Are Your University Classes Online This Fall? Treat Them as if They Were a Tutorial for the Best Results
In an op-ed published in the New York Times on July 8th, 2020, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, argued that in order to online classes to really work, they ought to be conducted using the tutorial system.
According to Barrett, the tutorial system, which is standard at Oxford and Cambridge, operates as follows:
In the classic tutorial system, students do most of their learning in small sessions that include the professor (or an assistant) and just a few other students. The students are expected to work actively with the material as they engage critically with the instructor and one another. Discussions and additional reading are tailored to students’ abilities and interests. Courses may also include larger lectures and traditional exams, but the tutorials are where the main action happens.
As a professor with quite a bit of experience teaching both online and in-person, I couldn’t agree more with Dr. Barrett. In fact, I’m confident that most professors would agree with Barrett.
The problem is that the American university system is crumbling due to decades of austerity at the state and federal level as well as equally short-sighted, if not downright imbecilic, agendas pursued by college deans and increasingly corporate-sourced boards. This leaves no money to hire the people needed to run a tutorial system (unless you were to rely even more on underpaid-and often uninsured-graduate student labor, which is morally unconscionable, even though it’s part of the current, broken model).
The long-term solution is for states to return to healthy levels of university funding, the levels of funding that would be able to keep universities not only somewhat affordable but also able to offer top-level instruction, online or off. We don’t need better educational technologies, we need more money and smart, dedicated faculty members. The future of education is in wetware, not hardware or software.
In the short-term, it is incumbent upon those students who want to learn, or simply those students who don’t want to be bored to tears, to treat their online classes and seminars as if they were tutorials. In my experience, even face-to-face classes suffer from low student engagement (except at a few elite liberal arts schools, where seminars are fantastic due to the students). In fact, in a class of 20, discussion regularly involves no more than 5 or 6 students (they are not always the best or the brightest, but that make the classroom come alive by participating).
So what I want to suggest to students entering the online classroom in Fall 2020 is this: treat your online classes as if they were tutorials. Students who want the most out of Fall 2020 must actively engage with their professor and the 4 or 5 likeminded peers they are likely to encounter in their online classes. Students ought to simply ignore the majority of their peers who will be passively “present.” This proposal is no panacea, but it will make Fall 2020 a little better, or a little more bearable for those who try. It’s the best that students can make of a bad situation.
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