The "Undeserving"

One of the discussions that I found most interesting during the conference with Greville was the discussion around the “deserving” and the “undeserving”. Like one of my fellow classmates, Cynthia, who stated, “I've experienced conversations where smug decision-makers want to keep higher education for the "deserving"; for those who have proven that they are committed to success”, I have also experienced similar conversations such as this.

In my experience, this conversation came about during a company conference in which the topic of discussion was multicultural awareness and sensitivity in the online classroom. This topic was of importance because at the time, there were a large number of Nigerian students enrolled in programs at a UK school that we create courses for. Some students were having problems with the course materials and certain deadlines. The discussion revolved around designing course content in a non-Western exclusive manner and maintaining a cultural awareness during the course development process. 

Unfortunately, a couple of my colleague’s felt that designing course materials in this way would result in “dumbing” down the content. Also, there was a feeling that these Nigerian students were probably not afforded the same quality of education as their peers in the online programs and this was why they experienced difficulties.

Although I can understand the latter, the notion that designing with a multicultural awareness in mind is “dumbing” down the content seems like a pretty prejudice statement to me. This way of thinking should not have any place in distance education. I do wonder, however, what is one to do in a situation where online students are meeting in the same classroom, but may not have similar educational experience or backgrounds? One of the original goals of distance education is to provide education to students who want it, with limited enrollment requirements. This is a great idea, but I wonder how well it works in practice and how many students suffer in silence because they can’t grasp particular concepts.

This varying level of experience in certain areas made me think about undergrad and how students were assessed in Math and English and if a student scored below the requirement level, they were required to take remedial classes for these subjects. I’m not sure how many online programs offer this, but I certainly haven’t experienced this at UMUC or at any of the online schools that I work with professionally. I wonder how much it would cost to assess students. Also, what would be the cost to implement remedial courses for students?

I did a quick search in the library to identify some literature on remedial online college courses and couldn’t really find anything. I found a lot of articles related to remedial community college classes, some articles that mentioned high school classes, and a few that discussed traditional universities, but nothing for online programs.