A soapbox at Occupy Boston (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A LinkedIn group discussion (may need to join the Technology in Education group to view) alerted me to a recent Huffington Post article by a 17-year-old who “had the horrific opportunity to experience online learning for a few weeks.” He thus decided to generalize those few weeks to a rant about all online education, including “Any school that uses online learning systems should not be called a school.”

I decided to share the response that I posted to the LinkedIn discussion here, as this is a fundamental tenet of my educational philosophy, and will undoubtedly continue to be revisited on this blog in various ways:

Design matters.
Interaction matters.

Poorly designed classroom-based education with little interaction is not likely to stimulate significant learning. And the same is true for poorly designed online education with little interaction.

The young author of the original article experienced what sounds like a rather lame online learning environment. It is unfortunate that he has made the decision that all online learning is therefore terrible and inferior to other educational approaches. “Online” is not the variable that made his experience bad.

Insisting “online learning is great” or “blended is best” or “in-person education is always superior” does a disservice to the bottom line of what determines the quality of an educational endeavor: the design of that endeavor.