Online Physical Education

Online Physical Education may seem like a convenient option for many students especially in districts where P.E. programs are being cut. However, I am not sold on online physical education programs mainly because I do not know how effective they can be.

If physical education were taught online, how would an instructor effectively evaluate students? It would be extremely difficult to be able to see each student perform the skill / movement concept that you are instructing online. This being the case, I feel like an online physical education class would be evaluated using more written quizzes than anything else. The students may learn about the concepts and skills being taught, but they would not have an instructor watching them personally. This can lead to students just learning the concepts and what they need to know for the quiz and actually never learning how to perform the skills. I feel that this is the first problem with online physical education. With no way to effectively evaluate student’s performance of skills, how do we know they are gaining anything out of the course.

One of the main goals of physical education is that students are active for at least 51% of the class period. With problems like obesity and diabetes becoming more and more prevalent amongst the youth of America, it is essential that we keep students active during the time we are instructing. Online physical education does not guarantee that students will be active at all. Although the instructions online may tell students to perform some sort of activity, how does the instructor know if the students perform the activity at all? In order for online physical education to work, there needs to be some way for the instructor to make sure students are performing the assigned activities.

Finally, online physical education takes away, in my opinion, one of the most important aspects of the physical education experience. Students are no longer interacting with peers when physical education is online. Many activities performed in a typical physical education classroom involve working with a partner, working with a team, following rules and regulations, and socializing with peers. Online physical education does not allow for students to learn concepts such as teamwork and does not ensure that students will follow rules and regulations that would be in a conventional classroom. These are important aspects to the physical education experience and students that take online physical education would miss out on this.

Although online physical education may seem like a viable alternative, I question the overall effectiveness of an online physical education class. I feel that there are many problems that need to be addressed before online physical education can be looked at seriously.