I don't even care about exact practical and psychological reasons for it. I know that I would not picked online school for my kids whenever there is choice.
And beyond the cost on kids, the cost on parents, specifically on mothers who took brunt of it is considerable too. In terms of losing jobs and this pushing whole familly into problems, in terms of exhaustion and isolation too.
Classroom sized video conferences with elementary school kids are a big mess though. A teleconference operator could go a long way.
Having an option to do things online for students where it works better seems good to me.
In some ideal world, students could work on some of their curriculm online where it made sense for them, and other parts offline. Kind of hard to coordinate a classroom that way though.
That in and of itself is educational for the world students will eventually enter. It creates some level of shared experience and social cohesion and underlying social reality. It's not done very well admittedly with a lot of time wasting and poor education and lowest denominator and propaganda flavor of the decade, but the principal still applies.
The thing I'm afraid of with parent and neighbors doing the socializing exclusively is reality bubbles and a fracturing of shared culture.
As our communities become less diverse, our schools follow. At least in Canada from my experience having lived all over the place. For example, a White suburb leads to white schools, and the house value of the suburb is always roughly the same so the socioeconomic status of the students is pretty close. There’s no bussing kids from different areas around to achieve diversity targets.
Where does teaching come in? The lecture or the help after?
The class was giving feedback to teachers, verbal and non verbal.
Having to slowdown the entire class because you need help helps you but not a percentage of the class. Going quicker for you hurts a different segment.
The answer is personalized education.
better to consider something like Coursera (live teachers, material access is not an issue as everything is delivered in the course) or Khan Academy / Duolingo where there is no teacher but interactive learning modules and immediate quizzing/feedback. Even Masterclass, which at least features engaging performances by the celebrity teacher.
MIT OCW videos are 100x more well made where the professors explain complex topics in a simple way and is pretty enjoyable to follow through.
Coursera on the other hand has courses which are almost always quite poor and basic in quality and mostly tailored to make students “feel” like they learnt something (when mostly they just learnt the basics in a random way) so that they don’t apply for a refund.
MIT doesn’t have any of that And is pretty enjoyable to go through , Maybe the difference is because of the high quality experiences of their professors
But I’d take MIT OCW over Coursera any day.
I think Edx might be a better comparison , they tend to have better quality content than coursera.
It seems obvious for instance that kids having access to better computer and networking as well as their own calm place to study will be able to perform better in remote learning. Not to mention adults who can answer their questions. Schools allows those differences to disappear.