I have no doubt this will work well for some students, but as someone who taught online for the better part of two years I can say with certainty that the experience is very different and (for the wide majority of students) worse than being in person.

My colleagues and I can attest to both general learning loss (ie., forgetting specific subject matter information) and a loss of broader “studying skills” (ie., coming to class and doing homework) after the pandemic.

In intro classes in our department, mean grades have been a whole standard deviation lower than the long run pre-pandemic average. That’s a huge effect!

This is also not just specific to our department or university but has been written about widely in the higher ed press.

People have been confidently predicting that online education “is the future” since the 1990’s. IMO the lesson of the pandemic is “no it’s not and it’s never going to be.”

If online works for you, awesome. Enjoy! There are great resources out there. But I don’t think you are in the majority.

In-person educators trying to do online learning, getting poor results, and then saying it's the fault of online education is a bit like a YouTube educator teaching in person classes, doing poorly, and then declaring that in-person education is inferior.

Also worth noting that students who have spent years being conditioned with in-person learning might have an adjustment period when starting online education, one that might not go smoothly if it's happening during a crisis and guided by people inexperienced with and predisposed against this form of education.

I imagine a huge factor is also parental involvement, when it comes to encouraging students to set aside several hours each night for study and homework. In the absence of parental involvement or in cases of parental neglect and indifference (woefully common in many situations), the role of the teacher becomes far more important in encouraging the student to develop good study habits. This might be more difficult in the online situation.

One of Malcolm Gladwell's books made a convincing argument that reducing class size quickly runs into the issue of diminishing returns. A cursory Googling suggests there's plenty of research to back it up[0][1]

The effectiveness of in-person learning may have more to do with social interaction and peer motivation. A teacher with about 20 students who is able to create a general excitement for learning in the class seems to be the most effective. A classroom where the "spirit" of learning is alive is ideal for a lot of kids.

[0]https://edcentral.uk/reading-list/431-what-we-have-learned-a... [1]http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/evidence-class-siz...

it works out really well for the student. instead of working a regular job during the year you get to do something that benefits your career, you build a relationship with your professors and it pays more than if you were working at the local grocery store.

https://cse.ucsd.edu/undergraduate/readers-and-tutors

https://biosciences.uchicago.edu/content/teaching-assistant-...

> All graduate students are required to serve as a Teaching Assistant in at least one course for academic credit before the Ph.D. degree is awarded. Appropriate courses may be undergraduate, graduate, or medical, but must be in the Biological Sciences Division (exceptions may be made for students in the Biophysical Sciences program).

Personally I was desperate in March 2020 (as were my colleagues) for any tips about what would work online. I didn't want my classes to suck, nor did my colleagues. There was very little information available at the beginning about what worked.

But what's worse (and what makes me disagree with your comment) is that even after a year of being online it still wasn't clear how to make it not suck! Basically no one had discovered anything which made students like it OR perform well.

I polled my students every midterm and final exam (and gave them actual points for their answers!) on whatever they had found to work in any of their online classes. Collectively they were exposed to several hundred other professors at my university. While they did have some suggestions (which I did implement), nothing really worked.

On top of this, schools tend to be constrained with trying to fit everything into the particular confines of what's considered a class. I don't know about your particular school, but all of the ones I've seen would never try to educate students with something like The Odin Project, even though many here think it's a great example of online education.

Also, even with a great program and experienced teacher, changes in education styles entail a transition period for the students. We would expect this to be much slower in such a rocky transition with the professors themselves trying to figure out what to do. But even with poor circumstances I'd expect to see at least some amount of progress as students adjusted to things. Did you not see any?

You mention them being exposed to the classes of several hundred professors at your university. Surely there was some variability in the success the professors had. What difference did the school see between the more successful classes and the less successful classes?

I work in sales and direct face-to-face sales ALWAYS has better close rates, happier customers, etc. than indirect sales through phone or internet.

I sold private whisky casks to individuals or groups. Before the pandemic, I would sit down at the table with them and guide them through a tasting, several hours long. My close rate was close to 50%.

With the pandemic, I switched to shipping samples and moderating the tasting online via Zoom or Teams. My close rate dropped to noise level.

I don't think I fundamentally changed my "tactics", and since it involved drinking more than a few sips of alcohol, I never required the customer to sign the order form in my presence.

In my experience, physical presence was waaaay more conducive to sales.

And sales where you're giving a sample like whisky? The social obligation to reciprocate for receiving something "free" is very strong. The idea behind giving a sample in a sales pitch isn't to get them to like the whisky (though it helps eliminate/reduce resistance), it's to incur that social obligation.

Were these Zoom classes? I can't think of a single synchronous (like Zoom) class that didn't suck.

What I liked as a student was prerecorded lectures that could be replayed at high speed (or even skipped) on my own schedule. Personally I much prefer these over live lectures.

This resource is available on most college campuses for the teachers who have the humility to ask. Those folks were intimately involved in MOOCs and knew a lot about how to make online teaching work. They might have been able to help, but there was a bit of a sigma around talking to them.

Take my 18-yo and 22-yo students. They have responded to my online teaching in a very different way. The 18 year olds responded much better to physical teaching - most vocally preferred it - while older students generally preferred online. I could write a lot more about the details here but I'm on my phone

My daughter teaches math in high school and what she sees can be summed up as: kids are social and need supervision, and a different approach depending on age.

12-year olds are basically still kids but as soon as puberty kicks in kids are overwhelmed by a series of physical, psychological and social changes. This makes life hard to navigate for them and for this reason they need guidance.

So in my opinion remote learning (without local adult supervision) is the worst option for high school.

I wrote briefly about the topic in a blog post, titled "Professors as Creators". It explores the idea briefly, and how treating teachers as "creators" could add value not just to remote learning, but to in-person lessons as well. https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/professors-as-creators-h...

But it's not a choice anymore in India where the online-school-education started out as a necessity during pandemic lock-down and now kids are enrolled in it due to peer-pressure; Parents in India already spent >40% of their income on their kids education before pandemic.

What's worse is that these online school education startups copied Khan Academy's coursework and some even became an unicorn during pandemic with fraudulent practices(False advertising: E.g. 'Kid who took our course got employed by Google', Untrained/Unqualified teachers etc.); So I wouldn't think twice about enrolling my kid into an online-school run by Mr.Khan if I had one.

This 1000x. My son is at UCSD. Very few of the online lectures were better, majority were worse.

I think online can be better, but it requires expertise that doesn't exists in most teaching professionals.

I teach at a university in Japan. I have been teaching my classes exclusively online—live using Zoom—for more than two years, and overall the experience has been better than with the in-person classes I taught for many years before. The class discussions have been meatier and more focused than in person, and the students have been turning in better papers.

I recognize that the results would be different in other situations. I am fortunate to teach small classes of motivated students with good study skills. And as one of the “very online crowd,” I might have been able to adapt to online teaching better than some others.

But the big revolution of online learning is the opportunity it gives for people to take part in interactive classes regardless of their location. Yesterday I taught a graduate seminar with fourteen students, eight in Japan and six in China, including two in lockdown in Shanghai. Everyone was able to take part actively. Starting next Monday, my other graduate class will shift from afternoon to morning Japan time so that a student who is in Mexico and unable to return to Japan can take part in real time. This past Monday, one of the other students in that class was in COVID quarantine near Narita Airport but was able to participate fully in class.

Until recently, it was assumed that the only way to conduct interactive classes in real time was for the teacher and students to all be in the same physical location. If students couldn’t get to campus for whatever reason, they were excluded. Online education opens up educational opportunities for many people who couldn’t participate before.

This in particular:

> The class discussions have been meatier...

is a literal miracle.

I think it might be this:

> I am fortunate to teach small classes of motivated students with good study skills.

I teach an honors and a regular section of one of my classes. The honors students (who are more serious and motivated in general) definitely are affected less.

If you are teaching grad students that is also not going to be representative of the overall population. Those guys are definitely in the right tail of motivation.

I call on students more systematically rather than just waiting for volunteers to raise their hand. When I taught in-person, it was usually the same few students who spoke up a lot, while others never said anything. Now everyone contributes, making for an overall better discussion.

With my larger online classes, I will sometimes throw out a discussion question and give the students five or ten minutes to write up their responses, which they submit through a Google Form. I then display those responses on screen and respond to them. Having the time to write up their responses, and knowing that their responses might be shared with the entire class, seems to make students respond more thoughtfully than if they were just making an ephemeral spoken comment.

I sometimes ask all students to submit questions to me through an online form, too. In in-person classes, many students seem embarrassed to ask questions in front of their peers. That doesn’t apply to online forms. (When I display the students’ questions on the screen, I don’t show the students’ names.)

Some of these ideas come from workshops I attended years ago on “active learning” and could be implemented in the classroom as well. But I began using them only after I started teaching online.

> If you are teaching grad students that is also not going to be representative of the overall population. Those guys are definitely in the right tail of motivation.

You’re absolutely correct.

I can understand why this gives a better learning experience and results (for most students). Hmm, also depends on the subject -- they're saying and discussing things? Eg social sciences? Whilst in maths, maybe there is less to discuss and talk about, and the positive effects you're seeing wouldn't be there?

Seems to me all this can be done in real life too -- but requires more discipline, since the "default", that the more talkative students speak out loud when they want, is what comes naturally? Rather than writing questions and thoughts on paper and handing in, and you read them.

Would be interesting to try IRL with pencils and paper :-) I'm not a teacher though.

Edit: what do you teach? / What do the students study

You’re right that the same method wouldn’t work with some other subjects and some other types of students.

I did take a mathematics class as an undergraduate, though, in which our teacher—Paul Halmos—had us work together in small groups on problems throughout the semester, with guidance from him only when we got stuck. That could presumably be done online, too.

> I learn as much from them as they do from me.

Sounds like a nice job :-)

Paul Halmos, cool to have had such a person as one's teacher. (Was that in the US? I wonder how he was like, as a teacher and person)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

He seemed a bit formal and intimidating at first, but he turned out to be a warm, considerate person. He and his wife had me and several other students over to their house for dinner a couple of times, and he enjoyed talking with us about whatever youthful nerdish topics we were interested in.

I was about twenty years old then. I just realized that he was in his early sixties, a couple of years younger than I am now.

Also, interesting to read about the Moore method (I found vid the Algolia link). If I'll ever do some teaching stuff, I'll try Halmos' flavor of that method :-)

Online, everything needs to be done differently from in-person:

- Lecture is a waste of time. Pre-made stuff will be higher-quality than anything you can deliver, and save a lot of time

- Grading should be automated as much as possible. Immediate feedback is powerful for students, as is being able to move at their own pace, have targeted remediation, etc.

- Automating stuff leaves waaaaay more time for 1:1 interaction, reviewing student work, etc.

- Audio isn't the only way to interact. Students can use chat, embedded surveys, forums, etc. There are many ways for having interactive engagement impossible in person.

- You should make heavy use of peer teaching: Breakout rooms, structured peer review, etc.

Online during COVID19 crashed-and-burned since people took in-person and tried to run it over Zoom. Good online can be better than in-person.

Oh, and details matter. Everyone should have a headset. Mute is generally bad. You should have good whiteboarding tools. Everyone should have a pen tablet ($40) or copy stand ($100). Etc.

NONE of this happened at most schools during COVID.

That said, my highschool did teach, more forced, me to read vast volumes very quickly. That skill really helped at various levels later. But that can be taught in other ways than sitting in a classroom slowly memorizing Shakespeare.

My first guess is "there are some pushy parents who will want their kid to be in a higher class even when their kid isn't qualified for it". The answer to this is, have a rigorous test and a high standard for skipping a class.

My second guess is "teachers have a general stance of not wanting to make any 'concessions' to parents, otherwise that will attract more pushy parents". (I did once have a math teacher who said "If I let you ... then I'd have 100 parents wanting the same for their kids.") So... keeping a strong negotiating position for the teachers is more important than doing right by individual students.

I think the answer is that, ultimately, the people making decisions about children's education don't have strong incentives to make it go well. If the kid sits in class bored but not causing trouble, that doesn't create a problem for the teacher or the principal; if the kid is enthusiastically learning in the next-level class, that might be nice for that teacher, but on average likely won't make a huge difference—and actually the teacher whose class the kid came from will get a replacement student who might need help, so that teacher may be genuinely disincentivized to recommend the kid's advancement, even aside from the "negotiating position" aspect.

Maybe there's also something of a resentment about them not being needed when they encounter an autodidact? I had problems with an AP chemistry teacher who was angry that I was doing the homework in class instead of listening to the lecture. When I said that I thought textbook had explained the topic quite well, her reaction was extremely negative. The existence of the autodidact sort of threatens the proposition of school itself.

Perhaps my junior and senior high schools, in the south west England in the late '60s, early '70s, were better than yours, or perhaps they just suited me better than yours suited you, but I learned a lot. We also did Shakespeare but I don't remember anyone having to memorize it unless they were actually putting on a play.

I think there's a huge under-served group who are specifically not the majority. Smart kids are generally held back by being shoehorned in with other kids.

Personally, I think we need to figure out how to use online resources best and that the future will most certainly be a mix. But also please entertain that maybe the optimal audience for this program isn't the majority at all, actually. And that doesn't make it less valuable.

When I discovered WGU 1.5 years ago, I did much better simply by being allowed to go at whatever pace I felt like, and taking time off when I felt like it, and I managed to get through school in a fairly short amount of time.

I'm doing online graduate school now, and fortunately my supervisors are somewhat amenable to this style; they simply give me a bunch of recordings of their lectures and all the assignments that I'm expected to do all at once. Some days I don't do anything, other days I'll spend six hours straight watching lectures and doing homework.

Have recently watched my daughter respond quite differently in online learning in group environments. One is Wingchun( a martial art) taught by enthusiastic and outright funny instructors. My little girl loves every minute of class. The other is oddly-enough Montessori class where she feels held back by other kids and their chatter. But she LOVES the IRL Montessori classes.

I feel that this form of online high school wont be for everyone but there is a segment of those for whom this medium suits them best due to combination of circumstance, motivation, and personality. Education is not 'one mode suits all'. I struggled to stay engaged at high school. Tertiary wasnt much better until i discovered extra-mural (distance education), and loved it.

I think this is exactly it.

In person never worked for me. I was bored - and being bored I ended up with “discipline issues.” I would never do my homework, never pay attention in class, was always late because I was talking in between sessions, etc. My teachers weren’t a fan, the administrators weren’t fans, parents were upset.

Every year, starting in 2nd grade, at the end of the school year I was given “token” exercises as a way of getting passing grades so I wouldn’t be held back. I’d knock those out and continue on. At the time I was thankful to the instructors for giving me that opportunity. In retrospect I’m fairly confident I know why that happened.

Every year we were administered state achievement exams. The school was evaluated based on the students performance on these tests. While I was failing every subject, I carried the class (scoring at least 10% higher on the exam than the next highest grade) every year. Holding me back would have raised quite a few questions about their curriculum.

Fast forward to 12th grade. I drop out of in-person school and switch to online. My in-person school refuses to release my records (we owed them money) so I was starting 12th grade with no credits. The online program was self paced. I knocked out 3 years of eduction in 3 months. Then turned 18, walked downtown and took the GED instead of finishing the last year.

Self paced education is huge for certain people. Every once in a while I think of all the kids in the world who could achieve so much with their youth, but instead they are strapped to a chair being tortured 7+ hours a day by well intentioned adults.

Have you ever considered that the digital teaching methods you employed are subpar compared to those a dedicated online only teaching platform might have.

I don't mean to suggest you did not try.

Most kids had no interest in working without supervision forcing them to work. Now that they're back in school, they are continuing to not work and it's a disaster, with teachers and staff quitting or retiring en masse. Again, this is in a school district that people had been trying to get into for years.

It's really not the coursework delivery style, it's about forcing kids to do what they don't want to do. This force just isn't a component of online learning -- it has little to do with content delivery, imo.

The upside is that those kids that actually want to learn are freed up more than ever before and can actually thrive.

Moreover (as I replied to a different comment above) even after a year of being online the students were unable to identify things that made any of their online classes work. At that point they had resigned to their classes sucking. (Not just my class - I asked my students to tell me what worked in any of their online classes. Collectively that's asking about the teaching methods of a few hundred professors.)

If you have information about some methods which work, I would have loved to have them. I would still love to have them! (If you can provide some evidence about whether and how they are known to work that would be better still.)

Were learning materials which cover the required material made available to students?

Were those materials made available on an approachable platform?

Were those materials made available on a platform which encouraged habit formation for students to work on the material?

Are students able to track their progress?

Are students able to confirm their progress and check with where they are supposed to be if the exam dates are fixed?

Is the progress of student embedded into a (meta) narrative which ties together the lecture and provides topical humor (like a lecturer would when cleaning the blackboards)?

Are means in place to ensure passive diffusion of important information if students are stuck?

Are means in place to encourage or enforce formation of student learning groups and cooperation between students?

The traditional lecture hall model has a lot of mechanism which need to be replicated in the digital sphere.

Can you provide links to any?

It may not work for everyone but the important thing is that it may and will work for someone for whom other options are not available or subpar.

I grew up in a small backwater-ish city and school was useless, outside of socializing. By far, the most important thing I did for my education was enrolling into a distance learning physics and technology school managed by one of the nation's top technical universities. You would receive learning materials and exercises several times during the school year by snail mail (yes, I am that old) and send your answers back for grading.

Whatever I am and the life I have started with this.

At least that last factor is directly correlated with online learning.

Also I know from experience that most students in online classes aren’t even actively listening. A good chunk of them end up on YouTube or Instagram.

It might be worth considering whether synchronously sitting in a lecture with 30 other kids isn't, in fact, a good model for learning in any environment, online or otherwise.

Think of a meeting of 30 people in your own office environment and wonder how many people are spacing out at any given moment.

Unless they live in rural settings, it’s likely a very loose correlation.

When I was a kid, I grew up in a neighborhood in a walkable town and my friends and I saw each other everyday, though we went to different schools or were in different grades at the same school.

I later moved to a rural area for high school and only saw people at school due to how far away we all lived from each other.

In the first situation, I suspect online learning would have been great for me since I could do it at home and I’d still have plenty of social interaction without the downside of hauling books between classes, sitting in an uncomfortable classroom environment, and largely not paying attention since there wasn’t any way for the teacher to track my participation in a large class.

I’m not sure how physical education would have worked at that time, but maybe fitness trackers help with that nowadays.

I do suspect that online learning isn’t great for lower income households since they may not have dedicate space set up for learning, and it would be a shame to create yet another class difference in education.

Living in South Africa, we have a huge difference between the best private schools and the worst public schools. It would be nice to know that every child in the world has at least a base level of education available that reduces “quality of your teacher” as a variable.

Obviously this assumes they’re able to learn remotely. I realise that’s not everyone. That doesn’t mean this has no value. I had extra lessons that were part recorded (so I could rewind etc) and tests with a teacher who could help guide through aspects I didn’t understand. Improved three symbols in one year with about a solid week of study over each holiday. Self study worked very well for me, as a supplement.

I’d also argue that online school during the pandemic, like remote work during the pandemic, is not representative of online school during non-pandemic times.

Now this is speculation on my part but the students who may be suffering from bullying (leading to that anxiety and depression) now have more control of their environment and connections. Its easy to ignore someone typing in some chat room (and maybe even mute them entirely) that you can't ignore when they are physically in the same location as you.

And I know being able to control my environment, and fidget or move around, or whatever I want to do allows me to work better than being stuck in some classroom bored and daydreaming. So for certain people there are definitely positive outcomes. Even if they are a minority. And a service like this might be a great asset to those people.

[1] https://sphr.nihr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Young-Peo...

The child's age is also significant... I certainly would not have a child under 12 working under the the same expectations as a teenager. Additionally, every child develops at a different rate, so finding that sweet spot is an important part of home schooling. These are all things that the public school mentality finds incredulous.

So I agree with what you are saying, but so many people still think the model for home school should be the same as a public/private school situation, which is where things fall apart. It's obvious to me that children always need to be well socialized and have a variety of teachers and experiences, but that can be achieved if the parent is proactive and willing to spend the required time and money to foster learning over optimizing for succeeding in the public school system.

No disagreement that grades are lower, but is it possible we are in some ways measuring the wrong things?

In a modern age, “remembering information” or “doing homework” don’t seem so applicable to the future.

Being in person can be important, but it’s for mostly social reasons, not the ones you stated.

No disagreement, but we were measuring the same things pre- and post-pandemic. The negative effect on those measured outcomes is very real.

It is possible that if we were measuring the "right things" (whatever those are) we might see no effect. A priori that's a little implausible IMO but I'm willing to entertain the argument!

> In a modern age, “remembering information” or “doing homework” don’t seem so applicable to the future.

Strong disagree on "remembering information is not applicable to the future." I partially concede on "doing homework", but honestly there is no other way to make the students attempt to apply the material they learn, and no way for them to understand what they don't understand except by attempting to apply it!

Homework might suck, but there is a good reason everyone uses it!

I did quite well in the program and on the SAT I took to get into college in lieu of a high school diploma. I did okay in college too, graduating with honors. I really can't see what I lost by basically doing high school alone in my bedroom reading books and taking self-graded exams.

I think it can work with the major caveat that it has to be both voluntary and the student has to bring a genuine desire to learn to the table. Not all students do. I think Khan World School will work very well but for maybe 10% of students leaving 90% worse off. Conversely I think in-person traditional schooling will work well for 90% but make 10% worse off due to stuff like bullying.

It would be unconscionable to withhold something like Khan World School from the people it could benefit. It's okay that it doesn't work for everyone. Neither does the traditional system.

How did everyone else mess it up so bad? I'm just reading this and thinking back to my resolve to use this time as positively as possible, like study and doing my best with savings was the most obvious thing at the time to me

Might be something to do with me living in the third world and adaptation culture being different

Kids. A different set of mental-health challenges. Being worried about losing their job. Being more dependent on their non-coliving family than you are. Being more worried about their family than you are. Having a job that they're not used to doing online. Having a job that's hard to do online. Having a job that couldn't be done online. Being deprived of life-long hobbies and interests that can't be done online or in the home. etc etc.

In my experience from observing my own children who universally despise online classes, Khan Academy has been excellent (with the exception of their Physics curriculum which is a complete mess.) I have no doubt that if I enrolled them in the 'classes' that they would absolutely hate it, especially based on that Daily Seminar image that looks like a Zoom meeting.

With the shift to enrolled classes it seems like they are pivoting towards the Educational Industrial Complex, which is unfortunate. That discourages me from donating to them again. Although I am always happy to pay for quality learning material and workbooks I'm not interested in supporting online classrooms.

In person learning is about learning from your peers as much as it is about learning from your instructors. People are quick to point out that the commonly occurring bad in-person instructor can be compared to online-learning. But, they leave out the fact that online-learning completely sidelines any prospects for peer-learning. I am not even bringing up the role schools play in socialization, physical health and as day-care. No amount of online-anything is going to replace that.

I would also chalk up the students generally being less organized to the stress of the situation, rather than a degeneration of study skills.

In fact, my homeschool friends who did remote video courses (as close as you could get to online at the time) were much better at many subjects than I was.

I don't think its online vs in person. It's online vs nothing or online vs shitty teaching.

The "it's never going to be" part does not necessarily follow from any of the data presented so far. Perhaps we simply need a better understanding of how people learn online, and get better at using technological tools to facilitate learning?

I mean, is there any particular reason to think we've reached the pinnacle of what learning software and online educational platforms can do?

The futuristic dream: kids use fancy tech like AR goggles and haptic tech to manipulate shapes in a collaborative learning game and ultimately learn math in an intuitive way. Think of the best Jypiter notebook you've seen and then take that off the screen and into the real world. Then add an AI assistant that constantly guides you through common questions and make it so that the whole program is continually being refined to make it better and better for each successive generation of kids. Every lesson has tens of millions of dollars poured into it since it will be reused potentially billions of times.

The practical dream: okay we don't have money for any of that, but at least use the internet to break geographic constraints. Have actual math teachers teaching math to various classes around the country/world, have actual music teachers teaching music, immediately direct gifted kids to accelerated classes, have more flexibility with special needs kids (e.g. take classes in a different time zone so that their parents can help), offer a wide selection of second languages by connecting kids to foreign teachers, do virtual exchanges, etc.

The reality: most kids don't even have computers. Actually I was shocked to learn that many kids don't even have chairs and desks at home. This is in Canada by the way. My wife was teaching K-8 online classes to kids lying on their beds, propping up their mom's borrowed iphone on their bellies, trying to not fall asleep as the front camera streams a dimly-lit view of their chin.

So to summarize, we start with the same in-person learning, from the same teachers to the same class, remove all of the blackboards/manipulatives/etc., reduce the child's field of view to a 6" screen streaming a laggy 480p video with horrible sound, delete all friendships by enforcing quarantine both during and after school, and finally conclude that online learning doesn't work!

Many commenters have mentioned that socialisation and its associated obligations are beneficial to learning, and this is what we are reminded of everyday among our students.

Kids learn best when they see other kids learn. And kids learn best when they are able to directly apply what they learn into a project that they own. We enable our own students to publish their own books and to perform in musicals that they produce.

Many online education companies fail because they think that all online education ("edTech") is simply digitising the school. It's not. To succeed, we need to think deeply about what online and physical education does best.

Hit me up if you want to learn more.

[1]: https://storychopsticks.com

Khan Academy has very strong brand recognition.

Many parents pay to have their child tutored. Partially because the quality of math teachers in high school is random (some are very good, others are not). Partially because one on one help is always very useful.

Trying to replicate the in person experience online is going to be a worse experience. The benefits, reduce costs and chances for a better education are there.

While this is obviously a little more difficult in a classroom format, I have seen it done in the 80s completely offline for math where the whole grade of students take a bunch of pretests at the beginning of the year (including the tests for the prior year material) and then are assigned to two week groups or classes for the topics they need. After two weeks, they get a post test. If they haven't passed at 90%, they stay in that topic until they complete it. If they have, they move on to the next topic. It got a little complicated as a few people were in groups that went down to one person after a while, and they were just giving me worksheets and then I would ask if I had a question, but I was able to proceed at more than 2x the normal pace for a few glorious years.

So, maybe doing the Khan Academy thing in the building, where you have a supervisor there to keep kids on task and prevent cheating, as well as ample people to whom one can ask questions, could be a net improvement.

For those who couldn't stand it should stay behind by attending classes physically

However...

Institutional learning, whether it's K-12, colleges, techs or whatnot have barely changed. The same fundamental dynamics exist, whether it's tertiary sorting and prestige or primary teaching methods. Education still serves and fails the same groups of people as it did before, in much the same way.

Education is an enormous "industry." It's in the same realm as defense, energy or transport. Possibly even more important.

I really hope to see online resources develop in such a way that schools can be built around them. A formula that a middle school principal anywhere, no matter how rural and remote, can implement. Why can't we have the best of both worlds?

The classroom model didn't work well for me as a student. I don't think remote-only would have worked either.

Great libraries have existed for thousands of years but you won't find examples, anywhere in the world, where kids are just left at the library to learn.

One of the fundamental aspects of learning is practice. Teachers/coaches/guides and mentors play a big role in keeping kids on track. It's not just about the best quality content. Or getting them interested. It's about keeping ppl on track when the repetition and practice gets boring. This is easy to do with small groups.

But very hard as group size increases which is why I don't have too much faith in the online model.

When I was 10 or 11, I was trying to use some operating system call on my Acorn Electron. The manual said one of the parameters had to be supplied using "two's complement". I had no idea what that was, and no idea how I might find a good explanation in the local library.

Today, a kid could find a great explanation in 2 mins, without walking to the library.

The mobile internet of 2022 is not very different, in principle, to the 2000 internet. But it is much more available and accessible to many more people. That means it has very different consequences.

So yes, as good Will Hunting said, you could get an ivy league education at a library. Some kids (and adults) did. Online resources make that pool of people much bigger.

I agree though that access to an online school is not a substitute for school. Most kids still need structure, coaching, support and peers. That said, it's still really important to have libraries, and that's what Khan is doing here. This is commendable.

That's the missing ingredient for online learning. I think being part of a class, having friends there, and not wanting to be left behind plays a huge role.

The guidance is the biggest differance. When you have limitless resources to learn from its hard to know where, and more importantly, and why to focus your attention.

Online resources typically give you a very clear path and often a clear why something is important to learn.

There is one important difference - almost all the school district leadership I have talked to supports change. They are held back not because they want to stick to the status quo, but because the funding model is driven by test scores, so the curriculum needs to follow the testing. That is what holds back innovation.

This effort by Khan and ASU bypasses that problem by not being free. Tuition is $9900 per year for students outside of Arizona. You have much more flexibility to innovate when you have non-federal funding.

There are many, many educational metastructures large and small around the world. Public, private, religious, regional, national, etc. By an large, the status quo persists much more widely than some specific incentive or funding structure. That doesn't mean test scores are good. It does mean that replacing the test score system will not, in itself, change much.

The teacher can focus on helping the people who need help, or ask a more advanced student to help out the struggling student.

The also allows that in school you could do more interesting stuff then just the teacher giving the same boring lectures over and over.

For me, I would have blown down the math part of the whole thing like 3 years early and would have had so much more time on French. Not that I would have enjoyed that but still.

This also bit me yesterday in a completely different fashion. I was attempting to replace the battery of an iPod Nano 3rd generation. This device is notorious for being very fragile to disassemble and repair. I managed to solder in the battery connectors only to start seeing the board heat up immensely. In removing the wires I burned one of the vias. Now I spent hours looking for a schematic or some info explaining what each via was for. I had to resort to looking up various youtube videos and asking on discord...no dice.

There is something special of having a structured curriculum that is trialed and tested so that you can go from a to b. I don't know if Khan Academy is that but local school curricula may be still relevant because of this.

You might be interested to know that Salman Khan has built a physical school

https://www.khanlabschool.org/about/about-kls

They call it a "lab school." I was hoping that meant developing a model which other schools can follow. No shade to Sal, obviously. He does plenty, and does it well.

I can't help but feel very let down by my state education experience, it feels like British state schools are a uniform Ford-esque production line that takes children as an input, utterly breaks their spirit, and produces a docile blue-collar workforce that doesn't really ask questions as an output. Private schools on the other hand actually seem to set their pupils up for life rather than simply being a cog.

The driving force behind this is that the well-paid jobs requiring certain skills like facility with maths, excellent reading and writing and verbal communication (presentation) skills, etc. end up being reserved for members of the aristocratic class and are obtained more by social connections than by some open competitive process. These include professions like lawyers, corporate managers, etc.

Hence, the educational programs for the serfs are cut down to the bone (as the serfs are not going to need those skills in their jobs as assembly line workers, miners, agricultural field hands, janitors, etc.). This of course helps perpetuate the class division in such stratified societies. Incidentally, encouraging contempt for education and skill development in the serf class is part of this whole problem. "What, do you think you're smarter than everyone else?" etc. Kids getting bullied for getting straight A's etc.

There has always been a strange borderland between these two zones, however, where the technologically adept can arise and prosper. Michael Faraday is perhaps the best example of a member of the serf class who broke the pattern.

I think it's disastrous to the long-term success of any nation, however. If America continues to slide towards such a system, it will fall behind China in technological development. Britain seems to have suffered from this issue: even though Britain was an early leader in computer technology (Turing, Colossus, etc.) they never had a Silicon Valley moment.

Except that it's happening in California as we speak... Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31170431

The "Progressive" model of education was very consciously planned with the intention of keeping the riffraff down, and far away from "elite" studies. It's "Progressive" in the early 20th c. sense of that word.

Of course one can also err in a different direction, devaluing practical education altogether and leading to "overproduction" of aspiring elites that are wholly parasitical on their surrounding society. And the two problems can even coexist, as seen in the US today! Extreme credentialism at the highest end (due to elite overproduction) coexists with the most dismal failure to achieve even basic educational outcomes for the bulk of the population.

* Homeschool

* Use your local school's curriculum or a public one like Common Core or another one of your choosing

* Use one of many amazing online sources, like Khan. The great thing is if you struggle, you can always find an alternative teacher. I've found sometimes I need multiple different explanations over the course of weeks to understand a topic.

* Many communities in larger towns & cities have tons of offline learning opportunities for groups.

Yeah, schools.

But learning needs teachers, and it needs teachers in small groups (classroom sizes of 20-30 are far too big). You cannot solve this with tech alone.

A New Era: Intelligent Tutoring Systems Will Transform Online Learning for Millions https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03724

I know a social worker who said, there were problematic kids that started "going" to school in the pandemic because it was now from home.

Imo online learning should always be a last resort though. The socializing aspect is important, having kids grow up in from of a computer screen without being able to fool around with their friends and explore the physical world around them seems sad.

This is an international venture. There are lots of places in the world where no high school education is offered but an internet connection is, or like you said this offering is better.

Online learning is very different and we haven't had many years of experience to perfect it yet. My guess is we will see its effectiveness grow for a few more decades as the nuances get figured out.

Outlier is doing the same thing but on the college level: why deal with a mediocre local math teacher if you can get taught by the best?

Because…you actually can’t. Static media (like books and non-interactive lectures) scales easily, but that’s not teaching (even if, especially in large lower-division courses, that’s what university faculty essentially does.)

Human interactivity, which is what teaching fundamentally is, doesn’t scale, which is why those large lecture classes typically also have smaller TA-led “discussion sections” or sonething similar. And, in many cases, as well as not scaling, it works a lot better in person than remotely.

Learning is the anchor, not teaching. Teaching is defined relative to learning. Anything that enables, delivers, structures or otherwise makes learning happen.

For me, classroom teaching was never helpful. I zoned out in classes from first class to university (where I just didn't attend lectures). I had a little private tutoring in 12th class that was very helpful. In college, small group tutorials where we reviewed homework problems also worked for me. The majority of "teaching" hours were entirely irrelevant.

Past very early grades, I would estimate the useless/useful ratio of teaching hours at <10%... maybe <5%. I don't think my experience is unique.

Anyway, I did benefit from educational structure. Essays, exams, teachers nagging. I don't think online-only would have worked for me. I needed eyes on me, and parents wouldn't have been sufficient.

If I were to design an educational system for child me it would have: (1) 0 hours of large class time. (2) 1-2 hours per day of intense small group learning. (3) 1-2 hours per day of private or semi private tuition. (4) self paced learning with a coach encouraging progress.

Isn't this exactly what the person was saying?

> […]

> It was not ineffective, though individual tutoring would've been the gold standard even back then.

Then it doesn’t scale very well.

We need some kind of institution to facilitate social interactions between children. Till date that has been the function of schools.

Moving away from this model, without proper deliberation, is sure to cause problems afterwards. And then we’ll all look back and ask why the world’s feeling more isolated than ever.

I would argue that segregating children by age for schooling purposes is a relatively modern idea that probably runs counter to tens if not hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

As long as high schools are facilities that push some people to extreme actions I think the 'social education' you would get there is too expensive for society as a whole.

Dealing and managing with other people who are incompatible with your ethics and morality is an important skill to learn. Not only does it help you learn asseriveness and diplomacy it also allows one to gain an insight into your own personal bias and teaches you how to respond and not react. A lot of grown, so called 'adults' still need to learn this skill set from my observations in day to day life.

My kids are all homeschooled, including parent taught as well as online education, and have friends of different ages with caring parents that are all very involved. They have outside activities including, music, PE, play time with friends at the park, zoo trips, museums etc.

Long story short my high school allowed gave credit for working, and going to a Communty College.

Once I got to the CC it was relief. My classmates were a lot older, but that was great. Their was no BS. I made great friends.

I didn't like high school much. I was respected because I was a good athlete, but hated high school. I also got a few brownie points because I survived a fight with the ultimate school bully. I went to the same school that our CA governor went to. He was ahead of me, but only graduated because his parents helped him out along the way. I could go on, but don't have the energy tonight. He is very open about his learning difficulties.

O.k. so back to my high school memories. My acne was so bad, I just wanted to hide. My hormones were crazy. I remember having to get to the school at 7:00 for no reason other than listening to some disenfranchised tenure teacher rattle on about their gripes in life. The only thing I liked about high school was a kind biology teacher, and looking at those cheer leaders.

Even at the time, I thought those four years in high school could have been condensed to two year if properly administrated.

If I had a kid, and they hated high school like myself, I would walk them into a CC admissions office.

I took a few classes there, and from what I remember, the primary mode of instruction was a janky early-2000s webapp that presented excerpts and quiz questions from a textbook. There were teachers and lectures, but a lot of kids didn't show up to those, and class sizes were relatively small. (I was frequently the only kid who dialed in to the conference call for my French conversation class, so I got a lot of one-on-one time with the teacher.) Social events like clubs were primarily handled through web forums that I didn't spend much time in because I wasn't a full-time student at the school.

The marketing copy here makes it sound like Khan World School is fundamentally the same model, but hopefully Khan Academy's online textbooks are a little less janky.

I don't believe so there is huge problems with hybrid/offline learning at scale with distractions, social interactions etc that cannot be fundamentally solved by Khan Academy.

But having a 'master teacher' is something I definitely welcome because my education, like so many others, varied year to year, on say math, because of educator quality.

Khan's 'reverse school' is something I wish I could have experienced growing up as I think it would personally have worked for me.

Right, we are all graduated from Harvard here.

Part of the problem is that many people take undergraduate lectures as a reference point and then think "well, there's no reason this couldn't be recorded, have interactive quizzes added, and then be better than physically attending a lecture of 200 people". That isn't wrong per se but mega lectures are barely teaching as it is and we should not be seeking to replicate them!

I know people bang on about the (much misunderstood) 2 sigma problem but I'm going to do it as well. Regardless of the exact result, we know a few things:

First, we know that intensive 1:1 tutoring moves the mean performance up by two standard deviations.

Second, we know from other research that there is a correlation between class size and performance.

That is obviously linked in that as classes get smaller, teaching styles can get progressively closer to 1:1 tuition. A class with ten people in it has room for a substantial amount of brief 1:1 interventions, especially if there are no behavioural problems in the group (so the teacher is not diverting massive amounts of time to classroom management) whereas a class of 30 makes that much more difficult.

Conclusion from that, plus the fact that undergraduate classes are often taught by research experts with no teaching nor mentoring in pedagogic technique, is that the undergrad chalk-on-board lecture with 200 students is at the far end of effective use of time from 1:1 tuition. So if tuition is the most "taught" of the learning styles, a large lecture is all the way over on the opposite end with "just read a textbook".

In fact, universities know this which is why they supplement lectures with grad-student led problem solving / discussion sessions, seminar groups, and small group tutorials. Some universities, for some subjects, use only small group tutorials (e.g. Oxford colleges for many humanities subjects) and lectures if they exist are very much optional. Most universities do not have the resources to do very much of this except for more advanced subjects but this has nothing to do with these techniques only being appropriate for such subjects - small group classes are also the most effective way of teaching Intro Calculus or Introduction to the Novel. Arguably they might be even more important in that context.

So the modern formulation of the two sigma problem to me is as follows: given that we can currently duplicate the (very bad) mega lecture format using technology, how much of the performance from actual teaching (the purest form of which is 1:1 tuition) can be captured using something less resource intensive?

Edit: PS: just remembered, if there were orgs like Khan or other leaders in online learning that managed to become accredited by established programs like the International Baccalaureate, that could be very interesting for students, as it offers practically universal global recognition (as well as a very well-regarded curriculum).

Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30698624

Also, simply having a good curriculum and materials to use could make it easier to provide quality in-person tutoring for whoever does that then (eg parents).

Even my local community college is doing better.

Not sure why khan academy went with them. They do have infrastructure set up for online. They just manifestly don't know how to design online courses. Maybe khan can help them with that.

Students will still need access to people to help when they have questions. And there is a need for some proctoring of exams/certifications.

I expect that the top universities will create content, e.g. Harvard, MIT, Stanford. Then they will partner with local universities and community colleges. Or people can just hire tutors if they need them.

This will wipe out a lot of lower-tier schools.

Personally, I think adding back the assistants for questions and proctoring will significantly reduce the cost savings (if not nullifying them completely) depending on how you implement them.

> Then they will partner with local universities and community colleges

> This will wipe out a lot of lower-tier schools.

Aren't the lower-tier schools exactly the schools that would be partnering with the top universities?

If students attend classes online while living at home, then the costs go down dramatically. You are left with paying on an hourly basis for a tutor. When my daughter took the AP tests in Oklahoma, some of them were done in nearby churches. They can deliver test proctoring for cheap.

You can already get a respected online master's degree in computer science from Georgia Tech for around $10k. And you can do it at night, while working, eliminating opportunity costs.

This is incredibly cost-competitive with traditional schools. The elite schools will be fine, as they are essentially offering a private club for rich kids.

Other schools will not be sustainable. These dead universities will be great for remote workers, combining office space and housing in a nice walkable campus environment.

If the quality of education can be improved while maintaining the same costs, that’s a win-win.

If they want to have an impact, focus on education for vocational and blue collar employment; from agricultural workers to general laborers and small business owners. Americas needs more people who can actually accomplish things, not spilled university students that are profit centers for universities that take all the profit and ensnare dim witted children into debt slavery at the public’s expense.

And seriously, ASU? Not LSU or FSU while they’re at it? Just alone the choice of university says something about the orientation, focus, and purpose of this effort.

Khan Academy is still free, but it looks like Khan World School has actual humans.

> Much of the learning and assessment happens through in-depth discussion with teachers, peers and industry experts.

https://asuprep.asu.edu/khan-world-school/academics/

Yes, but there are real questions of self-imposed incentives and broader optics. What will the Khan folks actually be focusing on going forward? Will they be trying to pivot their Khan Academy offering into a "freebie" funnel, steering their students towards this paid-for MOOC? I'm not saying that this is going to happen, I'm just saying that many schools, educators etc. might naturally worry that it might happen and want to avoid reliance on Khan Academy as a result, perhaps staying away from it altogether.

What would be the stoppers from implementation of this that are not bureaucracy and rent seeking by existing structures... or just pride?

Having a shared syllabus is not really the problem.

(I am teaching... I wish more people would actually study independently and I could just mentor them, but in my experience this isn't the case for many students. You may claim it's a matter of habits and education but that's not bureaucracy)

Basically, you would have independently set and assessed requirements. In the case of universities, it would be admission requirements, that the universities set and independently assess. Students, that want to get to these universities, then use any resource available to them to learn to those requirements. This could be through a mix of online and offline classes, remote learning, evening classes, day school, textbooks, tutors etc. "Official" high school is de-emphasized in this scheme, as there is no way it can provide the right thing for everyone. Nobody should be punished for school absences for pursuing their (academic) interests.

Schools should also do all they can to emphasize academics and de-emphasize sports, to counter-balance the natural tendencies of teenagers.

You are over-generalizing. This “natural tendency” does not apply to good portion of teenagers, they are all very different.

More importantly, if they show an inclination towards sports, then why must we nudge them away from that? Is there something fundamentally wrong about teenagers engaging in sports?

Curious where you draw the line on this one? At high school age _most_ subjects are unique to the local area. <insert language here> literature classes would likely focus on more local authors; when I studied english lit in ireland 15 years ago our focus was on Irish authors. You would expect UK based students to study English/scottish/welsh authors, and americans to study american authors. My middle school and equivalent geography classes were predominantly talking about globally applicable topics but with more local examples.

Source: I built of them [6] many years ago.

   [1] https://adrianroselli.com/2020/06/accessibe-will-get-you-sued.html (about this particular one)
   [2] https://silktide.com/blog/accessibility-overlays-dont-work/
   [3] https://level-level.com/blog/accessibility-overlays-common-sense-and-nonsense/
   [4] https://www.accessibility.works/blog/avoid-accessibility-overlay-tools-toolbar-plugins/
   [5] https://www.siteimprove.com/blog/seen-through-the-eyes-of-a-blind-user-why-overlays-are-not-the-answer-to-web-accessibility/
   [6] https://oswaldlabs.com/platform/agastya/

In schooling terms I suggest the Idriss Aberkane "Libérez votre cerveau !" vision where he say a school is like a very rich buffet where when you arrive you are told: "you have to eat anything in a given time at a certain peace, we know you can because we design anything on standard human eating habits, you need to conform". Schools must not be like that, surely their main point is giving a certain set of common knowledge on various topics to from tomorrow mature Citizens, but aside they are also the first step toward the external world outside family. Remain inside, watching the world from remote, is just like watching an XXX movie instead of actually perform, not at all a good thing.

Once we have our own family, earned enough (well, or being rich enough anyway) to have a home, a stable situation than WFH is a godsend (unless you can't afford a good home or have family issues) but before... We are social animals. If we are able to craft a new society where we can have a local social life with enough variety of people around of our cohort like at a physical school and we can separate the studying part from that... Well, ok, I'm interesting in discussing it's design and see if and how can work but so far we do not have anything like that. Surely except for very remote/rural living humans we normally all have neighbors and them are from various age so someone of nearly the same age is likely there but that's typically far from the "high school"/"uni" diversity just in mere numbers, if we add in personal interests and culture terms...

The cons is that how many people were self motivated in high school? I certainly wasn't. Online highschools fail those who need mentors and teachers to push them forward.

I know it is sacrilege to say that some kids are naturally more or less talented than others, but most of the unending and relentless crisis in education it seems is with the kids who are not naturally talented.

Maybe these online courses could do a better job at finding out what people are actually good at and focus their learning in those areas?

One recent approach in Germany, I'm aware of, was teaching students with an online text book, that immediately offered feedback for exercises and provided other helpful tips. The software was used to enhance the traditional teaching, not to replace it.

All in all, students using it tended to perform better on exams, no matter how smart they previously were (though bad students were still worse than the good students using the software).

So all in all, it seems to be a viable approach.

remote working

controlled/elective social interactions only

strong online communities disconnected from their immediate physical community

Then perhaps those offline social skills will be a positive distraction!

Then I wake up to this announcement. (Brain exploding emoji)

This is the way.

> Highly Engaged + Self-driven + Enthusiastic

Nice to see that they will discriminate against socially anxious, depressed and otherwise neurodivergent students from day one.

That aside I’m curious to see how this does. Education suffers from selection and survivor bias greatly.

also, is this like a permanent school? like you can be registered in khan world high school and not be enrolled in any "physical" school? do you drop out of your previous/current school? what about if you want to join this school as well as your existing school?

Also, based on the About Us page, the requirements for submitting an application are quite US-centric ("Student must be proficient in Algebra 1", etc). I did not try to fill out an actual application to see if they accept other countries' alternatives (I assume they do).

Even the most irritatingly bureaucracy obsessed box ticking country, i.e. Germany, would accept a transcript with two college courses per semester as a university preparatory high school.

India doesn't unless the institution is approved by the UGC or act of Parliament.

Same story in China.

American credits are also treated very differently outside.

It would not necessary. They want recognized diploma and may recognize diploma from this school (and likely there is a process you can follow). But, transcript from two college courses per semester is the thing that will make it on itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-sc...

-The tuition for full-time students who are Arizona residents will be paid for by the state at no cost to families.

-Students who live in the US, but outside Arizona, will pay $9,900 per year tuition.

-Students who live outside the US will pay $12,900 per year.

-Tuition for all students does include the opportunity to take two university courses per semester and earn college credit.

On the other hand I think it is competitive with e.g. The Open University though who also charge the same fees as normal unis.

Students who live in the US, but outside Arizona, will pay $9,900 per year tuition. Students who live outside the US will pay $12,900 per year.”

OTOH, this looks promising (though I haven't read his 2012 book which spells out the 'vision'), and would be great if this can provide a framework for a democratized online schooling system with the flexibilities and features it provides.

I think you under-estimate how much fancy schools cost worldwide. In Bangkok, for example, a very good British-style education will cost you $18k per year at Patana, and if you really want to flash your cash you can drop $30k at Shrewsbury (British) or $30k at ISB (American).

I grew up as an expat kid, and this would have been a reasonable alternative for my parents, with the added bonus that I could have stayed with the same peer group and curriculum while they moved country. Socialisation would have been a bit harder but far from impossible.

> Why should it be more for outside US students?

My guess would be the US subsidises some aspect of this?

In this case I am wondering if it could be related to needing additional staff to cover other time zones? Or maybe there are additional administrative paperwork needs for those students?

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I just looked at the video listing for these creators and there's nothing but pop-science.

I don't understand how it's at all comperable to KA?

Nobody is using Vsauce to help them study a college course. The videos simply don’t exist, and I say this as someone who’s watched the channels you mentioned.