CEDO 550 - Week 5 "Prediction Time"

The future of online learning...hmmm.

Here's what I think will happen:  more and more schools from the elementary level through college will start to incorporate online class offerings, or at the very least, an online component to their instructional strategy.  Things will go well in the beginning with schools seeing an increased enrollment in these types of online formats.  Students with specific needs outside the capabilities of the physical classroom in their particular geographic location will be afforded opportunities that they would not otherwise have.  Riding this early success, schools will start to slowly convert more and more of their class offerings to the online format to attract additional students from other cities, other states, and even other nations.  Eventually schools will be daring enough to shift to completely virtual course offerings and the brick and mortar schools filled with 30 desks of students will be a minority.  Enough time will pass where we will see the products of these classrooms entering the workforce and somewhere along the line a study will show that having students attend completely virtual schools is a detriment to their social growth and makes them a pain in the arse to deal with in the workplace.  Now let me say that the workplace may have drastically changed by then and these former students might fit right in because there won't be as much need for social interaction anymore depending on the nature of the job but I'm hoping that's not the case.  The final conclusion will be that there needs to be a balance between the physical classroom experience and the online methods to create the most well-rounded individual.