I have not yet seen a serious article or essay on the character, value, or deficiencies of “on line” education.
I am baffled by people who are convinced that you can replace classrooms filled with flesh-and-blood professors and students with a tv screen and a keyboard.
It is impossible to have a lively, dynamic, challenging, stimulating, discussion online. It’s just not possible. It’s crap. It’s turning education into television.
There is a caveat. In a lot of popular courses at a University or college it never was possible to have a lively interactive discussions because of large class sizes. But that only applies to the most mainstream courses. Surely, once you reach junior and senior level courses, classes would be much smaller and you could be engaged. The idea that you can replace this with an online course is insane.
And here’s the kicker. Do you imagine for even one second that you will see a drop in the costs of these course because they are now cheaper to present? Because one on-line professor can now present to 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 students at once?