McJobs has come to mean low-paying jobs in fast-food businesses. These jobs have limited skill requirements and employee turnover is high. Workers’ tasks are laid out clearly and the work is supervised closely by managers.

A kissing cousin of McJobs is what I call McTeaching. It is where tightly sequenced software with accompanying worksheets and quizzes, especially in credit recovery courses, become the meat-and-potatoes curriculum for secondary school teachers and students.

Higher-level McJobs are those online courses with live teachers lecturing in a studio. These courses have step-by-step rules for limited face-to-face engagement with distant learners. Online instruction, however, generally has lower prestige among teachers who face students daily in classrooms.

Surely, there is much variation in online instruction both in K-12 and higher education venues. The history of using the Internet for all forms of education has multiple roots and branches guaranteeing differences. Web-based courses, for example, differ in delivery. Some emanate from virtual schools with a curricular menu of software and teacher-directed courses; others are courses with online teachers having discussions in real time with periodic face-to-face contact. Online students range from home schoolers to those enrolled in International Baccalaureate diploma programs and Advanced Placement courses to those taking courses for university degrees such as a Masters of Business Administration (MBA). Then there are all those students who have failed courses and sign up for credit recovery.

The quality of online instruction also varies. There are stars among instructors who relish the work, plan thoughtfully, use the limited face-to-face interaction and discussion threads during the course creatively, and offer many stories of student success. Software designers have also created programs that both entice and push students through carefully sequenced lessons sufficient to teach complicated concepts clearly and crisply. Such stellar performers and well-designed software turn some McJobs into superb opportunities. But most online instructors and software programs plod along well-worn roads that only highly-motivated, independent students can traverse to finish the journey.

Even if those who tout online learning (derisively called “click-click” courses by critics) as a “disruptive innovation” that will replace regular schools or, those advocates of “blended learning” (sometimes called “hybrid” schools) spread their gospel, two facts about McTeaching are incontrovertible.

First, online teaching costs less per student than regular classroom teaching (see here,pp.7,80; and national_report, p. 7). At a time of rampant budget cuts, online instruction with lower instructional costs and seemingly positive student results (finalreport-5) give champions of web-based instruction from Bill Gates to the Idaho state superintendent evidence to tout the efficiency and effectiveness of applying high-tech solutions to delivering instruction.

Second, online learning offers limited face-to-face interactions between teachers and students compared to regular classroom instruction. Most online instructional enthusiasts assume that effective teacher lectures, software, programmed lessons, video clips,  exercises, and tests will achieve the goal of transferring knowledge from teacher to learner.

But different assumptions prevail for actual classroom teaching: the trust that grows from sustained face-to-face relationship between teacher and student is fundamental for learning; teachers develop teaching persona and emotional relationships with students (e.g., Rafe Esquith, Jaime Escalanate, Erin Gruwell) that students come to recognize and expect as lessons unfold; teaching is a performance (Am Educ Res J-1994-Pineau-3-25) and the “constant living interaction between teacher and audience makes every performance a new event.”

No, I am not romanticizing regular classroom teaching. I do know the variation among teachers’ personas and their teaching that occurs within the same school and across a district. I also know the inherent dilemmas that teachers face when bonds of affection develop with their students and when they risk losing those affections in pressing students to think harder and dig deeper into the subject matter. Or when they try to individualize instruction for 30-plus students. Further, I know well the uneven and too often low quality of teaching that occurs in largely poor and minority schools. So, I will not make every urban teacher a Rafe Esquith or Erin Gruwell.

The point I want to make is that the purposes of teaching include but go far beyond transmitting knowledge, the aim driving McTeaching. Most classroom teachers want to develop close relationships with students that foster their desire to learn more about the world, themselves, and others.

For those who seek the benefits of individualizing instruction through online lessons while having live teachers available in classrooms to teach group lessons–what some call “blended learning” or “hybrid” schools–the combination of online and actual teachers does defuse some of the criticism leveled by both parents and teachers at offering students a full menu of online instruction.

Yes, the cost of such “hybrid” schools once up and running still remains less than fully staffed conventional schools, a fact evident to anyone who can read a budget. Cheaper to do and employing different assumptions about teaching and learning, cheerleaders for more McTeaching offer policymakers ways of cutting district budgets by increasing online instruction. Experts have yet to put a price on what’s lost when face-to-face interactions between students and teachers go the way of bolted-down desks and McTeaching becomes the norm.