The National Center for Educational Statistics reports that in spring of 2020, 77% of public schools moved classes to online distance learning formats. Since then, the number of virtual schools in the United States has increased to approximately 475 full-time schools. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic no longer being a concern for most public spaces, many schools have continued to implement hybrid or online options for their students.
These online environments have consistently produced lower scores on learning benchmarks. Advertising online course formats as flexible equivalents to in-person learning experiments is not only deceptive, but also dangerous.
To many, myself included, an online option for a course seems appealing. Being able to choose when and where I complete my homework certainly seems to be an advantage. However, as a full-time college student who has explored many different kinds of learning formats, there is one thing that comes with an online course or degree that never came with anything else: apathy.
To put it simply, despite the convenience of these courses, students in online courses are detached from teachers and classmates, reducing the effort and value attached to completing the course. This difference was alarming to me. While numbers have shown how online environments reduce academic performance, behavior has shown how online environments stunt emotional growth and community connection.
This is a general issue too. As we involve more technology in educational environments, more students of all ages will be impacted. An environment that is entirely online is going to multiply that impact by 10. This goes beyond college and high school — if we cannot stop the spread of online options, we are threatening the emotional and intellectual development of young kids. If we want to produce grown adults capable of learning and caring about the things they learn about, we need to step in now.
Psychologists suggest a proactive approach to these issues. Both benchmark scores and emotional well-being can be improved by fostering connection in classrooms, which means reducing what technology we’re using in schools — get rid of Chromebooks, return to paper. As in-person connection increases, students are more likely to develop healthy habits and relationships throughout their life. Including their relationship with technology.
It may seem that restriction would interfere with kids’ development of self-control, but supplementing that time with connections to teachers and peers actually teaches them to find self-control outside of the internet. Psychologists have also discovered one other strategy for creating more empathetic adult students: put them outside.
With entertainment becoming more digitalized by the day, offering alternative forms of entertainment in nature has surprising mental health benefits. For one, nature exists in the real world and can be interacted with in ways technology cannot replace. Being present in these environments and understanding how we affect the real world has been shown to make people more empathetic.
One of the best examples of this is mothers. A mom’s primary job is to ensure the safety and health of her kids. Ask any mother, she’ll tell you her life revolve around her kids. This focus on real people who are directly affected by your choices is exactly the kind of care that makes mothers so empathetic. In the context of online degrees, a mom who wants to return to school but can’t leave her kids can benefit from that flexibility I mentioned prior, since they have the real-world connection outside of their school.
In a country where online course options have become more prevalent, I suggest institutions, parents and teachers place greater emphasis on the benefits of attending a class in person, especially for high school and college age students who are primarily focused on getting the most out of their education. Having online alternatives is a great way to allow working parents or adults to gain an education — it should not be an option for teenagers and young adults. Let’s put an end to advertising online courses as equivalent alternatives for traditional schooling when they pose a danger to emotional well-being.