The past & future of online education
I recently watched a video that included an interview about online learning with Youngme Moon.
This is a rough quote of what she said…
Reasons why people disengage from learning or school.
The first reason is you get frustrated. You’re trying to learn something it’s hard and frustrating. And the way that teachers expected you to learn was that they bang you over the head with it...
Technology is a patient teacher.
The second is… When something is going too slow or too fast you disengage. There too you can imagine a more personalized learning experience. Then the pacing is adjusted exactly the way you want it.
The third way is that people get disengaged is that the content doesn’t come to life for us. As we are absorbing the content we get bored. There too is an opportunity to bring the lessons to life with technology.
So one of the benefits of taking a course online is that you usually control the pace. In a classroom you do not control the pace. The teacher does.
However…
She also said…
“The majority of online courses delivered today are not that innovative. A tiny percentage of courses manage to defy that trend.”
In the case of online TEFL I have to say that reading text online is pretty boring and according to some studies people only read 20–28%.
The first course I took was mostly boring. It wasn’t online but it did include a lot of lectures which went in one ear and out the other.
I remembered about 20 minutes of that course. What I remembered from that was the activities that I did — the fun stuff.
Watching other good teachers teach is the best way to learn in my experience. That’s how I learned best pre-Youtube.
Finding stuff for my classes by searching and reading was a big time waste.
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