Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds
Not too surprising that the experience wasn’t good. Having taught in-person and online before, I can guarantee that these students ended up with a sub-optimal experience at best. Teaching online is drastically different than in-person and is not something you can easily pick-up in short notice. Made worse is that they were in the middle of a syllabus designed for in-person instruction. How material is delivered, what type of assignments to give, how to even grade those assignments, etc. - all of that needs to be tailored to an online environment in order to have a good experience. You can’t just “adapt” it like driving on the opposite side of the road. And this is also ignoring tooling needed to make the online experience productive.<p>I believe the colleges when they say that their professors are doing their best. That they are delivering the same high level material. However, that is willfully ignoring the fact that content is a very small part of the college education experience. The delivery, environment, and people are what gives college its value. Lose that and the cost, especially for these high ranking colleges, is not worth it.