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The concept of an online high school may sound terrible, but sooner or later it’s bound to happen: quality education will keep consolidating until there’s one s

• azinman2 4y ago
  Because there’s more to high school than just classes. It’s important to learn how to deal with people as well. A purely virtual high school experience sounds extremely lonely and thin for the soul.
  • frontman1988 4y ago
    Social learning can happen outside school in sports or other hobby related activities. High school is actually quite a weird place to learn social skills.
    • DeWilde 4y ago
      Yes, but the 5-6 hours you spend within a school alongside 3-4 hours you can spend on sports and hobbies probably out-competes just sports and hobbies.
    • MrBlueIncognito 4y ago
      Not every kid is going to be a part of sports and hobbies clubs. A lot of us never had any friends outside of school. 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.
  • DocTomoe 4y ago
    And we all know the best way to learn about how to deal with people is putting them in a group of incompatible people in a high-stress, prison-like environment. What could possibly go wrong? 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.
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    • andrewinardeer 4y ago
      I find that your first paragraph is very negative and has an insular posture. 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.
      • IshKebab 4y ago
        Yeah I definitely remember everyone learning to be diplomatic in high school. /s
      • DocTomoe 4y ago
        I love how you bring up diplomacy. It brings up all kinds of associations, good old Clausewitz not being the least of them when you consider what else happens at schools.
      • password54321 4y ago
        In a perfect world that's what school teaches you. What gets you through high school in a lot of social circumstances is nothing close to any sort of diplomatic behaviour or assertiveness. The louder more aggressive person usually came out on top. Maybe a lot of people here went to some private school where somehow logic, analytical ability and being polite is what got you through but that certainly doesn't describe where I went and can't imagine a public school being this way.
  • donthellbanme 4y ago
    The minute I found out I could work, and go to a Communty College, instead of going to high school I thought I won the lottery. 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.
    • gscott 4y ago
      So many high schools are dysfuntional I was able to get my son into Cc for the last two years of high school. Made a huge difference in his life.
  • magpi3 4y ago
    I hear this argument a lot, but lets's ask the question: are high schools the best way to learn to "deal with people?" How much trauma have high schools inspired and can we do better now that we have other options?
    • azinman2 4y ago
      No one is shitty like children are. It’s part of growing up and a great source of bad interactions that teach us about the world and ourselves. If the only thing you do in life is protect yourself into a perfect atmosphere, the less you are prepared for the real world which is unpredictable and full of trauma.
      • magpi3 4y ago
        Is this opinion just Stockholm syndrome since we were all forced to go through it? What other models do we have to compare it to? 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.
  • nvarsj 4y ago
    Learning social skills in high school is more like learning how to survive in a prison yard - it couldn't be more far removed from adult social skills. I'd say functional, healthy high schools are in the tiny minority, and generally are private and small.
  • txsoftwaredev 4y ago
    Do you believe that kids that do online learning never leave their home or have any friends? That's a pretty ignorant view. There are tons of opportunities for kids to have positive social interactions with peers as well as younger and older children, as well as adults. Being forced to interact with a handful of kids around their age in a public school is not a great way to socializing. 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.
• irjustin 4y ago
  > one super school left 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.
• csande17 4y ago
  Online high schools are already a thing; Connections Academy is the largest where I live. 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.
• frontman1988 4y ago
  This is indeed the future of education. It is something the governments should do now in countries with substandard educators. A few superstar rockstar teachers can replace millions of average teachers. The offline physical teacher will be there to merely solve doubts(and ensure kids are actually watching stuff) while the online teacher streams live to millions of students. The biggest challenge will be to make the experience so immersive that kids can learn online. VR might be able to help in this regard.
  • maaanu 4y ago
    If you think that your description is teaching, you never had a teacher or only very lousy ones.
• dodyg 4y ago
  > quality education will keep consolidating until there’s one super school left. Right, we are all graduated from Harvard here.
• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > 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.
  • zozbot234 4y ago
    To be fair, there are "interactive" teaching methods that scale very well. In old-time schools, it was common for a single teacher to teach a large number of students, who would rote learn a teacher-prepared "lesson" and chant it back word-for-word when prompted. Students would similarly be introduced to practice in e.g. grammar or math, simply by hearing problem questions from the teacher and shouting back the right answers. Thus they were prepared for anything that might turn up on a later test. This education system could be carried forward to quite advanced levels, equivalent to a modern high school education or even to some parts of community college. Abraham Lincoln was taught in this way, and like many other students he had a habit of rehearsing his material out loud while going to school and back. It was not ineffective, though individual tutoring would've been the gold standard even back then.
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    • MrBlueIncognito 4y ago
      > To be fair, there are "interactive" teaching methods that scale very well. In old-time schools, it was common for a single teacher to teach a large number of students, who would rote learn a teacher-prepared "lesson" and chant it back word-for-word when prompted. > […] > It was not ineffective, though individual tutoring would've been the gold standard even back then. Then it doesn’t scale very well.
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• Foobar8568 4y ago
  That's already the case today if you are not in a very good sector, at least in France and Switzerland.
• Mvandenbergh 4y ago
  As others have said, the fundamental challenge is that teaching, as usually defined, doesn't scale like that and that turning it into a non-interactive process removes much of what makes it more effective than just giving out a textbook. 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?
• vampiretooth1 4y ago
  Turning standard education into something scalable is going to be very interesting. We're already seeing this with MOOC and all, but when it's a part of a national network that students can plug into - I'm excited about the potential here. I like the super school idea, gives me the impression of a merit-based winner-take-all system