ZACH TENNENT

The Internet plays a big role in the lives of students. Although it can be a useful research and information tool, I’m tired of the way it’s continually applied to university courses and assignments.

There’s no doubt that the Internet provides modern students with many advantages that would have been luxuries in previous generations. Thanks to Google, you’re never more than a few clicks away from the answer to any question you could have. Online archives and databases make it so that virtually no source is unattainable. When it’s time to study, online video lectures and websites like Khan Academy — an organization that makes free math and science video lectures — make review far easier.

It’s fair to say that with all these resources available to us, the Internet has much to offer for enriching modern education. However, university instructors fail to understand its uses when it comes to incorporating it into schoolwork.

Recognizing the change in how students go about learning, many professors seem to be doing their best to work online components into otherwise unchanged assignments. The intentions behind this would be ostensibly to better engage students by refocusing the format of traditional schoolwork and centering it around the use of computers — which so many students already rely on for class notes and work.

This includes acts like assigning blogs, giving online quizzes and assignments or even giving homework from the lab CDs that come with many introdcutory level science textbooks.

These kinds of variations almost always end badly. Arbitrarily making assignments into online projects doesn’t enrich the learning process. All it does it take an otherwise straightforward lesson, quiz or project and apply it to a medium that it isn’t suited for. This then wastes all the potential that the Internet actually has when it comes to being an educational tool.

Making a blog or Wikispaces page instead of simply writing a paper isn’t going to make the project any better or make the act any more exciting or dynamic for the student. An online quiz may seem like a way to mix things up, but it will always just be a quiz. Doing questions on a CD instead of out of a textbook won’t aid in the learning process.

Not only do these computer-focused assignments lack purpose, but they also defeat their own objectives. It shouldn’t be about getting students to do their work online just for the sake of incorporating the Internet. If a professor is going to be giving online work, it should be a type of assignment that actually warrants a change. In my experience, assignments that actually necessitate the use of online resources are almost non-existent.

All this suggests to me is that professors want their assignments to be more exciting, but they don’t actually want to change anything about them or come up with new ones, so they simply wedge in the Internet as a means of making the old assignments more relevant to technological changes.

There lies the problem. I would much rather have no Internet assignments than ones that are unnecessary and do nothing to promote better learning.

As I said, there are definitely ways in which the Internet can be beyond beneficial to students. It makes researching, problem solving and studying all far easier, but current online assignments don’t even play to those strengths; instead of giving students opportunities to learn in new ways, they just superficially offer the same old thing and call it adaptation.

I have no doubts that professors are capable of creating online assignments that are stimulating, educational and purposeful, but until they begin to use online resources in a more functional way, we’re simply squandering potential.