I imagine a huge factor is also parental involvement, when it comes to encouraging students to set aside several hours each night for study and homework. In the absence of parental involvement or in cases of parental neglect and indifference (woefully common in many situations), the role of the teacher becomes far more important in encouraging the student to develop good study habits. This might be more difficult in the online situation.
One of Malcolm Gladwell's books made a convincing argument that reducing class size quickly runs into the issue of diminishing returns. A cursory Googling suggests there's plenty of research to back it up[0][1]
The effectiveness of in-person learning may have more to do with social interaction and peer motivation. A teacher with about 20 students who is able to create a general excitement for learning in the class seems to be the most effective. A classroom where the "spirit" of learning is alive is ideal for a lot of kids.
[0]https://edcentral.uk/reading-list/431-what-we-have-learned-a... [1]http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/evidence-class-siz...
it works out really well for the student. instead of working a regular job during the year you get to do something that benefits your career, you build a relationship with your professors and it pays more than if you were working at the local grocery store.
https://biosciences.uchicago.edu/content/teaching-assistant-...
> All graduate students are required to serve as a Teaching Assistant in at least one course for academic credit before the Ph.D. degree is awarded. Appropriate courses may be undergraduate, graduate, or medical, but must be in the Biological Sciences Division (exceptions may be made for students in the Biophysical Sciences program).
Personally I was desperate in March 2020 (as were my colleagues) for any tips about what would work online. I didn't want my classes to suck, nor did my colleagues. There was very little information available at the beginning about what worked.
But what's worse (and what makes me disagree with your comment) is that even after a year of being online it still wasn't clear how to make it not suck! Basically no one had discovered anything which made students like it OR perform well.
I polled my students every midterm and final exam (and gave them actual points for their answers!) on whatever they had found to work in any of their online classes. Collectively they were exposed to several hundred other professors at my university. While they did have some suggestions (which I did implement), nothing really worked.
On top of this, schools tend to be constrained with trying to fit everything into the particular confines of what's considered a class. I don't know about your particular school, but all of the ones I've seen would never try to educate students with something like The Odin Project, even though many here think it's a great example of online education.
Also, even with a great program and experienced teacher, changes in education styles entail a transition period for the students. We would expect this to be much slower in such a rocky transition with the professors themselves trying to figure out what to do. But even with poor circumstances I'd expect to see at least some amount of progress as students adjusted to things. Did you not see any?
You mention them being exposed to the classes of several hundred professors at your university. Surely there was some variability in the success the professors had. What difference did the school see between the more successful classes and the less successful classes?
I work in sales and direct face-to-face sales ALWAYS has better close rates, happier customers, etc. than indirect sales through phone or internet.
I sold private whisky casks to individuals or groups. Before the pandemic, I would sit down at the table with them and guide them through a tasting, several hours long. My close rate was close to 50%.
With the pandemic, I switched to shipping samples and moderating the tasting online via Zoom or Teams. My close rate dropped to noise level.
I don't think I fundamentally changed my "tactics", and since it involved drinking more than a few sips of alcohol, I never required the customer to sign the order form in my presence.
In my experience, physical presence was waaaay more conducive to sales.
And sales where you're giving a sample like whisky? The social obligation to reciprocate for receiving something "free" is very strong. The idea behind giving a sample in a sales pitch isn't to get them to like the whisky (though it helps eliminate/reduce resistance), it's to incur that social obligation.
Were these Zoom classes? I can't think of a single synchronous (like Zoom) class that didn't suck.
What I liked as a student was prerecorded lectures that could be replayed at high speed (or even skipped) on my own schedule. Personally I much prefer these over live lectures.
This resource is available on most college campuses for the teachers who have the humility to ask. Those folks were intimately involved in MOOCs and knew a lot about how to make online teaching work. They might have been able to help, but there was a bit of a sigma around talking to them.
Take my 18-yo and 22-yo students. They have responded to my online teaching in a very different way. The 18 year olds responded much better to physical teaching - most vocally preferred it - while older students generally preferred online. I could write a lot more about the details here but I'm on my phone
My daughter teaches math in high school and what she sees can be summed up as: kids are social and need supervision, and a different approach depending on age.
12-year olds are basically still kids but as soon as puberty kicks in kids are overwhelmed by a series of physical, psychological and social changes. This makes life hard to navigate for them and for this reason they need guidance.
So in my opinion remote learning (without local adult supervision) is the worst option for high school.
I wrote briefly about the topic in a blog post, titled "Professors as Creators". It explores the idea briefly, and how treating teachers as "creators" could add value not just to remote learning, but to in-person lessons as well. https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/professors-as-creators-h...
But it's not a choice anymore in India where the online-school-education started out as a necessity during pandemic lock-down and now kids are enrolled in it due to peer-pressure; Parents in India already spent >40% of their income on their kids education before pandemic.
What's worse is that these online school education startups copied Khan Academy's coursework and some even became an unicorn during pandemic with fraudulent practices(False advertising: E.g. 'Kid who took our course got employed by Google', Untrained/Unqualified teachers etc.); So I wouldn't think twice about enrolling my kid into an online-school run by Mr.Khan if I had one.
This 1000x. My son is at UCSD. Very few of the online lectures were better, majority were worse.
I think online can be better, but it requires expertise that doesn't exists in most teaching professionals.
In-person educators trying to do online learning, getting poor results, and then saying it's the fault of online education is a bit like a YouTube educator teaching in person classes, doing poorly, and then declaring that in-person education is inferior.
Also worth noting that students who have spent years being conditioned with in-person learning might have an adjustment period when starting online education, one that might not go smoothly if it's happening during a crisis and guided by people inexperienced with and predisposed against this form of education.