The future of education isn’t online

There is a certain class of people who are convinced that higher education as currently taught is a stupid waste of time, and that the future is to move instruction on to the Internet. I see a lot of questions on Quora asking when this will happen.

I think the notion of online learning is appealing for a certain kind of person: technologically savvy and probably rather introverted. I’m one of these people.

But most students are not like that. Most people learn best with face to face interactions instructors.

I am reminded of this by seeing this Twitter thread about Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium, which is basically an online class. Students get a computer lab and no professors.

And students hate it. I think my favourite burn is one studentwho wrote:

I would call this place hell on Earth but I don’t want to insult hell.

Even a MOOC company acknowledged that MOOCs have failed to disrupt education (they called them “dead”) in the way some people were talking.

More data shows MOOCs consistently underperform.

The vast majority of massive open online course (MOOC) learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world's most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs — low completion rates — has not improved over 6 years.

I teach some classes online, and I think you can create a good learning environment for some students. But this vision that the future of education is a bunch of YouTube videos and adaptive algorithms is not a vision that I want to see.

Update, 30 May 2019: A new report on online education adds more evidence saying they aren’t better, although this one is focused more on K-12 than higher education.

Full-time virtual and blended schools consistently fail to perform as well as district public schools.