EDUCATOR’S CORNER
Online Teaching vs.
Classroom Teaching Rasoul Sorkhabi, Ph.D., CPG-11981
Dr. Rasoul Sorkhabi is a professor at the University of Utah’s Energy & Geoscience Institute, Salt Lake City. Email:
rsorkhabi@egi.utah.edu
Teaching tools, methods and environments have changed
through history. There was a time – tens of thousands of years ago – when our cave-dwelling ancestors gathered around a fire and shared stories or painted the art of hunting on the rock. Indeed, for millennia, school was as large as life; children learned from their parents and tribal members all the time. This schooling is still prevalent in indigenous tribes. With urban life and division of labor came schools where profes- sional teachers taught children how to read, write, measure, calculate, and so forth. With increased specialization, higher education in colleges and universities became necessary. Plato reportedly had this sign inscribed at the door of his Academy: “Let no one who does not know geometry enter” – the first recorded instance of an entrance examination. Aristotle’s Lyceum was less informal: He used to walk while teaching – hence his philosophy came to be known as the Peripatetic (“walking”) school. Higher education schools were particularly developed in the Islamic civilization from the 8th through 12th centuries. It was in these schools that textbooks, rather than being skin parchments, clay tablets or cloths were paperbound manuscripts (originally invented in China), and professors wore “embroidered robes” (what we still do in graduation ceremonies), sat on their own “chairs,” and issued “licenses.” These traditions were adopted by emerging universities in Europe during the Renaissance. In all these different styles of education one thing was common: Teachers and students had to be together. Correspondence schools that emerged in the 19th century changed the rules of the game, but they never became mainstream education even with the advent of radio and television in the 20th century. Face-to-face classroom education has been the predominant platform of education through the history of civilization – until 2020, the year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when online education became a forced option, a necessary evil or a modern savior (according to dif- ferent perspectives).
Online education, like correspondence schooling, is a type of
“distant education” but the major difference is that – thanks to the internet –teacher and students can be together at the same time but in difference places. Online education is not entirely new. Even before the pandemic, universities offered
continued education courses on their websites, and college teachers used email, e-textbooks, video recordings (lectures and documentary films), and Canvas1 system even in class- room teaching. However, the 2020 pandemic has compelled universities to embrace online education more fully. This has raised questions and debates as to the pros and cons of real-life classroom versus virtual classroom teaching (or e-education for short), and whether a full-scale online education is able to or is going to replace the traditional classroom teaching. These questions and debates have both immediate and far-reaching implications.
Virtual Teaching: Vice or Virtue? The main difference between real-life classroom and online
teaching is the working environment. In classroom teach- ing the environment is physically specified and limited to a fixed number of participants who have to commute there. In e-education, teacher and students do not meet in the same physical place. This has several advantages. Firstly, it offers ease and convenience; you do not need to drive to the campus and struggle to find a place to park, and then walk to classroom, all of which consumes your time. You can sit in the comfort of your room and attend the class. Secondly, being a virtual environment, many students can take the course, or even, more than one teacher can teach the class.
Flexible time is also often mentioned as an advantage
for online classes although this depends on how the teacher administers the class. In traditional classes, the teacher and students spend, say 80 minutes, together per class, and atten- dance usually carries some grade points. In online classes, the teacher may decide to record lectures and post them online. This will give flexible time for the student to watch the lectures at an appropriate time. However, if the teacher decides to con- vene the class at a specific time on a teleconference platform (such as BlueJeans Meetings, Cisco Webex, ezTalks Meeting, GoToMeeting, Lifesize, Skype for Business, and Zoom), then there is little difference between real-life and virtual classes. Also, if the teacher sets deadlines for assignments and project reports to be submitted, it will be similar to classroom educa- tion in which students do their homework, assignments and
1. Canvas is a web-based educational management system designed by Instructure, a company based in Salt Lake City, Utah (founded by two BYU graduate students, Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley, in 2008). It is used by a large number of colleges and universities in the US, even for traditional classroom teaching. Teachers can upload lecture notes, assignments and other teaching materials, send messages to students, grade their work, and so forth. In 2019, Instructure announced that Thoma Bravo would acquire the company for $2 billion.
48 TPG •
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