Traditional Education Beats Online in Key Areas, Opinion Poll Finds – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

• Traditional Education Beats Online in Key Areas, Opinion Poll Finds – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  Face-to-face still holds sway over online learning what can we learn from the Gallup poll is that online learning is an emerging technology and learning platform that is a work in progress more research needs to go into studying online learning and keep adjusting online learning until it exceeds the traditional classroom experience. 

  tags: education learning universities college admissions enrollment scholarship online higher education

  • We’re years into the era of online education, and yet Americans still hold a skeptical view of online learning’s quality and value to employers, according to the results of a Gallup survey released on Tuesday.

  • October, Gallup asked two groups, each composed of more than 1,000 adults, whether they thought “online education is better” in a series of categories. In terms of “providing a wide range of options for curriculum” and “good value for the money,” online education got slightly better scores than traditional classroom-based education.

  • But online education scored much worse in four areas: in delivering “instruction tailored to each individual,” in providing “high-quality instruction from well-qualified instructors,” in offering “rigorous testing and grading that can be trusted,” and—finally, worst of all—in dispensing “a degree that will be viewed positively by employers.”

  • third of the respondents rated online programs as “excellent” or “good,” while 68 percent gave excellent or good ratings to four-year colleges and universities, and 64 percent gave such ratings to community colleges.

  • But “what you are seeing in there is that traditional classroom education is beating out online education on some of the most fundamental elements,” said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education

  • To him the most surprising part of the survey results was the high number of people who said that traditional classroom education was still better tailored to the individual, while evangelists for educational technology and online learning tend to hype the personalized and individualized elements of their products. “The reality,” he said, “is that that has not permeated Americans’ perceptions of what it can do.”

  • The poll found that 5 percent of Americans, and 20 percent of college students, were enrolled in an online course. While that is a “huge win” for the online market, Mr. Busteed said, “I think we have to take it for what it is: some signs of adoption, but not supplanting traditional education anytime soon.”

  • the view about online education was very different. Many of the speakers, drawn from the for-profit and ed-tech sectors, bashed traditional higher education as overpriced and stagnant.

  • Andrew S. Rosen, chairman and chief executive officer of Kaplan, probably made the day’s most daring prediction: Within a few decades, all but 600 colleges will be dead.

  • a panel of three undergraduate honor students, moderated by a Chronicle reporter, seemed to back up some of the data in the new Gallup poll: They said that while they wished their professors were a bit more tech-savvy, they found some educational technology cumbersome and overrated. They were skeptical of online programs—saying that they gave peers opportunities to cheat—and even more skeptical of competency-based education. Traditional education, they said, offered something that online education had problems replicating: a connection with peers and professors.

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