Essay 14

Essay 14: Why Online Education Poses a Threat

Advances in information technology have threatened if not already destroyed numerous traditional occupations. Those that think they are immune to such threats need to think again. First, I am going to quickly review some of the professions and occupations that have already suffered greatly. Then, I am going to explain why traditional education is as vulnerable as any of the others. As John Donne said, “send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

There are numerous well-known examples of occupations and professions that have been substantially if not mortally disrupted by information technology. Retail in general and book selling in particular have been upended by Amazon.com. Now Amazon has disrupted book publishing as well with the publication of 5,000 new volumes per day. Journalism is but a shadow of what it used to be, first threatened by bloggers and more recently by podcasts. One statistic I found said that “as of 2021, there are more than 570 million blogs on the internet”. To put this into perspective the population of the US is only 330 million. Another statistic I found said that in 2021, there were 850,000 active podcasts, with over 48 million total episodes. I should mention that these statistics are not hard and fast. But you can Google them as well as I can. Many, if not most, other occupations have been changed relying more heavily on information technology. For example, the person who delivers my mail uses a bar code scanner to verify delivery of packages and the person who delivers food or groceries uses an app on his or her phone for driving directions.

Traditional professions have not been exempted. My doctor’s office has been taken over by information technology for scheduling, submitting prescriptions and even for diagnosis. Lawyers often use legal expert systems to do work that junior associates used to do. Accounting jobs at the clerical level have been largely eliminated by information technology. And about a third of us now use a software package to prepare and file our taxes. Many of these and other similar professions had a false sense of security believing that the work they do could not be done by a computer. This false sense of security is still being enjoyed to some extent for education professionals. But not for long.

Let us try a thought experiment. Imagine that we are at some point decades into the future where all education is done online. It is far superior to the education done today for a variety of reasons that I will get to in a moment. But, then some sort of virus infects the internet rendering it useless. Technology experts believe it may take years to recover.

Educational experts look to other way to keep education going during this period. (When I came up with this idea, it was pre-pandemic. It is chilling now to look back on it.) They decide to go back to the way things were and have students come to specialized buildings where they are put into rooms of about 30 per room to be given instruction by a specially trained instructor. And it is a disaster. Why?

You can probably figure out the reasons on your own. The instructors vary widely in their knowledge and experience. Some know their field well and explain it well. Others know it well but explain it poorly. Others yet, don’t know it well and just waste the student’s time. Delivery is unreliable as the quality of teaching from one instructor to the next varies greatly, as does the quality of one instructor from one delivery to the next.

None of the deliveries are done anywhere near as well as they could be. The online education was rigorously debugged and adjusts to the learning styles of different students. The concept of product refinement had produced high quality learning experiences online and is simply not possible with in-class education delivered by people.

Then there is the expense. Once a course is polished, it can be provided to millions of students simultaneously with very little incremental cost. The in-class model requires tens of thousands of rooms with tens of thousands of instructors to deliver an unreliable and inconsistent product at a much higher price. The only alternative is to fix the internet and go back to the way things were.

I use this scenario because people always think that the way things are done is the best way to do them. They then reinforce this mindset with talking points. You need to step out of the present in order to see things as they actually are. So, this essay provides a few examples of how online education could be higher quality and more affordable, and perhaps inevitable. The question of whether online education will replace traditional education is not a question of if but when.

Send an email to me at drjohnartz@gmail.com if you have a comment on any of my essays. And please check out my website at DrJohnArtz.com to see other things I have written.