The Future of Online Learning

I have been having a hard time blogging lately because whenever I do find time to try to sit down and do it, I look through my google reader and find little that catches my attention or inspires me to write something. Maybe I need to find some more feeds to subscribe to. Because I am behind with blogging, I am going to discuss something that didn't really strike me as profound or surprising or interesting any particular way, but I am just using what I have to work with from my feeds so I can do another blog post.

Tonight I looked at an Edutopia poll that asked people, "What will online learning look like in 20 years?"  I guess I could be at least somewhat interested because we have just written a couple of papers for class centered on the topic of online learning. Apparently the U.S. Department of Ed. estimates that about 25% of K-12 public schools now offer online learning. Sara Ring, the author of this brief article/poll proposes some possibilities for what online learning might look like in 20 years, throwing out the idea that maybe all classes will then have some type of online component. She also suggested the idea that perhaps in 20 years all learning will be done online and students will not even go to school (I highly doubt that this would be the case in 20 years, because I think people will not lose sight of the value face-to-face interaction).

So when asked the question, "What will online learning look like in 20 years?", the largest category of voters (52% of them, which includes me) selected the choice that states we think online learning will be "Prevalent."  The description for this category says, "Online learning will continue to grow, though not every school will have it.  Online-only schooling will enjoy greater popularity."  I was not surprised that this answer choice was the most popular. It is somewhat interesting though, that 32% of the voters guess that in 20 years online learning will be "Universal". They think that some type of online learning will be required in every school and that many more students will take classes that are solely virtual.  Maybe if more people, myself included, were more open-minded at how online learning could continue to develop into something easy to use and that will still provide ways to engage students allow sufficient interaction between both classmates and the students and teacher, then we might have pictured the "Universal" category as a more accurate description for 20 years from now.  Maybe many of us educators that voted also have a hard time seeing how we as teachers will fit into the picture if online learning is so widespread.  Will we become online instructors? Many of us are probably not open-minded to that possibility, and some of us might be afraid that online learning might take away our jobs that we now enjoy as we physically interact face-to-face with a group of students. 
It will be interesting to see where we find ourselves in 20 years...