Which is better: ONLINE courses or TRADITIONAL Classes and Courses

This depends on the kind of “traditional class” you refer to. If it’s a large lecture class with no questions, an online class can be just as (in)effective as a F2F lecture. Lectures are little better than well-written texts. Some rare professors can make large lectures an exciting experience—not many do. AND let’s take into account that people learn in different “preferred” channels. Some people prefer to hear things to reading or “seeing” them. Some people cannot sit and prefer to be active while learning. Brain chemistry also filters in here. A large lecture for a person with ADHD is not the best way to “learn.”

My experience and career has been based on case method classes which include the following:

1. Selection of cases that present real, (not made up) business problems and end with a decision dilemma (not description cases).
2. Selection of accompanying technical notes or chapters that give students some frameworks for analysis.
3. Writing a syllabus that charts a path through related business problems.
4. Students with some work experience who read and analyze the materials in advance.
5. Students who meet in learning teams to make sure everyone is as far as they can go with the case given different backgrounds and experiences.
6. 90 minute classes.
7. Rooms with semi-circular seating so everyone can see and listen to everyone.
8. Rooms with multi-media channels—internet, chalkboards, flip charts, projectors, overhead cameras, audio systems.
9. Instructors who cold call on students (not just volunteers) so everyone has a chance to speak and express their opinions.
10. Instructors who are highly skilled at asking good questions that stimulate thought for everyone.
11. Discussions in which the students talk more than the instructor.
12. Discussions in which what the students say is graded daily by the instructor after class.
13. Discussions that include intense role plays—only when implied by student comments.
14. Discussions in which the instructor is facilitating learning and going at the envelope of the STUDENTS’ understanding not the instructor’s.
15. Discussions characterized by high energy, humor, deep insight, working at the edge of students’ understanding, no interruptions (coming in late, going to the restroom, AV faux pas, etc.) multi-media segments seamlessly intermixed, and complete and intense focus on the “magic bubble” of collective insight in the room.
16. Summaries driven by the students’ insights and only the gaps filled in by the instructor.

THAT’s a “traditional class” to me. I tried to get all of that every class, every course. I’ve taught on-line classes. Invariably they were a miserably poor approximation of what happens in the class outlined above. People on commuter trains, in coffee shops, watching tv etc. in the on-line classes, no facial or body language, connectivity issues, synchronous versus asynchronous structures, and on and on.

ONLINE courses are a reasonable approximation of a lecture class. LECTURE classes are a very poor substitute for a well-done F2F CASE METHOD class. There’s little comparison. 

The ASSUMPTION of the question above is that most students have experienced LECTURES as the typical “traditional” class. That is a travesty of educational institutions and instructors who don’t understand or apply the basics of adult learning.

See Teaching Management published by Cambridge University Press.