Online education! It’ll revolutionize the world! This changes everything! It’ll turn everything we ever thought about learning upside down and inside out and then do it all again just for fun! It’ll shred the very fabric of reality and replace it with fairy dust and kittens!
Only, it turned out…not so much.
In the two years we now not-so-fondly recall as The Tech Bubble, I was fortunate enough to be immersed in a start-up with deep pockets and a crazy vision. We were going to create an MBA program with the brightest minds in academe.
We were going to make it possible for anybody, anywhere to study with top professors from Harvard and the London School of Economics. We were going to develop and sell these courses to very rich companies, which would use them as part of their own in-house leadership training efforts. Armed with our courseware, these hypothetical client companies would churn out their very own armies of home-grown, world-class MBAs.
By the way–everything you’ve heard about the dot-com era is absolutely true.
• We did, in fact, have teams of brilliant people locked in conference rooms for days at a time, and occasionally they might have remembered to go home long enough to shower or shave.
• We did, in fact, have entire storerooms overflowing with Twinkies and Ho-Hos and Doritos and Coke. (The drink.)
• We did, in fact, order-in sushi for lunch, steak for dinner.
• We did, in fact, have a fooseball table and the more athletically inclined among us rode skateboards down the hallways.
The Marketing course team I belonged to in 2000 even invented a crazy, over-the-top fictitious product—a wildly tricked out cell phone with a touch screen that would also function like a PDA. It would even have…a camera in it. (Our course advisor laughed at us and told us such a thing would be technically impossible to manufacture.)
We also heard from our leaders, on nearly an hourly basis, how the Old Rules didn’t apply anymore.
Profits? Pfffft! Sales? Vulgarity! Instructors? Passe!
If we built it, they would come.
That was an article of unquestionable faith, from the CEO right down to the managers.
There was just one problem that those of us in the trenches saw, and couldn’t talk about.
It didn’t work.
The abandonment rate of the courses we were developing–even in testing, when we were paying people rock-solid money to sit in computer classrooms and take them–was staggering.
The frustration levels of students were matched only by their lack of motivation.
The pedagogical model we used (that’s “how people are supposed to learn” in plain English)—something called “Problem-Based Learning”—was practically designed to make people want to throw their monitor across the room. (If they could have lifted it, that is. Remember how big monitors were back when dinosaurs roamed the boardroom?)
The dirty little secret that we didn’t really talk about—at least not until after work, at the bar, when there were no managers around to hear—was that people didn’t want to root around hundreds of hyperlinks, exploring “Learning Resources” (i.e., textbook material) to solve an amorphous problem.
They weren’t armed with the patience, the drive, or the focus to sit for hours at a time, reading a screen, watching videos, interacting with animations.
Unfortunately, the people at the top of the company didn’t want to hear what wasn’t working, or why. They only wanted to hear how we were going to make it work.
Short of changing human nature, of course, we couldn’t.
For a lot of reasons, most people need more than just a computer screen to learn. They need human interaction—to get and stay motivated, to bounce ideas off each other, to practice new things, to refine skills.
There’s a reason Toastmasters still meets face-to-face. There’s a reason kids still go to sports camps. And there’s a reason skills-based leadership training still needs to be delivered in an intimate, intensive, face-to-face workshop setting.
I still wonder whether, had anybody listened to us when we raised concerns we had about the abysmal test results —truly listened—might the company have survived, maybe even thrived?
Had they been open to feedback, and had we narrowed our vision and strategic goals to match what we were just beginning to learn about the true nature of online learning, would ¾ of the company not have been sent home with pink slips on a bleak day in February 2002?
Today, obviously, online learning has found its niche among other forms of knowledge delivery. In short doses, with a lot of instructor interaction, for the right kind of student, it can be a useful complement to other modes of training.
But online learning didn’t revolutionize everything. It didn’t turn people into knowledge-absorption machines. It didn’t change everything we thought we knew about learning.
No more than the Segway changed how we get to work.