
Why Online Education Works (2012) - barry-cotter
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/11/12/alex-tabarrok/why-online-education-works
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blueboo
It doesn’t. The author’s is a bizarrely outdated view.

Disciplined high-achievers -/ folks who somehow already learned excellent
skills — might avail themselves of online education. Kids, in general, not so
much.

[http://www.insidehighered.com/digital-
learning/article/2019/...](http://www.insidehighered.com/digital-
learning/article/2019/01/16/study-offers-data-show-moocs-didnt-achieve-their-
goals)

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jambutters
[https://youtu.be/zxJgPHM5NYI](https://youtu.be/zxJgPHM5NYI)
[https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1071280.pdf](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1071280.pdf)

Khan academy's findings point in the other direction. Correct me if I'm wrong
but I'm really seeing completion rates being argued as why moocs failed, and I
don't agree with it being the indicator of measuring effectiveness.

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JackMorgan
As a former middle school teacher - I feel like I've seen the writing on the
wall since the early 2000s, and yet for some reason manual education is very
sticky in our society. I suspect that there will be a sudden tipping point
where schools remain physical but students are all doing most learning on
individualized learning plans, but I'm unsure when that will be. I would've
guessed 10 years ago, but here we are.

I suspect teachers unions play a big part.

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lonelappde
Schools already do a lot of online edtech education at daycare (school).

The larger barrier to personalized education is that it leads to less equal
outcomes, as healthy rich kids with supportive parents tend to excel while
hungry poor people from broken homes do not. That gets a lot of pushback from
"equity and access" activists in the school administration who believe that no
one deserves a great education (certainly not publicly funded one) until
systemic socioeconomic inequalities are fixed first.

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donclark
Is a big part of the hold out that parents need someone to watch their kid
while they are at work?

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ivan_ah
That's certainly a big factor for primary school, but using the same
"education as daycare" model for high school students feels very wrong.

~~~
donclark
Point taken. However, how many parents currently want/trust their teenagers at
home for online education?

