Erik Marshall

Check out  this provocative video by Dan Brown (not the DaVinci Code author) exhorting educators to  use technology more effectively, and to basically change the structure of education, or risk losing students like him by becoming irrelevant. Towards the end, he powerfully says “I dropped out of school because my schooling was interfering with my education”

Brown’s history lesson at the beginning is provocative, but his appeal comes about 3 minutes in. What I like is that he brings social class into the discussion, albeit a bit sketchily. Luckily, Dave Parry at Academhack discusses the video and teases out some of the class elements.

So, can one get an equal education online as in a classroom? If you are looking for knowledge and information only, yes. But there should be something else that college teaches, something that comes from college life, from interaction with peers and professors that you can’t quite get online. Unfortunately, with larger class sizes and the increasing use of overworked part-time labor, these things, as Brown points out, may be disappearing.