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There's two problems with that approach, which matters from 2 very different perspectives. From the business point of view, one-on-ones with a highly knowledgeable professor don't scale. The big benefit that the businessman sees from online learning is to dramatically increase the number of graduates who pass through some level of filtering, so scale matters a lot. The other, "education is important because educating people is important" point of view, runs into a more human problem: most students don't get one-on-one time with their professors, even when the professor ends up sitting in an empty office hour regularly, because doing so takes work. Students need to be reasonably proactive about reaching out, and that weeds out a lot of people regardless of how accessible the professor makes themselves. Online learning makes this even worse: In person, assuming the class is small enough (that's another can of worms), there's a fair amount of opportunity for small interactions: greetings, questions during lecture (for when the professor has completely lost you, which suggests he may have lost others, too), questions after lecture, hell, even body language exchange, where the professor can pick up on students being bored (i.e., they're going too slow, or they've lost the class). All of these make the professors far more approachable, where a brief exchange can become a "hey, let's continue this during office hours". I spent a lot more time in office hours with the professor who memorized all our names and faces before the first lecture than the one who was lecturing at a class of 300. Not to mention the heightened ease of interacting with your fellow students, which is, IMO, 60-80% of the benefit of higher education. And at smaller universities, the bureaucracies are a lot more malleable, too. Classes being "waivable by a conversation with the instructor" was very much a thing, albeit with the extra step of having the dean and registrar's office rubber stamp it. |