In a recent TED video, Salman Khan talks about his Khan Academy, which evolved from a few YouTube videos into a whole library of videos plus resources for teachers to track student progress. The idea is that teachers can assign video lectures for homework and save classroom time for more individualized guidance.
The amount of data available is truly impressive. The program tracks how well students are doing on a host of concepts (e.g., fractions or decimals), and teachers can even see how long it took a student to answer online test questions and which ones he got right.
A lot of the comments on TED.com question whether Khan Academy is truly a reinvention of education, since it uses a common technology (video) and common practices (like focusing on one-on-one tutoring and remediation). What strikes me as interesting is that the teacher role, though changed, is not eliminated. But visions of futuristic education usually involve students learning from online video, and not going to school. Is that realistic?
Khan’s talk suggests that it might be. In addition to teachers helping struggling students, his program can facilitate interactions between students. Students could connect with peers who have mastered a subject and even view their “reputation” (which I assume means comments or ratings from other struggling students who have learned from them). An education system that went fully online would require such peers—young or old—to provide help to those who have trouble learning from video content alone.
Would this be a good thing? I once spoke with someone who was starting a college, and asked her about online education. She replied that in-person interaction is vital for students because it allows them to witness the teacher interacting with others, demonstrating virtues of character in action. It gives them a role model. This relates to a broader view of education as growth as a person, not simply growth in knowledge. Fully online education may mean that parents have a greater responsibility for this aspect of their children’s development.
Kira M. Newman 
While I would like for most teachers in the US to have character traits I by and large extolled, I don’t think schools – as of now – choose them for qualities I’d like. Quite the opposite. I am most worried about the schools that say they are interested in holistic education and personal growth as a goal, having been at one myself. These are often code words for false ideas of self esteem and compromised academic integrity.
Teachers aren’t trained as psychologists, and therefore their ideas of personal growth are assological. Psychology is in its infancy as a discipline and at times wrongheaded in its assumptions. To the extent that teachers are trained in psychology or philosophy, it’s often of a sort I don’t agree with.
I’m willing to experiment with schools in which students lose face time as long as this is the case.