Good thread topic, Nakosis. It's of particular interest to me, since I've been professionally involved with it.
Do you feel the brick and mortar schools are a necessity or should we maybe invest in online schools?
It's complicated. I think that elementary school probably should be bricks-and-mortar since a big part of what they do is socializing kids, teaching them to function without their parents in social groups. I have mixed opinions about secondary school. Bricks and mortar high-schools are wonderful for some kids but horror shows for others.
I feel that health, education and welfare are important to any civilized country. My concern however is the cost.
The biggest cost for any school is going to be pay and benefits for its faculty and staff. So unless an online school can eliminate faculty, it will still be costly.
IMO, brick and mortar schools plus educational staff are costly. Is there a benefit to keeping them around?
You could educate the people at a far less cost using online schooling. Less staff, more automation, more consistency in the curriculum.
I'd personally prefer that secondary schools put more emphasis on teaching kids useful job skills. Then encourage kids to get an entry-level job upon graduation from high school. That would help them to mature psychologically, be socialized into adult life and maybe find an interest and an intellectual direction in life. The time for higher education would be once that's determined.
Contrast that to sending an adolescent off to university, where freed from the strictures of home and parents, kids often fall into disfunctional lifestyles that include anything but studying and can prove a major hindrance to maturation into adulthood. Sending kids to university can sometimes do more harm than good.
Another major consideration here is the fact that the day is long gone when people can graduate from school and then rely on that education for rest of their lives. People often change careers several times in the course of their lifetimes, and most careers require that professionals remain current. So the adolescent learning model is rapidly being replaced by a life-long adult learning model. And that will naturally put a premium on distance learning since it would allow people to keep their current job and residence while taking classes. It wouldn't require that they uproot everything and move to the university.
Something that I'd really like to see used more is prior-learning assessment. People find themselves learning, whether formally or informally, all through life. They learn by doing on the job. They take company training classes. They read books. They take individual post-secondary classes, some for academic credit and some not, from all sorts of providers.
So universities offering degrees by prior-learning assessment set out what they think that a graduate needs to know and be able to do. (Equivalent to a degree syllabus.) Then students are allowed to demonstrate that they possess the required knowledge and abilities in a variety of ways. Those include taking and passing conventional classes, transferring in classes taken elsewhere, passing written or practical examinations of various sorts, or by submitting portfolios of the students' earlier work.
Competency-based education information for higher education institutions
Thomas Edison State University: What is your learning style?
Finish your Degree Online | Charter Oak State College
Online Courses & Credit By Exam - Excelsior College
Accueil - France VAE
This model might start to reduce costs by making professors less central to the whole operation.
Or is there something lacking in this scenario?
There will probably always be the high-end universities and liberal arts colleges that market themselves as finishing schools for tomorrow's elite. So I don't expect Stanford, Columbia or Yale to go away.
And there are some subjects that don't really lend themselves to an online format. The laboratory sciences for example, the studio and performing arts, engineering and many medical and para-medical professions.
But having said that, I expect many subjects that revolve around classroom lectures and tutorials to migrate online. Literature, philosophy, history, mathematics and many subjects like that are probably headed online. Many of these subjects are complaining about declining enrollments (the "Crisis of the Humanities"). So we might see departments trying to expand their applicant pool beyond those willing to move to the school and those within commuting distance. Distance learning opens up the possibility of offering programs to the whole world.
The day might be coming when universities turn primarily into scientific research establishments with some graduate programs in those sciences tacked on. In other words, universities may someday look more like this --
Facts at a Glance | Scripps Research
