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How Online Education Is Evolving

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How will online education continue to grow and evolve in the coming decades? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by David Rogier, CEO + Co-Founder MasterClass, on Quora:

Online education is in its infancy. There are different phases:

  1. Phase 1: Simply put information on the web (e.g. Wikipedia). When I was in elementary school I was taught facts. Information was sacred. I literally had to show my ID to get access to a book in the library. The internet changed that. Information became accessible to almost anyone. This caused a fundamental shift in our world.
  2. Phase 2: Put the classroom on the web (e.g. Udacity, Khan Academy, edX). With tons of information, curation and guidance came next. This usually meant taking physical classrooms and putting them on the web (i.e. film an in person class with a webcam and upload it). Not a surprise that those from traditional educational fields dominated this stage.
  3. Phase 3: Education designed for the internet (e.g. Codecademy, MasterClass). We are just entering this stage - actually designing classes for the web. If information is easily accessible, the role of education is not the transfer of facts, but to spark your interest/inspire you to go learn it (a lot of traditional educational institutions haven’t made this change). This generation of online education is designed in the era of the web and ubiquity of mobile phones. So far this means: engaging content, better storytelling, shorter lessons, more interaction (e.g. singing into your computer to know what note you are singing). Soon it will push these boundaries (e.g. imagine you’re going to learn basketball from Steph Curry - why not see where to put your feet on your phone with AR?)
  4. Phase 4: “Online education” won’t exist. It’ll just be “education”. We’ll see a much deeper integration of in person and digital experiences (both structured and unstructured). It will also be much more contextually aware.
  5. Phase 5: Who knows - you’ll just download knowledge into your head.

This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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