NCAA’s Technological McCarthyism

I read in today’s Chronicle that the NCAA is now disallowing Division I bound high school athletes from  using  replacement credits earned through either the Bringham Young Independent Stdudy or American School’s online programs. One would hope that it wasn’t the Michael Oher story that prompted this decision. After all, I think the point of that movie was to inspire, not condemn. But since NCAA officials are being their typically tight-lipped selves about this decision,  one is  left to assume that the NCAA has decided that online instruction provides an easier way for a student to earn a better grade, and thus boost their eligibility for admission to a Division I school. Perhaps such is the case, but perhaps not. 

Perhaps online learning is a better modality for some students, since it affords them the opportunity to spend more time on topics with which they struggle, while allowing them to breeze through the stuff they already know.   Perhaps some students earn a better grade in an online class because this format allows them to access the best teacher in the country rather than the best that their district can afford to hire, or the best teacher who is willing to work in a neighborhood school that is the equivalent of a combat zone. Perhaps online classes improve learning through the use of formative assessments of learning—ones that identify weaknesses early on and provide an opportunity to remedy the problem—rather than summative assessments which simply pass this year’s problem on to next year’s teacher. Or perhaps for some students, the ability to learn by looking rather than by listening leads to better outcomes (especially given the fact that lots of classroom teachers don’t exactly demonstrate mastery of the English language). 

It seems a bit short-sighted that the NCAA would make a blanket determination that all online classes at these two institutions are bad, while at the same time they seem to believe that any credit earned, say, in a D.C. public school, is based on rigorous teaching and stringent assessment. Do we not have a problem with grade inflation and social promotion in our nation’s red-brick buildings? I suspect that there are good online classes and bad online classes in the same way that there are good classroom-based classes and bad classroom-based classes. For the record, one of my sons took a literature course through the Brigham Young Independent Study program (though he utilized the correspondence modality) when, as a 16 year old, he spent six months “living off the land” in the mountains of Utah and Colorado, hiking from place to place, living in a tent, with no access to a toilet, running water, or electricity (which was, perhaps, the most profound and important learning experience of his life—and one that probably took 10 years off of mine). Both of my sons took on-line AP courses through the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, and I was impressed with the quality and rigor of both the Brigham Young and the Hopkins courses. Both courses utilized certified teachers to grade the work and both required exams to be taken in a certified testing center (my son had to send in all of the work and take all of the tests when he returned to civilization).
 
Yes, there are challenges in assuring that the person sitting at the other end of the computer or completing the work is the student and not some proxy, but this is not unique to online instruction. I know countless numbers of parents (who send their kids to traditional schools) who essentially complete their child’s homework assignments on a regular basis, who write most of their child’s papers, and who even wrote their child’s college admissions essay, or hired someone else to do it. In fact, my husband and I both stopped judging science fairs when it became obvious to us that the winning projects generally involved a scientist parent or a scientist mentor and not the unimproved original work of the student. In either classroom or online instruction, exams must be rigorous enough to require that the student attends class, does the work, and learns a thing or two in order to pass. Is the NCAA going around to high schools across the country to evaluate the rigor of classroom instruction, exams, and grading rubrics utilized by teachers in traditional settings?

Based on what I hear from my friends who are still in academe, it would seem that the NCAA doesn’t  do this given the lack of skills demonstrated by many athletes at Division I schools who took all of their high school classes with a teacher in the front of the room. Beyond that, how many of you college professors check student ID’s at the beginning of the semester and prior to each exam to be sure the person sitting in your classroom is who you think it is (and not some other student being paid to take the hard class for a less able … um … student-athlete—which is not to suggest that all or even most student-athletes are less able than others to pass hard classes, but they do have significant demands on their time as the result of practice and travel requirements)?

It is interesting to me that while academics think of themselves as the brightest, most open-minded, and most progressive people on the planet, they refuse to understand that technology holds tremendous promise in improving education not just by nibbling around the edges (which is exactly what current reform efforts do), but instead by fundamentally restructuring education so that it is based not on how we like to teach, but instead on how students actually learn. Technology could allow us for the first time to use science and empirical data to customize the curriculum for each student, monitor student progress, and diagnose problems at the earliest stage. Technology could allow us to pair teachers and students based on alignment of styles or needs and abilities rather than geographic or registration accident. Technology could improve the efficiency of education by ensuring that students don’t lose interest at the hands of a teacher who moves too slowly, or lose confidence at the hands of one who moves too quickly.    

While every other element of society has harnessed the power of technology to drive advancements and efficiencies, education seems bound and determined to squelch innovation and ensure that good old-fashioned classroom instruction prevails, not because we have any evidence that traditional instruction is better for students, but instead because it is the modality with which the current professoriate is experienced and most comfortable.  Traditional instruction represents job security for those currently in the ranks. 

I am not saying that online instruction is better than classroom instruction or that it is worse, but I do believe that it is time for academics to stop pretending that better PowerPoints, or avatars, or Twitter feeds represent innovation in education or the best that technology can offer, when instead those things represent little more than whiz-bang tools used to do the same old things we’ve always done. Computers might allow us to write more, but they don’t necessarily force us to write better. In fact, I would argue that the electronic world has led to a precipitous devolution in writing quality, not to mention accuracy (does anyone under 20 understand when to capitalize anything?). 

While those who have spent their lifetime in the classroom might be afraid of the revolution, it is time to at least consider the possibility that technology might actually improve student learning in ways not possible within the constraints of the traditional system that is limited by geography, socioeconomics, time, real estate, and random pairing of students and teachers. And besides, good online instruction still requires good teachers, perhaps even better teachers since it is much easier to hold the instructor accountable when there is a written record of what students are taught and what they learn. Perhaps this is the source of so much fear.

Certainly an institution of higher education should have the ability to evaluate the worthiness of any credits a student brings with him or her from high school, but for the NCAA to make a unilateral decision that any online class from Brigham Young’s Independent Study program or the American School  is less worthy than any traditional class taught in any traditional high school is just wrong.  Some might call this sort of thing academic McCarthyism.