Thursday, December 26, 2013

Should we Offer Access to Online Education?


And this is why KA and other online education options won't ever replace brick and mortar. Students, by and large, simply will not do online education on their own. 

"Offering access"?  How am I "Offering access" when KA is on the Internet? A more appropriate question would be "Even had I wanted to, how can I stop them?"

The brick and mortar schools will be in trouble when the question becomes "How can I take all this stuff I learned online this summer and get credit for it in school?"  Since I have yet to have a student actually learn a lot of math online, I have no fear for my job. They need a teacher to nudge, cajole, question and respond, demand and reply. Sure, there are some who can learn online, but they're not in public schools and, if they are, it's rarely math that they can learn this way.

On the other hand, for me, it's not about WHERE you learn algebra, it's how well. If you transferred into my school and showed us that you had mastered algebra I, we'd put you into algebra II  .... so why would we care if you mastered algebra I through KA or some other over the summer?  The answer is, we don't.  If you show up CLAIMING to have learned it all in summer school, we're skeptical, but that's only because we have seen and worked with an awful lot of students.

It's sort of like Teach for America ... I guess there are SOME people who can learn everything in a six-week summer course, but it sure does seem as though the traditional methods are still better for most.

1 comment:

  1. "Students, by and large, simply will not do online education on their own." Yup, just see the online log in times for the students at my online school!

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