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Old 12-04-2019, 03:49 PM
 
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Will it replace brick and mortar university? Feels like online education is all the rage.... but most parents are still sending their kids to the best on campus program they can afford.

Edx and coursera seem to be the two big platforms. You can now get masters degrees. Is it worth it ? Seems like everyone is obsessed with credentials and degrees and getting skilled for life. Does it ever end?

Edx is trying to get corporations on board for employees to take courses. With the way employees are worked it’s rare to have much time for classes especially if you have a family. The courses still take work. Seems like the online platforms just want people’s money.
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Old 12-04-2019, 11:02 PM
 
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On line can work. If the course videos are well done and if there is some interaction between the distance learning students and the instructor by more than email. Biggest problems I've had with on line courses is audio and/or video quality -- can't read the board or hear the instructor or questions from the class. The ones that are well done don't have these problems.

Given a solution to the first problem, the second problem was lack of timely questions and feedback. You're watching the video on say Friday night and have a question. You write the question down and have to wait until Monday to call the professor or perhaps later in the week to bring it up in the hopefully weekly telecon/Skype session. By that time several days have gone by and you are either stuck behind or have lost the context of why you had the question in the first place.

The final big problem was homework and tests. The courses I've taken used Blackboard for the online turn in. Mostly it works, but did have a few big impacts from files not uploading correctly or, and this one clobbered a bunch of us in one class, the school's server went offline for maintenance during finals week. On campus access was unaffected, but remote access was down. Seemed to take dang near an act of God to get the university to extend the exam deadline.

Net result it works, but it takes dedicated extra effort on both instructor and student compared to a in person class and honestly there were some where the technical or video/audio quality hurdles were just too much to overcome so I just dropped taking those.
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Old 12-05-2019, 09:55 AM
 
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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No, it will just make a small dent, and in most cases, online will be used by people beyond the normal High School Graduate age. Too many go to college with the expectation of the "college experience." That is, partying, making friends in the dorms, fraternities and sororities, going to football games, and perhaps the most important, getting away from the parents. I know several people that have gotten online degrees, one a masters. They were all well over 30 when they started, and in good jobs, able to pay for the cost as they learned, and in some cases part paid for by their employers. One who is due to graduate next June tells us about it all the time. No issues at all with the technology, interesting that for exams his camera is on so that a monitor can see him to prevent cheating. I don't know anyone who did online college right out of high school.
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Old 12-05-2019, 11:04 AM
 
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There are definitely people who go to online college right out of high school. Especially if they graduated from an online high school. Not all, but some people want to thrive in the same type of environment they did before.
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Old 12-05-2019, 11:48 AM
 
Location: 0.83 Atmospheres
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I find online learning to be a fantastic supplement to classroom learning, but not a replacement for it.

I get a tremendous amount out of the classroom discussions I have in my MBA program. When I am struggling with a concept, Khan Academy is amazing, but it doesn’t replace being able to ask a professor a question in real time.
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Old 12-05-2019, 01:22 PM
 
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There's actually a predecessor for online ed - correspondence courses. Did some in my military days several decades ago, and know it was fairly common decades before that, for certain kinds of education.

Distance learning (the more general term) has big pluses along with big limitations. The pluses are pretty obvious - easier access, "best in class" lecturers and such. But it's limitations are pretty clear, too. Among others, there's a big quality control factor. The learning experience is different too - how that impacts one's skillset is a work in progress. Employers are still learning how to assess skills and knowledge acquired through distance learning.

I suspect in the long run (and it's already evolving in this direction) it will be used mostly for specific skill acquisition and credentialing, not for obtaining degrees.
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Old 12-05-2019, 01:22 PM
 
Location: League City
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Online learning can't entirely replace undergraduate degrees like nursing (clinicals), biology and chemistry (labs), or engineering (labs again), and many more. Universities will never produce elementary school teachers or clinical psychologists from a purely online curriculum. And then as others have noted, you would miss the college experience. That experience includes a lot of potential networking, getting to know professors well enough for references, job fairs, simple exposure to all kinds of cultural and academic events just due to proximity, and on and on. Oh and college football and basketball. No way that is ever going away.

A lot of the masters offered by Coursera and EdX require you to have an undergraduate degree that 95% of the time would only be found in a brick and mortar school. Now you can earn a BS in CS through several universities, so then you could potentially apply to some of the MS CS programs in Coursera and EdX without ever setting foot on a college campus. That is definitely a possibility. But a lot of universities are jumping on the online bandwagon every day, and I would wager it has a lot to with Coursera and EdX and a host of new online opportunities.

One final thing - a lot of times these newer online masters programs are really 'cash cows' to bring in revenue for a university. They are still legit and still rigorous, but just take a look at how many universities offer online masters programs now. I'm in an online MS program now from a local university (I started attending in person). It would be a mess for me to fight traffic to drive to class, and to coordinate necessary degree plan coursework when I am not working. Online is wonderful.
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Old 12-05-2019, 01:35 PM
 
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Yeah I think universities are using EdX and coursera but i guess it’s working out well for both.

Medical school courses are even being taught online as a supplement really. HMX is part of Harvard medical school and they are doing this. Similar to Harvard business schools program which was HMX but is now hbs online.
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Old 12-05-2019, 02:11 PM
 
Location: 0.83 Atmospheres
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bridge781 View Post
Yeah I think universities are using EdX and coursera but i guess it’s working out well for both.

Medical school courses are even being taught online as a supplement really. HMX is part of Harvard medical school and they are doing this. Similar to Harvard business schools program which was HMX but is now hbs online.
HBS also has Harvard ManageMentor. My company subscribed to it and I have assigned several of the modules to my team because I think they are valuable. The feedback has been positive.
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Old 12-05-2019, 06:11 PM
 
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I guess it all depends on how much respect employees have for college degrees attained online.
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