The mindset of the educational-industrial complex is threatening to take over online education as well

“Will this be on the test?”

Rethinking online education

by Seth Godin

The first generation of online learning came with a lot of hype but didn’t fully deliver on its promise. What does the future hold?

[Find out more about our take on learning at Akimbo]

[This is the sequel to Stop Stealing Dreams, now reprinted on Medium.]

A few years ago, a computer science course online broke records and signed up 100,000 students. It was a revelation. Students from all over the world, without regard for their ability to pay, formal schooling or connections, were all able to take an advanced course from a world-class professor.

At a time when tuition at an Ivy League school is more than $40,000 a year ($5,000 a course), this online course delivered more than three billion dollars worth of higher learning aggregate value for free.

This is the sort of mammoth economic and access transformation that the internet enables.

The media was abuzz. Net theorists, teachers and organizations were excited because this was the beginning of a mammoth shift in the way everyone would learn everything. Not only a college education, but corporate training and everything in between.

Not mentioned in most of the articles was the fact that nearly 99% of the students that enrolled dropped out of the course. One thousand students graduated — an astonishing number, a huge contribution, but the tiniest fraction of the number that began the course.

In real life, a dropout rate of 99% endangers even a tenured professor’s career.

But, you might say, it’s the internet. We’ve come to associate the internet as low-engagement, a drive-by experience. We take for granted that the internet offers us things that are slightly flaky, or easy. So we’re not surprised when the drop out rate is so high. Easy in, easy out.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The course was as well-designed as a real-world lecture and the teacher was qualified and engaging, but it’s not a surprise that the dropout rate was so high: As soon as education gets difficult (and useful education always gets difficult) it’s social pressure, peer pressure and our own need to fit in and achieve that often keeps us going. The typical online course provides precious little of any of these elements.

Your peers can’t see you, which makes it difficult to see yourself.

It’s not surprising that traditional universities embraced online learning — it’s at the heart of their charter. And countless organizations jumped in as well, because it appears to be not only a public good, but a cheap way to train your people, with zero marginal cost and plenty of upside for everyone.

Centralized content, top-down control of the syllabus, the ability to approve every interaction — these are the hallmarks of a process that fits most bureaucracies.

Here’s the thing: large universities have built their institutions around lectures, tests and accreditation. So have many internal training functions.

Lectures are at the heart of the last century of higher learning. A proven scholar orates in front of a class of selected students.

Tests are the way institutions enforce compliance. They’re the stick.

And accreditation is the carrot. Put up with the lectures and the tests and we’ll give you the certificate, the scarce piece of paper that is (supposed to be) worth far more than the effort you went through to get certified.

In one question, then, an easy way to understand modern education: “Will this be on the test?”

The student absorbs, the student regurgitates, the student gets the prize of a degree (and a job).

Modern industrialized education is like a job because, in large measure, it’s funded by the very same folks who offer jobs. It’s like a job because school was invented to train us to be compliant in our jobs. And it’s like a job because compliance is easy to scale.

We’ve seen that when knowledge jobs meet the internet, they change. And now we’re seeing that online education is having trouble acting like a job as well.

Online courses can’t offer too much in the way of credit (because there’s too little scarcity) and online tests are difficult to administer in high-stakes situations. Worst of all is the fact that few people in the age of a TED talk will eagerly sit through a traditional lecture when there’s little at stake.

This has led to an explosion of low-stakes, as-much-fun-as-vocational online courses like the well-executed ones offered by Skillshare and Udemy. But because the stakes are lower, the amount of transformative learning that goes on is lower. It’s possible for a semester at Harvard Business School to change a life — but less likely it will happen in a lecture course online.

Traditional schooling is based on top-down power, fear and an elusive carrot. It uses brute force to move large numbers of people down a straight line of education toward a norm.

And the challenge for traditional educators is that when they go online, they have very little power, the fear that comes from hard work causes dropouts and the carrot feels very far away indeed.