Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Online learning will never be a substitute for face-to-face

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I can easily imagine the exact same argument being used to proclaim that "cinema will never be a substitute for live theatre" a century ago. After all, the results from a theatre-goer experience survey (much like today's Student Experience Survey (SES)) would seem to confirm this conclusion. Just as "Students who enrolled for on-campus education led the decline in satisfaction," so also, it would say "theatre-goers led the decline in satisfaction" with movies and television. But it would be a pretty poor conclusion, wouldn't it? If you surveyed people who had no access to theatre, they would rank movies and television as a vastly superior alternative. The same with online learning. For many people, and in many contexts, it will be vastly superior to gathering people into a room to talk to them all at once. But yeah, sometimes when the time is right and we have money to burn, Broadway's pretty cool too.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 12:45 a.m.

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