A big question is whether we want learning to be active or passive.

From personal experience, as a small child, I found other small children boring, so I didn’t interact with them much. As an only child, this was a pretty easy route to take.

When I got to kindergarten, because I wasn’t interesting in doing anything other than going into my own quiet corner to paint and draw, I got labeled “retarded,” since in the 1960's that was both the term and the popular diagnosis. And things only got worse when I got put in the classes for retarded children because I got even more bored.

What probably saved me was the fact that the county had just built a new library near enough to my house that the bookmobile came through twice a week. And I chased it the way other kids chased the ice cream truck.

From age 5, I’d figured out that I was going to have to go out and get my learning if I was going to get the things I really want. Meanwhile, the county was standardizing tests to churn out people completely unlike me. I did well on the tests mostly because I wanted to learn, and this made me smart enough to pass them, regardless of what happened in the classroom.

What amazed me when I got to an Ivy League college as a freshman was how few people there were like me — and how many of them went to the Ivies because they’d played the education game well and were looking for the biggest carrot they could find (the Ivy sheepskin). Sadly, some of them had to be beaten with the very biggest sticks. And some obsessed about grade point, since at Lake Woebegone High School, they’d all been valedictorian. So they took the easiest classes they could take that’d get them into The Very Prestigious Ivy League Law School so they could go on to be Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky, Washington, DC.

Online learning can be the ultimate in activity or passivity depending on what the student chooses. It can be active if you chase the links to interesting things, sort out the crap (of which the internet has plenty), and do some critical thinking of your own along the way.

Or you can sign up for an online course and have even more passivity, since you don’t even have to put on clothes or go out the front door to get to class.

The medium isn’t the issue. It’s the mindset of the user. That may be down to human nature, and it’s unlikely to change on any time scale other than that dictated somehow by Darwin & Co.