Online Teaching

Distance Learning Then and Now

When distance learning began in the Twentieth Century (facilitated by cheap postal service), course materials moved between student and instructor via mail.  These were correspondence courses.  Today, students and professors communicate through email, videos, and audio, and exchange content via the web. Learning on the web can be synchronous or asynchronous, with real-time, hourly, or daily exchanges between instructor and students, more closely mimicking the real classroom.   Well-crafted online courses are not just correspondence courses, but what we call instructed courses, or those that feature strong teaching presence, professor-student interaction, and student-student interaction.  

Since the beginning of the internet, online learning has grown steadily.  Pundits have predicted that online education will transform higher education, and the hype surrounding online courses has inspired at least as much healthy skepticism.  But even as higher education enrollments have stabilized, online enrollments have steadily (if undramatically) become a greater share of higher ed enrollments.  

By 2015, about 14% of students attended college exclusively online, and about twice that took at least one distance education course.  By the beginning of 2020, around a third of U.S. college students had taken at least one online course.  Most online students attend not-for-profit institutions within their own states, but as many as 40% attend classes offered at schools in other states.  Public colleges and universities have been perhaps the most aggressive in developing online programs, but around one out of four students at private, non-profit schools are or have been online students at some point. 

The COVID 19 Crisis of 2020 forced many colleges and universities to move some or all academics online.  This gave many college faculty experience with online teaching, but it is important not to draw conclusions about online teaching just from this experience.  Online courses are properly constructed as such beforehand.  For most face-to-face courses hastily reconvened online in March 2020, this was not the case, and neither faculty nor students were prepared for the switch.  

Canisius University has greatly expanded it's online academic footprint.  In 2017, Canisius offered around 100 online courses; in 2023, the University offered over 450 online courses.  Many are in our online programs but most of this growth was in programs that were ostensibly face-to-face.  Canisius has no all-online undergraduate programs but in Fall 2021, over half (54%) of its undergraduate students were enrolled in at least one online course.  Online courses support Canisius University's 2023 Strategic Plan, directing us to "Expand the use of flexible educational modalities to meet modern societal workforce demands."