Todd Gilman's Combating Myths About Distance Education

There is a battle raging on between traditional and online education. Many people believe that because the students aren’t being lectured within the old fashion “bricks-and-mortar” classroom, that they aren’t learning like typical students at a university. They also believe that online teachers are just playing pretend. In his essay Combating Myths About Distance Education which is published in the Chronicle of Higher Learning, Todd Gilman effectively appeals to his audience of educators, professors, and scholars, to confront the myths and misconceptions about online education. Gilman successfully makes his audience feel sympathy with the use of pathos. The tone of the essay is set when Gilman uses a simile to describe the unfair way online teachers are being treated by stating, “In the department’s eyes I am like Pinocchio, not a real boy.” (Gilman 100) If we remember the story of Pinocchio, the puppet did everything a real boy did and yet, was never actually considered alive. The audience sides with Gilman because he has established his credibility as a librarian at Yale and an online teacher at several large universities and they understand that he feels dehumanized and worthless because he is doing everything a professor at a university is doing without being considerable a reputable educator. As part of his argument …show more content…
He even hints that online learning may be more difficult for both the professor and the student due to harder deadlines that professors need to meet in order to keep students on track and more self-discipline that the student needs to possess when he says, “the online learning environment can be much less forgiving.” (Gilman 103) He achieves his goal of challenging online university fallacies and explaining what is necessary to learn and succeed in the digital