• Traditional Education Beats Online in Key Areas, Opinion Poll Finds – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  tags: online elearning opinion poll survey data

  • But online education scored much worse in four areas: in delivering “instruction tailored to each individual,” in providing “high-quality instruction from well-qualified instructors,” in offering “rigorous testing and grading that can be trusted,” and—finally, worst of all—in dispensing “a degree that will be viewed positively by employers.”

  • To him the most surprising part of the survey results was the high number of people who said that traditional classroom education was still better tailored to the individual, while evangelists for educational technology and online learning tend to hype the personalized and individualized elements of their products. “The reality,” he said, “is that that has not permeated Americans’ perceptions of what it can do.”

    • Interesting, particularly as adaptive learning technologies vastly improve the ability of the student to receive a customized experience at the appropriate level of challenge. However, just because these systems are being built does not mean that they are commonplace, used correctly, or have achieved critical mass industry-wide.
  • The poll found that 5 percent of Americans, and 20 percent of college students, were enrolled in an online course. While that is a “huge win” for the online market, Mr. Busteed said, “I think we have to take it for what it is: some signs of adoption, but not supplanting traditional education anytime soon.”

    • My favorite part about this is how people always conclude that online learning isn’t going to "take over" education and leave everything else behind.  I’m not sure why people think that one way of making things more effective would, in fact "take over" education.  Bizarro.
  • Many of the speakers, drawn from the for-profit and ed-tech sectors, bashed traditional higher education as overpriced and stagnant.

  • While some assertions rang true, others didn’t seem to have any grounding in reality. Andrew S. Rosen, chairman and chief executive officer of Kaplan, probably made the day’s most daring prediction: Within a few decades, all but 600 colleges will be dead.

  • They said that while they wished their professors were a bit more tech-savvy, they found some educational technology cumbersome and overrated. They were skeptical of online programs—saying that they gave peers opportunities to cheat—and even more skeptical of competency-based education. Traditional education, they said, offered something that online education had problems replicating: a connection with peers and professors.

    • I love these comments.  They really get to the crux of the matter.  They’re not against online education.  They don’t like poorly done online education.  They probably don’t like huge survey lecture courses either, but they don’t lump those classes in with every educational experience they’ve had and unilaterally dislike it:). Generalizations abound!

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