Why virtual teaching will not replace the real kind

I’m teaching two courses this semester, both of them online. They’re going better than I had imagined, but they’re simply not as good as the face-to-face kind.

And that has me thinking about the Personalized System of Instruction, the most important precursor to online learning. Hundreds of thousands of college students took classes in the 1960s and 1970s via PSI, which divided course materials into modules that you could read at your own pace. You took a test after each one; if you passed, you went on to the next. And you rarely encountered the professor, who designed the course but didn’t teach it directly. The system was the brainchild of psychologist Fred S. Keller, a graduate-school friend and disciple of the famed behaviorist B.F. Skinner. Starting at Arizona State University, where Keller taught a psychology course in 1965 via PSI, it spread rapidly across the country. By 1973, roughly 2,000 professors in the United States were using it.

But PSI fizzled almost as quickly as it boomed, because students wanted to know their professors as humans rather than as names on a course syllabus. "Somehow a course where the students never get a chance to even see the person who has designed it is missing something," one PSI instructor told Keller.

Meanwhile, mounting evidence suggested that working-class and lower-income students often lacked the skills to succeed in PSI courses. Stronger students moved quickly through the courses, while weaker students tended to drop out of them.

At pricier private schools, finally, officials worried that students in PSI classes were not getting their money’s worth. A skeptical dean at Georgetown declared that the university "promises students far more than supervision by fellow undergraduates," alluding to the student proctors who administered PSI tests.

Looking back in 1985 on the rise and fall of PSI, a dejected Keller called it a "flash in the pan." But a psychologist friend took the longer view. Across his career, the friend told Keller, he had seen several trends "fade from popularity" and then reappear. In the future, he predicted, "someone will come up with PSI, perhaps under a new name."

He was right. It’s called online instruction, which has reached a crescendo in the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s a pale substitute for the real thing, which is why students at dozens of campuses have demanded tuition discounts. True, students and faculty interact with each other online in ways that simply weren’t possible in the era of PSI. But no matter what we do, we’re all still boxes on screens.

And that makes it more difficult for people to learn. A growing swath of research suggests that students don’t absorb as much online as they do in face-to-face classes, and — as with PSI — that the drop-off is greater for less advantaged students. People who start college with the requisite skills can succeed online, just like they did in PSI courses. But for everyone else, it’s going to be much harder.

"The presence of the teacher matters," one PSI instructor told Keller, explaining why he had started to meet with students in person instead of simply overseeing their tests. "I cannot help but feel that learning is a social act."

Our students are feeling the same thing, right now. We should listen to them.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of "The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America."