In-person and online teaching: what is better?
Strengths and weaknesses of in-person and online teaching. The speech by Carlo Lottieri, professor of Philosophy of Law at the Department of Law at the University of Verona
Even if very often in a specious manner, online universities are today criticized by defenders of the old academic world on the basis of the thesis that face-to-face lessons would be much better in terms of quality and that teaching based on recordings would outline teaching that is lacking from various points of view. view.
Although the hostility towards online universities appears to be dictated above all by a mix of opportunism (the defense of the places and privileges of state universities) and ideology (the fear that progressivism will see its well-established hegemony over culture disappear), it can still be It is appropriate to investigate how well founded are the considerations of those who contest the value of a teaching imparted using telematic methodologies, and not using traditional oral lessons.
Without denying the merits of the interpersonal relationship, it is good to keep in mind that recorded (asynchronous) courses have their strengths; and not on trivial aspects.
First of all, recording a course forces the teacher into a discipline that we do not always find in traditional lessons. Those who teach in the classroom can often get lost in a whole series of parentheses and start long dialogues with students which, in some cases, are distracting. The asynchronous lesson, on the other hand, is always a specific piece of a linear scheme, of an educational path first conceived and then constructed, which must lead the student to achieve very specific acquisitions. Since the recorded lesson is not ephemeral, but instead remains available for years, it also forces the teacher to take greater care. In short, the teacher is called upon to develop a linked, consequential analysis aimed at better understanding the subject matter he deals with. In order to help the student with his study, the asynchronous lessons are imagined as if they were the chapters of a volume (and generally the teacher is also asked to provide a written description, in concise terms, of each lesson).
Being designed for a typical listener who tends to coincide with the student-worker, whose time is obviously very precious, asynchronous lessons must be understandable and effective, well calibrated, not dispersive. In this sense, in general we can expect a higher teaching quality from online lessons compared to in-person ones.
Is something lost? No doubt. In fact, in many circumstances the excellent student does not need a professor to introduce him page by page to the contents he must prepare for the exam. It may then be that he takes advantage of "high" lessons, detached from the final exam and aimed at problematizing this or that aspect of the subject with great freedom, outside of rigid schemes. From this consideration we can derive the idea that probably for a top student traditional teaching may also be preferable, but for the majority of students the (clearer and more explanatory) methodology of recordings is much more suitable.
If what has been said has a foundation, it cannot be said that one method is absolutely superior to the other, because in the end a lot depends on the recipients of the teachings.
As mentioned, however, there is much that is specious in the accusations addressed by state universities (and by the Crui, the Conference of Rectors of In-person Universities) against online universities. When you ask, for example, that the numerical ratio between teachers hired by the university and students in online universities is similar to that of in-person universities, you pretend to ignore two things: firstly, that speaking in a classroom is one thing in front of thirty people and it's another thing to record for a theoretically unlimited number of students; secondly, the tutor has a crucial role in telematics, acting as a link between the teacher and the student.
Equally senseless is trying to impose a certain amount of streaming lessons. In fact, if not even students of traditional universities are obliged to attend (and if traditional universities are above all "absent" universities, given that Cineca data highlights that after the first year non-attending students rise to 70% and in subsequent years even at 90%), it is not clear why telematics student-workers should be penalised. In addition to this, the strategic choice of recorded videos arises from the need to satisfy the needs of those who work and must be able to freely choose the times and ways of studying.
In this sense, an analysis of educational issues that ignores the experiences of students, and therefore also of those workers who represent a much more than majority share of those who enroll in online universities, would be unreasonable.
For a series of educational and also organizational reasons (practical and economic, which take into account the scarcity of time and resources), it can instead be argued that many study courses would benefit considerably from a hybrid approach: which sometimes resorts to lessons in presence and in other circumstances, instead, to those recorded or in streaming.
The trouble is that this intermediate solution is often hampered by sorting. Online universities cannot hold in-person courses, but some of the same in-person universities (this is the case of Link) are sometimes accused of being online universities in disguise, since they record all the lessons and make them available to every student . According to the defenders of the existing, however, any "hybridization" would betray the spirit of a regulation which, when it allowed the accreditation of online universities, did not intend to liberalize the academy, but only to create a second university area, subjected to a infinite number of rules and constraints.
In Italy, higher education will then have a future if the logic of freedom of enterprise (for private companies) and autonomous organization (for state ones) prevails over the centralist dirigisme that prevails today, which sees a small group of politicians and bureaucrats establish that in the next three years it will not be possible to create courses in Political Science or Economics, that lessons must be taught this way and not that, and so on.
No one can know for sure how teachers X and Y can best meet the needs of students A and B. Only an order of freedom that puts aside state university programming (which in other words restores academic freedom), goes beyond the legal value of qualifications (as Luigi Einaudi already asked for in 1947) and rejects any artificial distinction between in-person and online universities, can help us search for the best solutions: outside of any planning presumption and any authoritarian imposition.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/didattica-in-presenza-e-online-cose-meglio/ on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 07:02:26 +0000.