Imagine this. It's 8:00 a.m. on Monday, December 15, and the temperature outside is negative ten degrees Fahrenheit. You, a UW-Madison undergraduate student open the shades of your apartment window and gaze out upon the frosted white sidewalk to see hundreds of students trudging across slippery sidewalk with the hoods of their thick winter coats pulled over their heads as they walk to class. They wear thick mittens on their hands that clutch white cups of coffee.
You have a class across campus at 8:50 this morning. You look down at the weather app on your phone, then back out the window. You have a decision to make. You think about how cold your walk to class will be, and then you glance back over at your nice, warm bed. Do you go to class in the Wisconsin cold, or do you go back to sleep?
Professor Morton Gernsbacher of UW-Madison, creator of the course Psychology 532: Psychological Effects of the Internet, admits that every single class that she teaches, she teaches via the internet. She admits that when she shares this with her colleagues, they often look at her like she's crazy. However, when she gets this look, she reminds her colleagues that many new inventions were feared by many when they first rose in popularity, but eventually, they come to be accepted.
The main difference that the internet has when compared to other technologies is its saturation speed. Saturation speed is the time it takes for a technology to be used in half of all households. In Gernsbacher's Unit 1 lecture, she discusses that saturation speed for the landline telephone took more than 50 years, and for air conditioning, it took 30 years. Amazingly, the internet's saturation speed took only a dozen years.
Perhaps this is why people critique the internet so much. It has become incredibly widespread very fast. Although it's been around for awhile now, because it became a part of our culture so quickly after invention, perhaps people view it as a problem similar to addiction. They think that surely, it is unfit to be used for education.
Despite these thoughts, we have talked about new technologies in a negative light for years, and online classes represent a great way for students to learn without leaving the comfort of their apartment or home. If students can take classes online, they never have to trudge through the snow or cold. They can work on their classes around their own schedule at a time that works for them. They may actually be able to hold down a job.
Because Psych 532 was online, I was able to live at home working two jobs and helping my sister recover from surgery while finishing my gerontology certificate. If I had to live in Madison and go to class every day, I would have to pay rent and find a job that could accommodate my class schedule. I love online classes, and I think that more professors should seriously consider making more of their classes online.
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