Why Online Education is Mostly a Fantasy
pandodaily.com
pandodaily.com
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.
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.
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...