You don't know what you're consuming!

High School Hallway by
Matt Dempsey CC BY-SA

"You don't know what you're consuming!*"  It's a loose translation of what my grandmother used to say to me when I refused to eat something 'exotic' (in my view) that she had cooked, like rabbit stew or cuttlefish. My sophomoric response was "I know exactly what I'm eating" since I didn't want to even try what she'd cooked. I suspect that Grandma meant to say "You don't know what you're missing," but somehow Grandma's malaphor was always one of those things that we shared a tacit understanding of.

Anyway, the other day I was reading a post on IHE on Online Classes and Conflicting Desires. The crux of the argument is a conflicting relationship with what people say and their actions (um, surprise?)...

I’m seeing it in the push-pull of students wanting a more robust on-campus college experience while simultaneously crowding into online classes. The desire for a robust on-campus experience conflicts with the desire for a convenient schedule.

Matt continues on his description of what has transpired, which I will paraphrase as a self-reinforcing spiral of doom: Students choose online courses instead of campus courses, fewer campus courses are offered as a result, more students are online, then (some) students lament the loss of something that was advantageous in some manner, but it's too late.

The piece ends with:

My colleagues and I don’t want to go back to the days before online classes (or dual enrollment, for that matter). But we would like to see more students roaming the halls, talking to each other and seeing what they’ve been missing. I can’t help but wonder how much of their voting with their feet reflects not knowing what they could have had.

I think your mileage may vary, depending on your socioeconomic background, when and where you went to college, your types of support, and so on.  Whenever I read things like "not know what they could have had" I tend to default to my own college experiences. For the most part, my education was in traditional classrooms (a BA and 3.5 Master's degrees worth of classes). Yes, our campus was (and still is) full of life.  The hallways are packed with students, classes are full (from what I can tell by when I walk by an active classroom), and people seem to be enjoying the experience of in-person classes...and also, people who seem bored, checked out, sleepy, and distracted by some digital device. However, just because classes have people in them and the hallways are seeing full of people, it doesn't necessarily mean that those are your people and that you have time to enjoy those moments between classes. 

My unviersity, despite being a commuter school, had a lot of student activities - very few of which I could actually make time for because I was also working. So, I would go to work, then go to class, then back to work, and then back to class (and sometimes back to work) before finally heading home. I didn't have the luxury of not working, and I assume others are in the same boat. In graduate school, working adults came after their workday, and there wasn't all that much HOMAGO happening before or after class. About the only time this happened was when Dr. Tonn, in one of our intro to management courses, forced us to meet outside of class hours to do work as teams on a regular basis.  It was fun, but it was enforced (and it didn't happen in other courses where it wasn't enforced). I don't think this mythical, magical land of on-site learning, homago, camaraderie, cumbaya actually happened except for some very privileged instances (where it probably still happens). For the rest of us, we've had real-world concerns, and education fit in, like water filling the voids between grains of sand, in other words - fitting in wherever possible. 

Many years ago (2011ish?) in BlendKIT, I heard a phrase that has stuck with me.  The future is blended. I still think that's true, and in order to make it effective, we need to be intentional about our course and program design. I think there is a space here for meaningful, memorable, and impactful on-site experiences.  I don't think filling the lecture halls for chalk-n-talk disciplines is it, in the off chance that some spark of creativity and camaraderie catches on fire. If we want folks to come to campus, we need to at least be willing to eat the cost of a campus class when it's under-enrolled until it's not under-enrolled; and work on creating blended experiences that make sense for the educational outcomes rather than use them as measurements of on-site butts-in-seats time. It's also OK for folks to be fully online if they are getting what they need to get, but that's another post.

Going back to my Grandma, I don't think the author's argument of "you don't know what you're missing" is valid because I don't think that thing was ever there in the way it was imagined in the minds of the author.

* The actual phrase was Δέν ξερεις τι τρώς (you don't know what you're eating), but for the purposes of this blogpost, I slightly modified the verb to make more sense.