Before last year, online education was somewhat more of a Silicon Valley experiment in the ways tech could enhance aspects of education and address some common issues with it. With the advent of COVID-19, schools that ordinarily wouldn’t have considered such a radical proposal anytime soon have been forced to live and breathe it fully. It’s not a stretch, then, to say that the kinks are still being ironed out in delivering effective online education. But as it becomes more prevalent and important, we must address those issues now more than ever. Let’s talk about one of the long-standing arguments against online courses that has been continually invoked until recently: classroom interactivity.
In education, we think of the spectrum from the in-person to the online classroom as involving a tradeoff, between generality (how many people can be in the audience) to interactivity (how well the student’s concerns and problems can be directly addressed, or how well the student can learn directly from the instructor.)
However, sometimes there are exciting innovations that can actually end up making both dimensions better, and those can get really interesting if they are readily available.
For example, Art of Problem Solving has pioneered an approach to its online classroom, that I think, in a starkly innovative way, confers the benefits of increased generality from the inherently online nature while preserving, or in fact actually increasing, the interactivity.
How exactly does it do this? The online classroom runs essentially like a chat, which allows for quick and easy input (just type what you want, don’t think about having to click around to use a UI). However, when a student types into the chat and hits “enter,” the message doesn’t appear. Instead, it goes directly to the instructors. Students can type whatever they want – their most basic, “dumbest” questions about the material – and no one sees it except the instructors. It’s better than raising a hand in a classroom, since students might not be comfortable speaking up and, relative to whatever social dynamics are at play around “knowing the stuff”, they might feel that they could be punished for asking simple questions. Instead, the TA, who’s watching the messages come in while the instructor conducts the class, opens a private window with just you, and engages directly with you, while the class is running – no office hour scheduling needed. I used this to great ability when I mistakenly took Intermediate Number Theory Seminar with AoPS without having seen modular arithmetic before. The TA for that class calmly opened a window and explained the terminology to me.
There will be all sorts of problems with online courses as they become more prominent – more than what we’ve already seen. As these issues manifest, we must put together our resources, our ideas, and our thoughts to tackle them head on, innovating in ways that not only solve for those dimensions, but actually make them even better. In the process, we’ll remake our education system for an era that is increasingly technology-heavy, and make it better for ourselves, our instructors, and our current and future students.
