Kids can learn online, but they often don’t

Is Khan Academy or Crash Course (or something like it) going to drive public schools out of business?

Online competition has already dominated our traditional ways of doing almost everything –planning vacations, looking for jobs, watching TV, playing games, meeting dates, talking to friends, consuming news. Just ask my former colleagues in the newspaper business.

It seems like a no-brainer that online access to most of human knowledge is going to put teachers out of work as well.

But I don’t think so, at least not any time soon.

Both of the high school classes I’m teaching right now are hybrids – meaning, the students do the majority of their work online. In both of them, too many students suffer from an inability to keep themselves on track.

Every week, I pull aside students during our face-to-face meetings to remind them about missing (and upcoming) work, which is clearly listed on the class calendar. Every week, I send out email blasts, call parents, talk to deans, leave blanks in the grade book.

Ultimately, all (or nearly all) of these students will successfully complete these classes, but it will take a large amount of prodding and handholding.

Why? Because most high school students just don’t have the maturity or motivation yet to organize and pursue their own learning. If they did, they could master almost any subject from the comfort of their home already — without us.

To be fair, when I’ve taught all-online courses to adults, the completion problem is even worse. Many never finish at all – and never explain why.

Most of us, it seems, have trouble sticking with the discipline of completing an academic course on our own. We like to dabble; we like to find answers to immediate questions (what is the speed of light?) or find DIY solutions (how can I remove wallpaper?) but when it comes to mastering a challenging subject like intro-level microeconomics, it’s just too hard to keep ourselves on task.

This shouldn’t really be surprising. We are social creatures, and we learn best in a social context. Our relationships with our teachers are a large part of our motivation – they are the ones who spark our interest, who make us care, who give us real feedback about our progress, who help us overcome challenges. (Teachers — this is our advantage, so we need to make the most of it.)

Without a real human being deeply invested in our learning, we just don’t care quite as much.

Khan Academy – and dozens of other tech startups like it – may have great content and increasingly clever and engaging presentations, but until they have a way to connect students with other human beings who care deeply about them, I don’t think our jobs are going anywhere.