As the associate vice provost for the Office of Asynchronous Online Courses for Student-Centered High-Impact Learning (OAOCSCHIL, an office we created in the last few years after realizing how lucrative these things are), I want to address a growing concern on campus: the rumor that asynchronous online classes are “basically a scam.”
I understand the confusion. Outsiders are quick to pass judgment on these courses stocked with hastily recorded video lectures from 2020, auto-graded multiple-choice quizzes, and reflection message boards that are now 87 percent bots talking to other bots. Because there are no scheduled meetings with professors or classmates, and grading consists of counting whether students clicked the correct buttons, the fact that we charge tuition for the privilege of participating in these experiences could be mistaken for a scam: one in which no learning and very little effort are exchanged for grades and credits.
But, I assure you, this is not a scam. This is innovation.
Let me walk you through our new pedagogical model, which we in the OAOCSCHIL call Vibe-Teaching. You may have heard of “vibe-coding,” the revolutionary new software methodology in which programmers no longer understand code, write code, or even read code. They simply tell a large language model (LLM) what they want, run whatever it produces, and then tweak the prompt until the contraption is complete. Coding becomes cycles of evaluating outputs driven by persistent hopefulness.
Vibe-Teaching brings this cutting-edge, iterative feedback loop to higher education. Rather than building courses through faculty expertise or disciplinary knowledge, faculty gather complaints from alums now trying to get real jobs, feed those complaints into AI, and allow the system to revise the course accordingly. This continuous-improvement cycle transforms real-world disappointment into automated course updates, freeing faculty time for research (about AI), service (related to AI), and existential despair (you can guess the topic).
This instructional design reflects our commitment to inclusive pedagogy: All learning pathways are valid, whether students engage as manual human learners or outsource their consciousness to a chatbot. We support all modalities, confident that each demonstrates a different facet of multiple intelligences—or whatever we’re calling it this year.
In Vibe-Teaching, faculty are no longer required to read the AI-generated slop that students themselves have not paused to read. We only uphold one high-touch requirement: Vibe-Teaching faculty must log in every two weeks to respond to the pop-up message, “Are you still teaching?”
Some have asked why we don’t simply focus on helping students learn things. We appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately, AI has made it impossible to measure actual learning. Every assignment is now an unverifiable collaboration between a stressed undergraduate and a VC-backed robo-parrot. Detecting “authentic” student thinking is technically possible, but prohibitively expensive. Think about it: We would need to pay real human faculty to interact with real human students. We do not have the budget for that.
So we have stopped trying to change student thinking. Instead, we focus on the continuous improvement of vibes. In lieu of learning outcomes, we now ask whether students have a warm sense of what learning might feel like and whether they can recall, with confidence, that they took “chemistry.” If so, we mark that as “exceeds expectations.”
And because we are a modern, data-driven institution, we have checked our dashboards to confirm the effectiveness of this approach. GPAs are rising, fail rates are down, and student satisfaction with online learning is trending in the right direction! Our website now proudly proclaims our AI-enhanced commitment to student success. The naysayers may fret about a post-literate world, but they have clearly not looked at the data. Numbers don’t lie.
From an institutional perspective, the benefits are substantial. Vibe-Teaching allows us to maximize enrollment and graduation rates without expanding facilities, faculty positions, or effort. It satisfies student demand for maximum flexibility, minimal cognitive effort, and zero human interaction, while meeting accreditation requirements (in vibes, if not in letter).
There is, of course, some risk of corroding the very foundations of our university’s mission. But institutional survival requires adaptation. Our graduates must become “AI-resilient and future-ready members of the workforce”… whatever that means.
The truth is, everyone wants this. Why they want it is beside the point. In light of these market demands, we humbly ask everyone to stop referring to asynchronous online courses as a “scam.” That word implies deception. In Vibe-Teaching, we are fully transparent:
We provide the illusion of education.
Students provide the illusion of engagement.
Together, we uphold the illusion of academic integrity.
