BY AARON BARLOW

We are losing our students.

At least, for now.

Yesterday, another student in one of my classes told me he is not registering for the fall. He said that online education isn’t working for him (though he did say he likes my class). This is not the first time I have heard a student say they’ve had it with online classes over the weeks since the ‘migration.’ And the scuttlebutt at my college is that, while applications for the fall are up, fewer returning students than usual are registering.

Other schools are experiencing the same thing among their returning students. Or that’s what I hear from faculty (administrations are rather mum, not surprisingly). Students are unhappy with their online courses and would rather take a break from school completely instead of continuing in this fashion.

This should be no surprise to anyone. One of the predictions for financial problems in colleges and universities as a result of the pandemic is based on an increased drop-out (or at least a semester off) rate. This will be caused, in the common belief, by financial disruption within student families. That it might also be caused by student reluctance to continue with a new form of instruction that they do not like has been noted but is not a featured argument. It should be.

Students deserve offerings as strong as we can make them. Online pedagogy, especially in course design, has long been weak, focusing most on the technology and designed by technologists who have rarely sought input from teachers who have the totality of the student learning and living situations in mind.

So, not surprisingly, the universal push in higher education is to bring instructors up to speed on the technology needed for online education. While this is necessary, in their rush, colleges and universities are ignoring, for the most part, the impact that the hurried and uneven implementation of the recent move online has had on student motivation. Students have to want to pursue online classes for those classes to succeed. This essential part of online pedagogy seems to be getting lost. Certainly, it has been damaged this semester.

Aside from the chaos of a too-quick migration online, part of the reason for the current failure is a long-standing vision of online pedagogy that centers on mastery of digital technologies along with acceptance of assumptions about student motivation that aren’t really warranted but that the technologists in charge are unequipped to examine. Even the oversight of online teaching has long been left to technologists (who “certify” teachers as competent to teach online) and rarely to teachers. This has long been a problem; the current crisis simply exacerbates it.

Online courses have rarely been designed with student retention in mind. For the most part, online pedagogy has focused on the method and not on the learner, assuming that reaching to goal of course completion provides motivation enough.

Without real attention to student needs (beyond the technological—which are, of course, essential), the disaster of this semester (let’s call it what it is) will continue into the fall. The students know that technology itself is not enough and fewer and fewer will wish to participate in something that grows more boring, frankly, the more they do of it. Something that provides little motivation for continuing.

Any school with a concerted effort to make online courses into activities students want to partake in should make that effort obvious to the students, but I have seen little sign of that, making me think few colleges or universities are addressing the problem. Course design publicly involving active student participation in the planning of the classes, for example, could stem part of the decline we are facing for the fall. Make the classes interesting and each one different, just as we try to do in our physical classrooms, and students will enroll once they hear about them. Find ways of making online offerings different from, and better than, those of other schools and promote them. All of these things can help with retention.

But they are unlikely to happen. At least, they are not happening so far—or very rarely.

Part of the reason for this is that few of the people making decisions about the look of higher education for the coming fall are teachers in direct contact with students. Instead, they are administrators and technocrats who have had little direct experience with the realities of student lives during this crisis. Nor do they feel they have the time to organize the front-line teachers into leadership positions or to work directly with disaffected students to try to meet their needs. So, they go ahead as they always have, only more so.

This is understandable but it is also short-sighted.

Any school that manages to show that its online courses will be different from the cobbled-together one that students are experiencing right now, and that its fall offerings will be distinct from those students are familiar with from past years of what they tell me is dreary exposure to online education, will be at a real advantage this fall. Its courses, instead of focusing on the students and making them feel like either rats in a maze or consumers without knowledge of the product, will allow students to do the focusing—and students will appreciate that. The idea of their own agency, their own involvement, will intrigue students and start a process of enhancing motivation that can be furthered by course design and pedagogical smarts.

“As we move into a new, perhaps temporary framework for education in the fall, we are asking our students to work with their professors to create classes that meet course goals while recognizing students’ current lives and educational desires.”

Can you imagine a school making such a statement, vague as it is? This, or something like it (with more specifics) could be effective in regenerating student interest. At the same time, it could be sparking real shared governance for the first time in a long time, bringing both faculty and students into an act of educational creation that could actually improve student college experience even amid the reigning chaos.

But it would take guts to implement it, and guts (as we saw in the run-up to the shut-down) are sorely lacking among American higher-education administrators.

For success in the fall, student agency and involvement need to be considered and evident. And strongly backed. Students shouldn’t be sitting and waiting for something to be done to them or even “for” them, as is the case right now They need to be part of the process attempting to make the fall semester successful—or many of them are going to drop away until the time when higher education is back to a “normal” they can trust.

Students don’t like what is happening now. That should be clear to everyone; certainly, it is clear to most of us who are teaching this semester. Already, we have lost far too many students and hear the grumblings of the others. We can’t ignore them, not if we are going to reduce the attrition and keep our institutions vibrant.

Yet the American colleges and universities are heading into the fall with only minimal input from the very people they like to imagine as “clients” or “customers,” the very people who can make or break their enterprises. Or even from those of their own employees who interact most directly with those students, the frontline teachers—and not just the full-time, permanent faculty but the casuals, the “visiting,” the contingent, the adjuncts. Instead of listening to them, administrators are only trying to provide something—but even that, unfortunately, seems to be limited to imparting technical prowess to the faculty.

Unless they, the students (not to mention their teachers), are brought explicitly and substantially into the process of the redefining of college education (even it the changes are only temporary), the blow to higher education from the pandemic is going to be much harder than it needs to be.

What startles me is how few administrators see this or recognize the role they could be playing in supporting students and faculty in projects to create something positive this fall even as the old ways seem to be crumbling. This is not something faculty can do alone—it is at the heart, though, of shared governance and the current failure shows its lack. Had we shared governance in reality and not in myth, colleges would right now be involved in exciting processes involving students, faculty and administrators as equal partners in creating an improved model for American education. Instead, American colleges and universities are relying on top-down management and a pedagogy for online education that has been failing students for years. They are also relying on technologists to guide their movement into an entirely new situation who are offering nothing but what has been seen before.

The students see this and are turning away—but there is still time to turn things around.

There is still time to turn online education to something students don’t groan about (as mine did, when I announced the migration), making it something that, while not a replacement for the classroom experience, offers something students want and can make use of.

But it will take both leadership and a willingness to share decision-making throughout the institution to keep our colleges and universities, even online, from remaining as empty, metaphorically, as the streets of Brooklyn really were this March.

Let’s hope we can find them.