On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Internet as Educational Tool

¶ … Online Learning

In the past several years, Silicon Valley has set its sights on the education establishment. What does this mean? At one point in history, there existed such things as new and used bookstores, travel agents, and New York taxi drivers. Amazon, Hotwire, and Uber have now ensured that these industries which employed large numbers of people are now virtually defunct. Silicon Valley's semi-deranged cult of "disruption" -- which seems to be their updated term for what the economist Joseph Schumpeter and his right-wing fan club had traditionally called "creative destruction" -- has taken an interest in education because they spot a realm of economic activity, very often state-subsidized, that currently suffers from low public approval (mainly due to right-wing complaints about sclerotic unions, political correctness, and a host of other dubious bugbears). As a result, the idea of "disrupting" the educational establishment with online analogues -- whether it be cyberschooling, Khan Academy online math tutorials, for-profit online universities like Phoenix, or MOOCs -- is currently all the rage. But the real question is whether online learning will be able to take the place of the traditional form of learning, and thus it is necessary to evaluate the pros and cons of online learning.

The argument in favor of online learning should be obvious. There is no doubt that the increased prominence of technology in daily life for everybody means that the integration of technology into the curriculum and the classroom must be taken as a given. Students today need to learn how to read and evaluate what they read online as surely as students in previous generations also needed to learn how to read and evaluate what they read in books. Furthermore, theoretically speaking, the Internet has the power for tremendous democratization. In reality, we cannot currently rely upon the assumption that everyone has regular Internet access: a poor rural family might not be able to afford Internet service and might find that even access in a public library is too inaccessible to make it feasible for educational purposes. But obviously this is an objection that would change in time, and would change with greater investment in Internet infrastructure. But if we do take this leap of faith -- as everyone in Silicon Valley already has -- then the notion that the Internet makes location irrelevant, and thus the idea of physically-centralized school districts and university campuses would become obsolete. This simple fact is the source of much optimism about online learning because, as noted, this is theoretically a democratizing force. Proponents of education wish it to be universal and of a high standard: there is no-one in the education debate in America who believes that the goal should be fewer well-educated citizens, and if online learning is able to bring education into every home then this would be a genuine argument in favor of online learning.

The difficulties with online learning, however, are fairly steep. For a start, we have noted that most of the rationale for promoting online learning depends upon an infrastructure that is not presently in place. As a result, the shift to online learning would require massive public investment in the first place -- a school building can serve multiple generations of students, but an online paradigm would require each individual student to have a computer and Internet access available. There is also the basic question of whether educators are able to fairly evaluate a student without face-to-face interaction. Does any instructor honestly have a failsafe means of determining if the work that a student has done for an online course was actually done by that student? Every high school teacher knows how to prevent students from cheating on a test, but surely the urge to look up the answers on Wikipedia while taking an online test is overwhelming, and cannot be reasonably supervised by an educator. Some things cannot be achieved without the physical presence of a student, and this includes intangibles such as the adolescent and young adult socialization process. The simple fact is that high school and college are, in America in 2015, not merely educational experiences but they are also crucial rites of passage in the anthropological sense. In our zeal for improving education, we may be at the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and ruining a generation's social skills because we fancy that the Internet will create better students.