I would love for online education to surpass the traditional for the sole purpose of recapturing the education institution from liberalism. It provides the best opportunity to do so through classes offered by such schools as Hillsdale.
However, the strength of the traditional method is presence. Presence is such a great advantage. It gives everything from camraderie to esprit de corps to direct interaction to structure and organization.
Online must find a way to match or exceed those. I like your idea of online having the advantage of catalogued lectures/lessons one can use to catch up or forge ahead. That is a strength of online.
I’m thinking that something like “go to meeting.com” would be a work around. There’d have to be some real means of instructer observation of real-time student work. There’d be a means of questioning, give-and-take. Students must be able to immediately and completely view any work the teacher wants to do on chart, whiteboard, etc.
However, the strength of the traditional method is presence. Presence is such a great advantage. It gives everything from camraderie to esprit de corps to direct interaction to structure and organization.
Online must find a way to match or exceed those. I like your idea of online having the advantage of catalogued lectures/lessons one can use to catch up or forge ahead. That is a strength of online.
I’m thinking that something like “go to meeting.com” would be a work around. There’d have to be some real means of instructer observation of real-time student work. There’d be a means of questioning, give-and-take. Students must be able to immediately and completely view any work the teacher wants to do on chart, whiteboard, etc.
Essentially that is the origin of the Khan Academy. Khan started out tutoring his young cousin interactively using the phone for voice and the internet for transmitting his writing/drawing to illustrate his meaning. It was only when his success at that led to “demand” from more and more cousins, overburdening his spare time, that Khan resorted to posting video lectures on YouTube. And when unrelated individuals found his YouTube lectures and began effusively thanking him for posting them, Khan threw up his hands and began making the lectures full time, on faith that the money would somehow work out.That was before he got a call from an employee of a well-known corporation, telling him that his boss loved the lectures and wanted to talk to him. And asking if he would have time to talk to Bill Gates . . .
There’s quite a lot to khanacademy.org. You would enjoy the site if you haven’t yet reviewed it.