Why Online Education Cannot Replace Schooling

When I decided to become a college instructor, I was very pleased with the college employment environment at the time. Old professors were retiring, and there was a shortage of new people. Then I joined my school's "Massive Online Course (MOOC)" and was shocked by the boom.

One teacher, one webcam, and one computer with Internet access can teach and educate the entire world. Sebastian Thrun, an investigative expert at Stanford University and co-founder of Udacity, a MOOC online course company, has threatened that "in 50 years, there will only be 10 universities left in the world that can provide higher education."

I was shocked. Earlier this year, I, along with 90,000 other college students, took How to Build a Search Engine, an online course offered by Udacity. In this video course, professors discuss problems with students and teach cutting-edge ideas. It's easy to think that online education might be the end of the college ivory tower model of education. But I've also identified five of the most basic problems that arise with MOOCs:

1. It's too easy to cheat

Udacity encourages students to help other students on the Web. You can't view the answers directly, but you can still search for them through the web, so easily that you don't even bother. The presence of cheating is the biggest failure in college education. Not to mention the fact that out of the classroom, there is no teacher supervision, this situation is even worse.

2. Good students can't shine

Even if a student excels in this course, the lecturer won't know about him. The internet is a network, but it doesn't connect the student to the professor. In a traditional university, I would write letters of recommendation for my best students, spelling out their good character and academic achievements in great detail. But online education doesn't do that.

All Udacity can do is pitch the students who watched the video to interested employers. Of course, if it were actually possible to write introductory letters for students who excel in online education, for 1% of students, that would mean writing 900 letters. Even if professors were willing to write them, the market would not accept that many so-called "good students".

3. Employers don't like strange people

The purpose of hiring people is to get them to work. No company wants strange people to make a mess of the company. Not to mention people who come from unknown sources. An online education graduate is certainly no better than a normal university graduate.

4. Computer scoring is unreliable.

MOOCs are popular because they are easily accessible to the masses. While student grades can be easily graded by computer, traditional final papers or presentations cannot be graded by computer, especially final papers.

Student-faculty communication is a basic and very practical skill that can never be learned from online education.

5. Competence for money

A high degree generally means a high income, because a university degree is a status symbol. Students can learn real skills in college and also show employers your intelligence and talent. Although philosophy is not used much in life, getting an A grade in philosophy will impress employers. Of course it has to be very outstanding to emphasize the importance of the achievement and ability.

If college education is very cheap, students can save a lot of money to spend on outperforming other students. Similarly, teachers would make classroom education harder and harder in order to avoid too many high-achieving students. As a result, there will be more competition among students, and online education will become more and more expensive until it surpasses traditional college education.

This scenario has happened before. A long time ago, college education was scarce, and graduating from college meant a guaranteed job, and then more and more people entered college, and a bachelor's degree from college was no longer an advanced degree, but instead became a necessity for people looking for a job.

Udacity is looking for ways to deal with cheating, and it is preparing to set up testing centers where students can be certified by other schools (not cyber-schools) after passing a test. There are so many downsides to MOOCs at the moment that students are resorting to cheating in order to get high grades, but in general, it's not as cost-effective as going to a classroom.

But the traditional classroom model of education continues to improve in light of trends in online education. In the network can learn a lot of knowledge, if the university has not taken this approach, will measure the best opportunity. Here is a good idea for professors: to use the network teaching, classroom regular questions and organize student activities. This will not only save money, but also will not reduce the quality of teaching.

If traditional universities don't learn from MOOCs, they are doomed to become obsolete. There is much more that traditional universities can do before Sebastian Thruns' prophecy arrives.