

Why Online Education is Mostly a Fantasy - carlyle4545
http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/25/why-online-education-is-mostly-a-fantasy/?utm_source=feedly

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edtechdev
There is a widespread misconception that online education is just inherently
inferior to learning in a real classroom. The Department of Education did a
huge meta-analysis and found this was not the case - in face online education
is a little better than face to face. Blended and hybrid learning was better
than either online or face to face alone.
[http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-
practic...](http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-
practices/finalreport.pdf)

We're talking about actual learning, not how well we liked the learning (the
two are inversely correlated). An online video for example you can pause,
rewind, fast forward, compared to a face to face lecture in which the speaker
is likely going too fast or too slow for many.

That said, are there certain types of topics or certain types of students
which are better taught face to face? Sure. Remedial courses require much more
learner support, and really one-on-one tutoring. Other courses are inherently
social or inherently difficult to teach online. Are you going to hire a pilot
or a firefighter that only trained online? Of course not, but I would hire a
pilot or firefighter who had hundreds of hours of practice with difficult
scenarios in a simulator over one who had only learned in a face to face
context.

~~~
bayesianhorse
Actually, Khan Academy is outperforming face-to-face remedial math only.

What KA is doing and Coursera isn't, is diagnosing student progress and
misunderstandings by utilizing a tree of knowledge. KA is actually testing
students and pointing to where they should go next.

It's trivial to test for example foreign word spelling in software: Just ask
the student to type a word and see if it's right.

Peter Norvig recently talked about using Udacity's massive data on students to
predict what misunderstandings students have about programming, much like a
face-to-face teacher might do.

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bayesianhorse
I mostly disagree. If you pay close attention to the field of online education
one cannot help but notice that the most serious players are not attempting to
replace traditional schools and universities. They point out that paying
through the nose for the accreditation is a bubble ripe for being pricked by
technological disruption, but they still cherish and recommend traditional
universities.

The most value these courses provide is ongoing education, mostly in topics
one did not or could not study while in school. A programmer might learn
economics, an MBA might learn biology or programming, a biologist might dive
deeper into physics.

For me these courses are a type of curiosity-driven entertainment rather than
learning particular skills or knowledge I might need...

