For most students at the Illinois Institute of Technology (or Illinois Tech), we are familiar with a semester-long course structure; attend classes two times a week for 90 minutes. For most of my time at Illinois Tech, that was the case for me as well. Recently, Illinois Tech has made a shift in how they offer education to students, now offering an online-based program. This online program offers students masters degrees in business administration, data science, information technology, as well as my degree; health physics.
Up until this semester, all of my classes for my health physics master’s program have been semester-long, bar a week long lab course in the summer. Most of these classes were online despite professors mostly being on campus. Most students in the program are already in the field, being older and unable to temporarily uproot their lives for college, therefore an online program makes a lot of sense for this demographic. Myself and one other student are the only co-term students in the program.
Before I talk about the eight-week system, I will drop a few comments about how the system has been up until now. The health physics program often feels a little bit ‘watered down,’ much of the physics and math content is not rigorous, but there is a much stronger focus on the mechanics and fundamentals. While this is a little sad for a physics (my bachelors) student, it makes sense in the context of this degree. The program suffers from a somewhat repetitive nature. The content is repeated a bit, and many classes start the first lecture with what an atom is, what radioactive decay is, and so on; stuff we should have already learned in the intro course.
But these are small complaints; the system worked. I learned a lot, and felt satisfied with my outcome in education, and most important; I was able to find employment, even before graduating. The professors in the program are amazing and worked hard to get the knowledge in our heads. The head, Doctor David Scherer, is incredible and handles a majority of the labor of the department. Being online was not even a hindrance at all. I enjoyed being able to pace myself, get more time during the day to do things, then being able to focus on lectures and work at night. Having another co-term friend also helped keep me from feeling alone in the program.
Last semester, the head of the program let us know some major changes were coming our way; the program was going to be eight-week courses instead of semester-long. All of the professors for the health physics department had to create, in quite a short amount of time, eight weeks of content in the form of videos, quizzes, and supplementary materials. This is a difficult task, as you can’t just upload all that content you used prior for 16-week courses; videos and content had to be made from scratch to fit this new format. This meant professors who were already teaching full-time courses and doing all the duties that come with being a professor had to make a whole class (or multiple in Scherer’s case) in a very short period of time alongside their regular duties.
So, with that said, my complaints with the changes do not lie with the teaching staff, who, as stated, work incredibly hard and do a phenomenal job, but rather with administrators who have made these changes to this program. I will also say, I have only taken one course thus far, and an elective course at that, but speaking with my other friends in the program, I get a sense of what the major courses are like.
For my personal experience with an elective course, that being project management, this
eight-week structure is not great. Each week gets one module; a lecture, reading assignment, quiz, and extra video. The lectures always feel rushed. The first three or so lectures were around an hour long, but each week after they progressively got shorter, going closer to 25 minutes by the last lecture, almost as if the professor was rushed to get these out. The lectures struggled to be meaningful, with it feeling like the professor couldn’t get to any point. They would discuss a few good ideas for management, as well as talk a lot about case studies, but it did not feel like there were many good takeaways each lecture. I could tell the courses were a bit commercialized, and marketed specifically to Chinese students. The professor commented a lot on the fact the audience was mostly Chinese nationals.
The worst part of the class was the quiz and reading assignments. The lecture content had nothing to do with the quiz and reading. The professor would, for instance, talk about the Beijing Olympics, while the reading would be about food contamination at a pizza place. The readings were alright, but often very corporate jargony, almost to the point of feeling like capitalist propaganda. The quizzes were very poorly put together as well. The first few questions would be softballs, asking basic questions about the article; when did this happen, how much money was the project allocated, what was the reaction when this happened, etc.
But, eventually, the questions became really out there, asking things not at all talked about in the article. For instance with this pizza debacle, they asked where did the company post a response video to the incident, yet this was never mentioned in the article. So as a student, am I supposed to Google that answer mid-quiz? I have no other choice, it would seem. But these topics are about things that happened long ago in the 2000’s (wow, we’re old), so nothing comes up online besides a Wikipedia article that says the same things as the reading assignment.
After coming up with all 20 answers, I finally submitted. Nearly half of the quizzes I did ‘poorly’ on, and my average grade is around 85, with my lowest score being 65. To the professors’ credit, and again not their fault, they allow us to contest answers we believe to be wrong and will likely make changes for subsequent semesters.
Many of the ‘correct’ answers listed were outright wrong, such as the price for a project being $20 million in the article, but the ‘correct’ answer being $30 million in the quiz. Others were confusing, or had two correct answers. Back at the contaminated pizza place, they asked how long did it take for the company to publicly respond; 24 or 48 hours. 24 was correct, yet the assigned article said it had been nearly two days and they had yet to post a video response. Online searches say the company had corresponded with the media after around 24 hours. So am I to answer with the number in the article, or the answer found online, both make sense!
Looking back, I feel as though I learned far too much about particular details of case studies, details that don’t give me project management skills, while learning very little about handling a project. As with any class, these are skills I need, especially for the career track I want to take.
Now, as for what I have heard about the health physics courses. The first course I ever took in the program was the radiation instrumentation lab, a week long in person course in the summer. This was the only course where you had to be in person, so students would fly out to Illinois Tech to take part. For me, it was just a commute. The course was a lot of fun, and actually got me to sign up for the health physics program.
Now, the course is going to be moved online, which I am very skeptical about. From my understanding, RSSI, Illinois Tech’s radiation safety service provider, will provide these videos. My fear is that, without hands-on laboratory experience, these videos will become difficult for students to learn from. Imagine taking a physics or chemistry lab and being expected to do a thorough lab report based upon a grainy video of the experiment. There are many different types of equipment, each with many different models, we use in the field – each with quirks and use cases different from one another. Understanding how to use them, in my experience, requires hands-on knowledge. I learned about the equipment in classes, sure, but it was not until I got a job in the field that I began to fully understand how to use them properly. I hope I am wrong, but I feel this class is one of the biggest losses of this all online eight-week format.
As for the other courses being offered now, some of the same issues exist. Videos are short, content is not fully fleshed out, and much of the burden is left to the student to read. Before, these classes had 16 weeks of 90-minute videos, all that content must be compressed to a whole new format. I took a class called Radiation Dosimetry, which I would argue is the most important class to take in the program as it describes how to assess people’s exposure to radiation; very useful anywhere radiation is used, and it was immediately useful at my job. There was so much content in this class, and it was easily the most rigorous course I took that semester. The content barely fits into that semester long format as is.
Many of the courses formerly had projects attached to them, such as designing radiation shielding for a facility in the case of medical health physics, or the comprehensive capstone assignment, which I never could have done in eight weeks, even if I doubled my time commitment per week.
Are there any benefits to this? The first benefit is that the price of the classes is far lower, now $1000 per credit hour, nearly half of the former ~$1800 per credit hour. Well, that is if the school charged students that this term. Most students in the program were erroneously charged the higher price, though that is apparently corrected. This lower price likely comes from the fact Illinois Tech sold a lot of their online course content to Coursera, so the cost is supplemented. That said, I am not familiar with this deal, or if this applies to the health physics department as well, so take that with a grain of salt.
On paper, a lower price is nicer, but when the courses themselves feel less of value, it becomes less of a bargain and more of a ‘get the small fries for $2.99 less, but get the large for $3.50.’ Above all, I am here to learn, and I feel as though this takes away from the educational value of the program.
Another benefit is that this eight-week structure may work better for certain students who are already in industry, requiring less time investment in the program, making their lives easier. Then again, a more ‘crammed’ course will be more stressful than a prolonged one that has a more steady pace. For my project management class, there were weeks where I finished the content in an hour, and others where I spent four to five hours on the course. So for a person already in industry, that can be hard to work around time-wise.
What upsets me a lot is the fact that the professors become the punching bag of this move. Like I said, this is not on them, they did not choose this change to the program. But, when course evaluations go up, it is not the administrators that made these changes that get them; it’s the professors who have to see that their educational impacts are diminished. The short turnover to this format provided a lot of stress for the professors as well. Last semester my advisor and head of the department, Scherer, was incredibly busy assembling all of the content for the many courses he runs. Like anyone else, our professors have lives and things outside of school, and to burden them with such heavy workloads is crazy.
I am frankly quite glad I only needed to take two courses in this format, only one being a HP course. I could not have done my capstone project in eight weeks, I could not imagine many of these courses being integrated into eight week formats. It feels as though I took the last plane out of Saigon. For the sake of everyone not as lucky, I hope things change.
Overall, the change to the online programs is a disgrace to the education of students. It prioritizes money and throughput over the quality of the education. The students and professors are left shafted by changes, while Illinois Tech stuffs their pockets with money from commercialized online courses. For the sake of the students, professors, and of education, this change should be reversed.