Online expansion will hurt STEM students.
A14
Careers in engineering, computer science and the physical sciences are among the most promising routes to solid financial futures for young women and men. It makes sense for Florida’s public universities to give all students — including those from disadvantaged backgrounds — the best possible opportunities to succeed in these fields.
The physics departments at several of the state’s public universities, including the University of Central Florida and Florida State University, have developed and adopted teaching strategies that improve the opportunities for all students to succeed in these demanding fields. Unfortunately, Florida’s leaders seem to be de-emphasizing these important advances. Instead, they are focusing our state’s universities on online instructional strategies that would ignore the results of decades of research about how students learn best and make it tougher for many who would be excellent engineers and scientists to succeed in learning the science and math they need to understand.
Students learn science best when they work together in small groups on hands-on laboratory exercises or problem-solving challenges, a strategy that is often called “interactive engagement.” The intense conversations that take place among students — and between the students and their instructors — during these interactive engagement tasks are the secret sauce that supercharges student learning. The improvements in learning that result from using these strategies are not marginal. In some cases, student learning gains are doubled in classroom environments where such strategies are adopted.
While interactive engagement boosts learning gains across all demographics, it is particularly effective for improving learning by students who are traditionally underrepresented in fields like engineering, computer science and physics — particularly women and students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Women earn only about one-fifth of the bachelors’ degrees awarded in these fields. There are multiple causes for this situation, and simply having many fewer women than men in a classroom causes additional challenges. However, the interactive engagement learning environment gives educators like me an opportunity to address difficulties that women can experience in our classrooms.
In the same way, the interactive engagement classroom allows instructors the opportunity to help first-generation students and others from disadvantaged backgrounds overcome the isolation that often plagues them.
Unfortunately, the governing body for Florida’s State University System — the Board of Governors — is focusing its attention on the development and implementation of science courses that are completely online. They are featuring the development of a program that would scrap laboratory exercises where students have traditionally built collaborative relationships in favor of exercises that are performed by individual students in isolation.
By setting a goal of having 40 percent of all undergraduate credit hours being earned in online courses by 2025, the board is nudging universities toward substituting online courses for in-person courses. This would be particularly damaging for the women and students from disadvantaged backgrounds we have worked so hard to coax into the fields of engineering, computer science and physics with interactive engagement course offerings and other sorts of personal outreach.
Our university system’s leaders should pause their drive to expand online classes and instead consider how best to help the state’s students access the most economically viable professions. Once they have done so, they should focus their efforts on initiatives that would best improve student learning and career prospects. This would likely take them in a very different direction than the one they are pursuing now.