Last year, our principal posed this question to our faculty, write Jody Passanisi and Shara Peters for Scientific American: Can we be rendered obsolete by online learning?
The Khan Academy was receiving widespread attention for propagating the idea of an online learning experience for younger students. There was a general fear among school administrators and teachers in the K-12 education community that this could become an exclusively online learning system; that a computer could replace a teacher, and an online learning environment could replace a classroom.
Could an online learning system replace a classroom? Yes, it could. Will it? Most definitely not.
The skills that are valued in education today, as opposed to ten years ago, require students to be able to do something with raw information. Students, in order to compete in this highly dynamic world, should be able to collaborate with others in order to create, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate information.