Online education has originated as a response to the limitations of the age-old practice of in-person classroom education where an instructor addresses a room full of students. As we know, this practice continues even today. Educators believe this limits access to education to billions of students across the world as what is being taught in the classroom reaches only those students who are physically present in the classroom at that moment.

Now, thanks to technology like telecommunications, computers and the internet, classroom lectures can be broadcast to a much larger universe of students, providing them access to education which can improve their lives. But that is only part of the story.

Even for students who have access to education, there are other problems to in-person classroom education which negatively affect the student’s experience of learning. For example,

• Most students do not pay attention to what is being taught as their minds wander during a classroom teaching session;
• Typical 45 minute to an hour-long classroom sessions lead to fatigue in students and discourage amenable learning;
• What is being taught cannot be personalised for individual students, which limits the student’s retention and assimilation of knowledge, and understanding.

Needless to say, these problems reduce the student’s learning and academic performance.

Affordable ways of increasing access to education

Of course, for years, educators have been working to resolve these, and other, problems on classroom education. Fortunately, solutions are being found. For instance, personal tutoring has been found to be an effective means of education which significantly improves the quality of learning for students. According to Daphne Koller, cofounder of Coursera, in her 2011 New York Times article: “In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class.”

However, finding and mobilising large numbers of tutors for individual students and managing the tutoring process is cumbersome and expensive. Many solutions rely on the use of technology which, once again, increases the cost of education. The question, therefore, is how do we find affordable ways of increasing access to education which engage students creatively and enhance their academic performance? In the New York Times article quoted above, Ms Koller agrees: “Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal.”

The answer rests on online education or online learning. Educators have been working on the limitations of in-person classroom education for decades – and, as a response to that, online courses have been in use since the internet came into our lives almost 30 years ago. Its predecessor, computer-based learning, with colourful materials available as packaged software programs on discs, were popular for a while. But, being reliant on physical media, they couldn’t achieve the scale of operations the internet allows, and became clunky and expensive. However, they contributed a great deal to online learning content development in terms of creativity and instructional design.

Online videos as a means of disseminating learning cheaply

The internet, which became a home for online videos, made especially popular by YouTube, highlighted big differences between traditional in-person classroom and online education. It allowed creation and (free) distribution of online learning content. And, as people were already familiar with watching YouTube videos (over and over again), providing access to online learning content was no longer a problem. Educators quickly jumped on the concept of using online videos as a means of disseminating learning cheaply and began including it in almost every curriculum.

Nowadays, in the absence of in-person teaching in classrooms, the bulk of the instruction is shared with the learners through online videos. That means, in online courses, based on the curriculum and course objectives, instructor lectures are pre-recorded as videos and made available online to the learners. The learners access the videos according to their individual needs: i.e. course enrolment, study-in-progress, assimilation, pace of learning, and the course deadlines set by the course curriculum. Online videos are now the mainstay of online learning platforms such as edX, Coursera, Udemy, FutureLearn, among others.