What is your opinion on the impact of online courses on education?

I teach in two online PhD programs in instructional design and learning technology, and have helped lead online instruction companies for 35 years. In that time, the effects on education have varied widely.

At all levels of education, information and communication technologies (ICT) have gained wide use for automating administrative tasks, creative tasks and specialized tasks such as analysis. However, online courses vary widely in their conceptualization and influence.

Research on how to design effective online courses started in earnest in the 1960’s, and we now know many important principles about how to make online study effective at every level from K-12 through post-secondary and professional and technical training of the workforce. (The field is called instructional design). However these principles are not well understood by most educators. The result is that the default models for online courses are simplistic attempts to transfer classroom teaching methods to online learning. This almost always results in mediocre learning experiences. A small number of universities, and many e-learning companies, have learned to create courses using a multidisciplinary team of specialists in the content area, instructional design, graphics and multimedia, simulation and game design, and programming, all supported by a team of researchers. This kind of infrastructure is unfortunately rare, and it is likely that you have never encountered a well designed online course in your studies. The net result is that while it is possible to create online courses that are more effective than classroom instruction, depending on how well the intended learning outcome fits the known principles for teaching that kind of content online, it’s still rare. If you simply ask if online courses are better or worse at teaching, the only research based answer is, “sometimes, but it depends…”

At the post-secondary level, however, there is a wide preference for online courses — to the extent that campus-based enrollments are declining. The reasons mostly have to do with convenience and access. Even if the tuition is the same, the costs of running and attending a campus-based program are often much greater than online courses. This is especially true in developing countries. The result is that post-secondary education and training is the one part of the education sector where the Internet has been as disruptive as is true as in many other sectors of the economy.

For a variety of reasons, the effects of online courses in the K-12 sector are much less pronounced. But that’s a discussion for a different time…