Why Online Education Works (2012)

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.

Many of the Europeans I know, both online and in real life, who grew up on the internet in the 90s/early-mid 2000s, swear up and down that things like playing MMOs are largely responsible for their strong English skills. This seems especially common the further east you go, though you see it everywhere, with people from every walk of life. I wouldn't call everyone on RuneScape in 2003 a disciplined high-achiever, yet many of them ended up with fluent English skills anyway, even/especially when formal language education was weak.

Recently I've been spending more time talking with Japanese native speakers. With that population, you've got the inverse example: massive national effort dedicated to formally teaching English, yet results are terrible - something pretty readily acknowledged by the government. Many have little to no experience of speaking English outside of a classroom, and because there wasn't much overlap in online spaces (it was common for a Swede or a Pole to play a game in English, not so much for a Japanese) there isn't that same body of fluent self-acquired internet-speakers.

To me, this suggests that online learning isn't only useful to those who would have already done well - it's just that we haven't really figured out how to do online instruction yet. That problem is compounded by how (as shown by the Japanese English class thing) we haven't really figured out how to do _offline_ instruction for some subjects in a consistently useful way. Most American online education opportunities I've seen that are associated with the state education system seem very intent on a 1:1 translation of existing course material into an online format, which is like trying to translate a sentence to a very different language via literal word mapping: it'll be frustrating, difficult and not turn out very well because it ignores foundational differences in the mediums and just tries to pile the similar stuff on top even if the foundation doesn't fit. In other words, the medium matters, and the positive experiences of those who mastered English in online, non-academic settings suggests that we haven't yet grasped the potential promise of online education.

I don't have a transformative master plan or anything, but I suspect motivation has to do with it, and that's the link to your original observation about disciplined high-achievers: if you really want to find a group for that quest or sell that item, that's sufficient motivation to overcome the fear of failure inherent in trying out a new language - motivation that's commonly lacking in traditional educational environments.

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.