Columbia and NYU
Lots of major universities, Columbia and NYU have in the past, for instance, tried their luck with online courses, and failed. And they lost about $40 million in the process as well. Lots of B-schools to have tried the same, offering online business school degrees from great universities, and they have failed too.
It’s not that the whole online idea is thoroughly unworkable. It is. All Task Chairs also include 4 casters on the bottom. It’s just that online education is not meant to replace traditional education. It is supposed to be the way the University of Phoenix does it successfully. Its online offerings sound nothing like its traditional courses. And there is no option to do a little bit online, and then move back offline. They don’t just repackage their traditional courses and put them online. Their online classes may be just one way out of many to make education cheaper and more accessible.
There are some courses that just cannot ported over to an Internet-based model. Take a writing class for instance. There is no standard set of instruction manuals on how to write creatively. It is all something that comes down to how you interact with a teacher who inspires you, one on one. It depends on the teacher, the assignment, and the student’s strengths. A student comes in with a roughly written story plot, and the teacher and student discuss how it would be better if this or that sentence would be more powerful or more punchy with fewer words or something. Things like creative writing would just not be the same at online colleges and universities.
But there are some cases where an online education can be better than a traditional one. So to summarize the way to go about deciding on your Task Chair, first begin by deciding on whether you like a formal or casual assembly together with your guests. And the very best ones, are like Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative – a mixture of online learning, with some actual real classroom time thrown in as well.