How long until the (first-world) classroom education model is obsolete?

My view is that there will always be a niche for in-person classroom instruction. I think the product that higher education should be selling is the opportunity to develop a personalized relationship with an expert. That happens very effectively in the small classrooms of liberal arts colleges.

The non-interactive lectures provided by large universities with hundreds of students in the lecture hall at a time went obsolete when video was invented.

Classrooms are completely ineffective at preparing students for

(Rant)
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living without jobs, without hope, and with a constant stream of fear, hate and/or mind-numbing garbage continuously poured into their heads from the 24 hour infonewstainment channels.
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If you know a useful trade, take a young person under your wing and teach them that trade. If you are the parent of a young person, find someone to teach them a useful trade. I think employers understand how broken education is and would be willing to give someone with "Four years apprenticeship with (good coder), while he was working at (good company)" on their resume a try over "B.A. in Computer Science."

Agreed. Small classrooms, with face-to-face instruction are very effective. Remote classrooms do work but are less interactive and allow for more distractions.

In-person instruction is analogous in the business world to face-to-face meetings. They have been shown to be more effective than phone calls, video conferencing, etc.

However people will push for "something different," due to failures in the current system, even though those failures are not related to in-person classroom instruction, per se. People frequently throw out the baby with the bath water, so I believe in-person classrooms will be "obsoleted" by people reacting to current failures. (See public schools).

This is as poorly defined question as I've seen in a long time.

Do you mean that a model of children being taught by adults would disappear? If so - it's been the only way humanity operated for the last few thousand years. I don't see how that can change.

Do you mean that children will no longer be educated in centralized school environment? If so - it's been the only way for the last few hundred years (for those who had any education, anyway). As long as education is perceived as necessary - that's the only way it could be.

Now, if we have drastic changes in economic system - may be. For example, we could admit that majority of world population does not have anything useful to contribute to economic process or production, and somehow find a way to distribute goods and services to them without demanding "labor". If so - education will no longer be required, at least for that part of population. However, the remainder still have to learn somehow - and I don't see any viable models other than "experienced teacher teaches a child". (Well, also direct upload of knowledge into brain - but that's pure Sci Fi for now)

After all, minus 100 is less than 20.... ;)

I agree that teacher-student interaction and personal relationships should be more encouraged in higher education through smaller class sizes. Nevertheless, I don't think that this is currently limited to liberal arts colleges—I attend a university with a small yet excellent engineering department, in which relationships with professors have proved invaluable to my education.

Large lectures on the other hand are minimally interactive, and could be migrated to online video. The benefit of this migration is that professors who held large lectures in the past would be available to teach smaller classes, providing more opportunities for one-on-one interaction. The hard decision is which classes to offer as online lectures and which to offer with small class sizes, as different courses seem to lend themselves to different teaching styles.

What's wrong with that mentality? You think society gets anywhere by throwing a bunch of books at students and walking away? Society is built on rules, even rules about how to learn and convey knowledge. For society, the rules are far more important than the technical knowledge and skills. For society, replacing the tech at the chemical plant is far more important than nurturing an Einstein.

This poll needs a "20 years ago" option.

We can broadcast information now. We don't need a mediocre performer explaining it to a small audience. We need an excellent performer broadcasting it to a large audience, with local helpers available to answer individual questions. Mass media works. And it's the only way to bring the best quality instruction to the largest audience.

But schools are about payroll, not about quality instruction. And a mass media model doesn't maximize payroll, so schools are stuck with an information distribution model from 100 years ago.

The classroom lecture environment has never been useful in instructing students. Great teachers in antiquity engaged their students in discussions. They did not ask them to sit quietly while they talked. The western classroom itself is really a fairly recent invention, and it's never been much use for anything.

There's the issue of social interaction. I mean in meatspace, not FaceBook. Try replacing that with an online/homeschool/whatever model. Then there's the issue of adult supervision. Some kids' parents have to work and can't just leave them at home. And then there are hands-on activities that one just can't replicate online. Like band, sports, shop class, PE (sorry nerds, get off your fat, Cheeto-munching asses).

I do think that advances in online learning will make significant inroads into the traditional education system. There will be facilities with adult supervision. But it will be possible to 'import' the services of skilled instructors from far away (like into disadvantaged neighborhoods) to augment the resident staff. And there will be more (although not complete) autonomy, particularly with students identified as being self motivated. Others will still require oversight or they'll just end up smoking in the parking lot all day.

If you found work "in the industry" to be boring, part of the problem is that you likely were hired by a larger firm where you have to go through the meat grinder of an apprenticeship anyway. The problem is that you got your PhD and thought that you were the king of the world due to your advanced credentials, but it turns out that means squat in terms of what these kind of businesses expect out of an employee and you weren't ready to become the apprentice again. Perhaps understandable if you went through the grind of getting your PhD trying to prove yourself to your professors.

For those "in the industry", you typically aren't given any sort of real project until you have been working for awhile and have a proven track record... usually about 10 years of going through the grind as a junior engineer doing all of the busy work that the senior engineers also find boring. If you found it to be tedious and unstimulating that is likely the reason: your credentials didn't matter and you had to prove yourself all over again in a completely different hierarchy.

My point is more along undergraduate programs that are oriented towards being engineering diploma mills (often by state government officials trying to "streamline" the education system in a mistaken notion of saving tax dollars) and the professors who teach those kind of courses. If you are doing post-doc work and climbing the academic ladder, you have in effect chosen a completely different career path. I'll also point out that there is no need for a hundred thousand new engineering PhDs doing bleeding edge engineering research, but there is a huge need for that many new engineering in industry. It is also sort of the distinction between pure and applied science.

Small classrooms, with face-to-face instruction are very effective.

Yes, they are. But they are not the current model...

Do you work in an office .... then a classroom is good training for this ..

Nothing to do with the teacher interacting with you, it is more to do with the whole class interacting with each other, vieoconferencing is all very well but a lot of the social cues are missing ...

Meetings are mostly pointless, but having wasted time on lengthy email conversations then gone and talked to the person and cleared up the whole thing in minutes, they are sometimes the best way

But one of the MAIN components missing in the classroom methodology of old, is pretty much the most important one...the parent.

My parents, kept a constant look over my shoulder as to getting my homework done. They once grounded me for 2 weeks, until I could get my multiplication tables memorized through the 12's.

They rewarded me for good grades, and chastised me for poor ones (C's, I darned not get below that, and rarely made C's).

They knew my teacher, my principal...often as not, my Mom had much too good of a personal relationship with the principal, as that I was a bit mischeavous..and she was called in more than a couple of times about me. The school thought I was a good kid, but I often would finish my work early, and become class clown, or attempt to distract others.

I guess in today's world...they'd drug me.

But really....where are the concerned parents? We didn't need the 20 metric tons of homework every night that kids get today...enough to get the job done and my folks oversaw that. I didn't have homework every night...usually I got it done at school and had time when I got home to *gasp* go out and play in the neighborhood with the other kids I went to school with.

Parents....they are what is missing in today's classes.

No teacher should have to spend the majority of her time babysitting and shouting down kids, rather than teaching...

We'll get into the other distraction...worrying about Billy's self esteem in another thread.