to its site traffic (often unreliable) and revenue (mixed with subscribers, but mostly ads), so we will do our best to estimate how many users it has.
I wasn’t able to find the data going back a few years, but we can assume that rates spiked during 2020 and have slightly decreased since.
This is the data found from SEM Rush
224 million visits in September.
Let’s assume that a normal assignment is 20 questions and each visit was for a different assignment. This means that in the month of September alone, 11,200,000 assignments were cheated on.
There are about 17 million students enrolled in high schools (US) and the same number enrolled in colleges (US), equaling about ~34 million. Now, if we take out the freshmen in high school (1/4) because they likely aren’t taking any online courses, we’re left with about 25.5 million students taking both in-person and online classes. You can estimate how many of their classes are online vs in-person, but most college students have a hybrid schedule (I’m not sure about high school anymore). Which means these numbers are staggering.
Not only are they staggering, but this is coming from only one site. As stated before, if you have math class issues, you go to Chegg, while Quizlet is typically used for English, Science, and History classes. Furthermore, this is coming at a time when ChatGPT has a free and paid version, which anyone in their right mind would sign up for.
With these three sites alone in consideration, I will let you come to your own conclusion for estimating the actual number of students that cheat on their assignments.
In the past year or two, students have gotten so lazy that they wanted to cut out the work of copying the question, going to a new tab, pasting the question, and searching for the answer. So, Chrome extensions have begun to emerge to streamline this process for them, generating millions for the creators of some of these extensions. Although some I saw previously are now taken down from the Chrome store, copies have been made (with fewer users).
Previous extensions of this kind had over 500,000 users but have since been blocked from the Chrome store.
Okay, so only assignments can be cheated on, so what do students do when the proctored exams come around? They do one of two things, of course: they do it or they cheat.
I’ll start by describing how they do exams without cheating.
They do it: In this scenario, the student simply looked up all of the answers for the assignments to avoid doing them, which resulted in them not knowing the content of the class. Then, when the exam comes, they don’t want to cheat, so they choose to study for the exam. But how can they study for the exam on such short notice? I’m not sure about other schools, but at UF, there are two services that serve students who do just this. The most popular is StudyEdge, and the other option is SmokinNotes. What these subscription services have done is essentially teach students everything they need to know for each exam in a short amount of time, and they’re EXTREMELY popular (StudyEdge claims to serve over 1 million students on their site).
Since these are semi-small, private companies, their numbers are private. However, I can say that if you walk into any UF library near exam times, nearly every computer has a Study Edge video playing, and the Smokin Notes packets are everywhere.
I’ve used both of these services and can say that they’re very good. I would strongly argue that Study Edge teaches the course material in a much more effective way than the actual class offered from UF. Not to mention that Study Edge is all online, which means you can go at your own pace. I can also defend that using one of these methods gives you every resource needed in order to pass the exam.
You may be saying, “So what’s so wrong with an online tutor service to help students learn more?” Well, nothing is wrong with 'them.' They're just filling a gap in the market that is a result of poor teaching from UF professors and/or allowing students to cheat their way through the semester, then only study for the week approaching each exam.
They Don’t Do it: Now let’s explore how students cheat on exams.
After reading this, you will likely think that exams can’t be trusted to be 100% academically honest if they’re remote (which may be true at the moment), but I’d like you to have a more optimistic view.
The widely used service to proctor exams is HonorLock. There used to be a split between Honorlock and ProctorU, but after ProctorU required students to show their entire room before the start of the exam, they were sued, and I haven’t heard anything about them since. ProctorU used to have an actual human proctor watch you throughout your exam, while Honorlock has an AI monitor you. A pretty mediocre AI at best, I’ll say.
Before starting your exam, Honorlock works as a Chrome extension and checks your computer for other open tabs, extensions, external wire connections (HDMI cords), or anything else that breaks its policy. It even started to get fancy last year when they would catch people on their phones during exams because their iPhone was connected through iCloud to their Mac computer. But, the victims of this have paved the way for others to exploit any vulnerability they can. I think I’ll leave it at that.
Technical Competence
As seen in the Quizlet and Chegg spikes, Covid forced a wide adoption of online teaching to all of American high schools and colleges. However, the teachers and professors were not at all prepared for this sudden shift. During the second half of my senior year of high school (2020), it was an amazing time to be a senior in high school because multiple times during the semester, teachers would just give up on teaching a class due to not knowing how to work apps such as Zoom.
Of course, this has died down, and teachers have been trained on how to use the apps, or so I thought. Until last semester when my friend (a fellow senior at UF) said that he had a teacher who just gave everyone A’s for the rest of the class assignments because he didn’t know how to work Canvas. How could this be?
Well, there are two explanations for it. One is that online teaching means older professors have had to drop their teaching style with chalk and board, pen and paper, and replace it with software and recorded presentations. The recorded presentations are fine, but the ever-changing software may be too much for them to handle. This is just a fact for older people, especially those who have committed to doing things a certain way. The second reason is that the in-house instructional design/online teaching department at UF did not do their job the right way by assisting this professor.
I believe that there’s a huge opportunity for a company to offer online teaching assistance along with best cheating prevention practices to universities and provide their professors with all of the information needed to succeed because the in-house departments just simply aren’t doing it right now. This just reinforces the fact that universities are moving away from being an organization that makes its money from teaching, when in reality, they’re money management firms. However, as our degrees decrease in value with every year, I am interested in seeing how these large universities react to the shock that mostly all degrees given out in the next 3 years could be accomplished by nearly anyone with the knowledge of copy and paste and 3 weeks of hard work every 4 months.
I didn’t write this to screw the students coming after me or to encourage universities to fill the gaps brought forward here. I wrote this to spread awareness of the current state of online education and the dilemma that both universities and students are facing with adopting it.
The current state is just not sustainable.