Virtual Education can’t Replace Conventional Education – Prof Farooq Kperogi

A journalism professor based in Greater Atlanta, USA, Prof Farooq Kperogi, has disclosed that virtual education cannot replace traditional education.

While stating this on his Facebook wall on Monday May 25, 2020, Kperogi said that Covid-19 has shown that “online education has no future”.

“Before COVID-19, we were told that traditional brick-and-mortal institutions and face-to-face instructional methods were museum-bound. That compelled me to enroll for online teaching certification 5 years ago.

“But the COVID-19-inspired transition to online-only pedagogy across the world this year has shown that the reports of the death of traditional ways of knowledge dissemination are greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain,” he wrote.

He added that virtual education is too inadequate to cater to the academic needs of the students. He stressed that parents, students and teachers don’t really enjoy it.

“The data that has emerged, at least in the US, shows that wholly online learning environments are too inadequate and too socially impoverished to stand in for the full ‘college experience.’ Students detest it, parents resent it, and teachers chafe at it,” he stated.

“The’re many reasons for this. I’ll share only one personal example to make my point. A few years ago, a student I taught in an entirely online class and whom I’d never physically met requested me to write a recommendation letter for her for a job.

“Sadly, I couldn’t say anything about the student other than that she took and passed a class I taught her. I couldn’t speak to her character, her personality, her social skills, her discursive abilities, or other non-academic attributes that are central to constructing her full portrait.

“I politely told her I couldn’t write a recommendation letter that would be helpful to her. I’ve heard similar experiences from my colleagues,” he continued.

“If there’s any positive thing that COVID-19 has done to education, it is that it has dramatized the irreplaceability, at least for the foreseeable future, of face-to-face instructional methods,” he concluded.