Seemingly more and more online courses are recorded and uploaded for the general Internet users to access. How does this phenomenon come about and what would it be going forward? Will we have a day when most of the educational resources are put online for free?
Yes, it is a big trend, but I'd say it's not over the Gartner hype cycle yet. Check out http://hackeducation.com/2012/12/03/top-ed-tech-trends-of-2012-moocs/ for further info. I think so far, the "everything for free" model is helping to build huge online communities. At a later stage and with the momentum of the large amount of potential customers registered already, it might become very tempting to commercialize.
If by trend you mean "trendy", as in a fashion that will soon disappear, then no. Online education represents merely another mode of content delivery, though not necessarily a new one. Online ed has been with us for quite some time.
However, if you're referring to "free" online courses, they too have been here for some time, in various forms. Coursera, for example, is simply one of the newest manifestations of this growing avenue.
The larger, and perhaps more meaningful, point is whether or not educational administrators see online ed as a way to save costs; think lower overhead. This line of thinking, IMHO, can be faulty as not all students do well with online delivery.
Free or not, Online ed is here to stay. Most likely it will take many more years for various approaches to be tried, adjusted and so, until we learn just what online strategies work best.
Online education is here to stay as it opens the gateway for many students who otherwise would not be able to attend college. However, online education is not for everyone as it takes a high degree of self-discipline to structure life around the curriculum. I doubt that educational resources placed online will be 100% free. There is a lot of money to be made in this market and business people will not let go of that profit margin easily.
It will be critical that universities design online curricula carefully as students will not be at the same level of reading comprehension and it needs to be as inclusive for all students as much as possible. Comprehension of the reading material is paramount for students as they must read textbooks, listen to lectures, and write discussion board posts with appropriate terminology that does not attack another student's idea or concepts. This type of writing is not as simple as one might think especially if the content of the discussion is controversial. Therefore, professors, instructors, or teachers working the online classroom must closely monitor discussion boards before they become a free-for-all. Furthermore, it is far easier to lose a student online than in a traditional classroom; therefore, those instructing online classes must have weekly requirements for students. This is the best way to track student attendance in the online environment.
Traditional institutions that include online curricula will succeed in the future more so than institutions that use one or the other. The world is dynamic and the opportunity to attend classes from home on the computer will increase over the next decade as the younger generation moves into adulthood and is computer literate from a young age. Traditional classrooms will have to include technology within their curriculum in order to keep the students engaged in this highly technical era.
Keep in mind that the potential for online education can go far beyond the College/University level. In technical professions (for example in my field, waste management), there are tens of thousands of personnel that are required to operate fairly expensive and complex waste handling facilities. The use of eLearning courses to present the nuts and bolts of these systems, as well as advanced topics, in a visually interesting way (beyond powerpoint typically found in training courses administered to people in this and related professions) provides a greatly enhanced student experience and a more well-trained workforce. So in this respect, the prevalence of eLearning (both computer-based training and training available online) will only continue to increase in the coming years and likely be improved through mLearning and related capabilities.
I see your point, Jon. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Actually I have been seeing the online education, not only affirmatively a trend already, continues its growth rapidly. Also, I won't be afraid its long lasting and expansion would replace or at least hurt the traditional school education, I have been confident that it will coexist with the current educational system and synergize it.
I completely agree. As has been commented elsewhere, the effectiveness of eLearning and online education will be a function of the course design, content, and delivery methods used - we will likely see very well-executed examples and some that are not so great. Presumably the cream will rise to the top.
With the rise of new technologies find many applications and interactive platforms that allow us to continue our work of teachers through virtual means. This process began in the 90s with distance education and now their chances enriched by factors such as the existence of broadband, the proliferation of e-mail communication and messaging systems as well as sustained release and improvement of various online tools.
The social vision on distance education or virtual, so far negative, is slowly changing in the opposite direction, with a future that seems to indicate that it could even jeopardize forms of more traditional teaching and learning. Some time ago an unfortunate example as pandemic influenza A and recesses imposed educational spaces around the world, whose negative effects were largely minimized by the use of different types of remote resources, online, creating pages or blogs that served as virtual classrooms to share materials with parents and students, or teachers systematic consultation by email.