In practice, online education is worse. Discussion boards are a shallow replacement for real shoulder to shoulder conversations, many students speed through video lectures, and the entire experience seems flattened and gamified. It feels more “effective and efficient” but that feeling doesn’t necessarily match reality.

As someone who was was an adjunct before and during the pandemic, I can tell you from first hand experience that a lot was lost when transitioning from in-person to remote learning.

The most obvious impact was participation. Even at the college level, when students aren’t physically in the classroom they are less focused on the class.

However, even beyond that there are a lot of things that suffer:

• The ability to just walk over to a student to see how theyre doing (whether they want you to or not).
• In class exercises and group collaboration.
• The ability to easily dive into questions and tangents (drawing programs online are very hit or miss).
• Not to mention audio and video issues.
• Ability to read the classroom (going to fast, something wasn’t clear, etc.)

It may not sound significant, but it really adds up. Not to mention that the impact from covid in education is very visible at all levels of education.

I think a great majority of learning in college comes from living someplace other than home. Meeting different kinds of people from different places and spending time with them. Classes are very important but so much learning happens outside of classrooms.

Your experience is not representative of the majority.

I’ve got a master’s degree and I’ve also been a teaching assistant and I strongly disagree with the notion that online teaching is more effective. Putting all materials online is useful, but explaining something to someone is way more effective when you’re standing next to them.

Both me and my wife tried doing online courses for our Masters and ended up opting out that route.

Both of use found they were riddled with people who didn’t show up to the regular online ‘team meetings’ or wouldn’t contribute to the ‘team projects’ until the day of submission.

I know you have slackers in regular university as well but at least there, visibility and contribution is immediately noticed by the professors.

I would also argue that being hands on makes a huge difference in most courses.

Mark my words, people who will have any social skills in the future will be the next millionaires…

According to everything I have seen and read on the matter, most kids seemed to have a shit time with online schooling during COVID. Too easy to be distracted, frequent technical problems, no hands on activities or labs, no socialisation, no arts programs, no physical education, terrible support for kids who had learning problems or who otherwise required customised education plans, and the much larger class sizes meant an overall poorer quality of education.

For many, it was an unmitigated disaster, and most kids are much happier to be back at school in person. A handful loved it though. My daughter was one, though she also is very happy to have music classes again, so even she prefers being back in school.

Our conservative provincial government liked the cost savings though, so they tried to introduce an online course requirement to get your high school diploma, but due to popular demand, they had to include an opt out option. Since the opt out was so popular, they are now making it harder to access by requiring that you fill out a form for it available only by contacting the school guidance office.

Let’s face it, online education is not popular because it sucks unless your program only requires a lecture, you are very motivated to learn and study, you don’t need or want to discuss anything complicated with profs or peers, you have no learning or hearing disabilities, and you prefer to avoid people. It is great for work you already know how to do, which is the reason my daughter loved it, and why I like working from home. But default online education? Correspondence school has long been a thing, so if that’s you, fill your boots. It seems most would rather pass on it.

What are your metrics for “effective?” As someone who is both teaching and taking classes currently, I can tell you engagement is pitifully low in online formats. Education is not just about memorizing facts and going through the motions to get a good grade. There’d have to be some amazing innovation in online education practices to convince me it will be the default anytime soon.

People learn many different ways. Online learning is not right for everybody.

Some classes translate to an online format much easier than others. How do you effectively translate an upper level chemistry lab to be done online? Even if you could do it in such a way that the student gains the theoretical knowledge, it wouldn’t give them the hands on practice that they’ll need for real lab work.

In my experience

That’s great, and that’s why it’s an option.

But research consistently shows that everyone is different and has different learning needs.

More ways to learn means more people succeed in learning.

Now your specific question is still quite interesting, with emphasis added to default:

Why it is not the default option for universities?

I think online is rapidly becoming the default for anything that can be learned online, for anyone who can learn online.

But I’m thankful that we have both community colleges and universities for things that cannot be effectively taught online and for people who needs more modes of learning.

Look at it this way, I paid £3,290 per year in tuition fees to attend university back when I went. The price of tuition has since nearly trebled to over £9k.

If I paid £9k per year for online courses and was denied the student experience of actually attending a university campus (as many teenagers who went to uni during COVID had to), I’d be fucking livid!

I can’t imagine my experience wold have been better online. The third year was almost all lab work and practical.

But aside from that, one of the best things about my offline experience was getting to spend time with people from other disciplines and honestly, some 20-odd years later, that has been almost as valuable as my degree in my career as well as my understanding of the world.

*For you.

You know, there are different learn-types?
Some can learn better in person, some remote.