What’s more, since each student takes three to five (sometimes more) courses, they experienced multiple modalities of online education, from Zoom meetings to fully asynchronous courses taught via videos and podcasts. Once you take Shakespeare 302, or Chem 101, or Econ 102, you move on.īut thanks to the sudden switch to online teaching in the middle of the semester, students can compare the digital with the analog versions of their classes. The argument over the relative merits of online versus face-to-face education always runs into this crucial roadblock: students (presuming they pass) do not take the same course twice. It’s time to “reimagine” education with computers and laptops “at the forefront.” While both deal with K-12, the proposal to replace “all these buildings, all these physical classrooms” with virtual spaces applies equally well to higher ed.īut what do students have to say about the differences between online and traditional teaching? Do they look forward to online education as “the future”? Jeb Bush announced that online is “the future of learning,” and Governor Andrew Cuomo, with Bill Gates (of course) standing next to him, wondered why we need all these buildings when we have technology? “ The old model” of a classroom, the governor opined, is over and done with. Politicians have also climbed on board the train. In a recent op ed in The New York Times, Hans Taparia writes that online education, previously considered a “hobby,” could be the silver bullet that rescues higher ed from the financial ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. After all, virtual learning is better because it enables “students to reach greater heights and not be limited by a predetermined set of circumstances.” We’re all online now, Frankfurt says - let’s stay there. Tal Frankfurt, a technology consultant and contributor to Forbes magazine, proposed that the emergency replacement of traditional classrooms with virtual ones should “be viewed as a sort of ‘bypass’ button’” for the usual snail’s pace of educational change. A crisis, as the saying goes, is a terrible thing to waste, and the tech utopians have wasted little time in promoting the move to online teaching as a permanent solution to higher ed’s problems.
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