[blagie]

My prediction would have been different 2 years ago. Pre-COVID, I worked on a few 100% remote teams, and it worked great.

COVID didn't do what I expected. Instead of online learning moving into the mainstream, we got emergency crappy online learning, and the world burned out on online learning. Everyone now believes it can't be done.

All the businesses I worked with switched to WFH, equally poorly. In my current job, working from home, I feel isolated and asocial. I hate it. That's true of many coworkers as well. It's not the fault of remote work, but it's the fault of the very poor implementation of remote work at my employer.

I don't think my employer is unique here.

I now share your prediction.

[zdragnar]

I don't really know anyone who (openly) believed that online learning was going to be successful.

Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day.

Expecting 7 year old kids and teenagers to sit in front of a computer screen and suffer through what effectively amounts to 7 hours of meetings is asinine- they can barely do that in person, where the number of distractions is far fewer.

OTOH, I will never go back to an office, full stop. The commute isn't worth it, and being in person more than a handful of times a year (tops) isn't worth it. I'm a fairly introverted person by nature, though, and my dogs and wife are home during the day, so I don't really get any sense of isolation.

[sofixa]

> Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day.

And even then. Do you remember in the early 2010s with the rise of edX, Coursera and co when one of the founders was predicting that in 20 years almost all learning will be online, universities will ho bankrupt and close with less than 50, including the online ones, remaining?

The reality is that the vast majority of adults can't be bothered to maintain their motivation and finish an online course. The stats on course completion rates are abysmal. I've been there, of course, I have enrolled into probably more than 10 different courses, all of which sounded very interesting, but none of which i was motivated to see through the end.

[blagie]

It's worth noting "the founders" were mostly figureheads who took over from the actual founders through power plays, and knew nearly nothing about online learning, or much of anything other than corporate politics.

The original founders built platforms which worked pretty well. In the end, MOOCs were videos and multiple choice questions. No one can stomach that.

The original Stanford AI course, from Norvig/Thrun, did pretty okay. Coursera steamrolled Udacity by building a massive number of crappy courses.

The first edX course, 6.002x, mis-attributed to Agarwal but mostly built by Sussman/Mitros/Terman, did even better. Within a few years, edX was run by corporate types who did massive numbers of crappy courses.

The actual founders had bold plans for how to make the platforms and courses even better, but those never panned out, due to politics, incentives, etc.

Good online can be really good.