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Andrea T. McMahon
Prof. Elliott
English 111A
17 September, 2014
Response to Virtual Promise: Why Online Courses Will Not Adequately Prepare Us for the
Future
High school: a glorious time for studying and making it through classes, right? Thats not
always the case, from personal experience, Ive seen slackers and people who just skim by in a
class. That percentage of classmates grew even more with online classes. More and more
students started taking these classes and said how easy it was to pass and how they barely had
to do anything at all. Online education was suppose to better the education system, but it seems
to make it worse. Claire Giordano wrote Virtual Promise: Why Online Courses Will Not
Adequately Prepare Us for the Future and said how the hope for online classes was very high,
but the potential is undermined by the problems of reliance on technology. She further points out
how the benefits of online education all have their downfalls that are greater than the actual
benefit it is supposed to offer. She cites a professor at Brooklyn College, who is widely
published with ideas and theories in the use of online education stating that the benefits and she
continues to point out the downfalls of such benefits. She goes through the expense of the
classes, how online courses are not acceptable to everyone, the loss of critical thinking in a
classroom setting building character, and finally how the attachment to technology will only
further the effects of lack of social interaction and physical lifestyle. She provides real life
examples she experienced with her sister who did benefit from online courses and also examples
from the other side of online education.The other side being that given the right circumstances

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online classes can be helpful and useful, but only within those circumstances. She says that
...online courses also create an environment devoid of the necessary challenges and interactions
that foster complex critical thinking which is widely important for going through life and
education.
Claire begins her paper by pointing out a survey that was taken in 2013 by the Kaiser
Family Foundation Survey that found that children and teen spend more than 53 hours using
digital media every week. That statistic doesnt mean they should influence being in front of a
computer more. She continues in her paragraph to say that though the expectations for online
education are high, their negative repercussions outweigh the positive ones. She states that online
courses promote inequality by the requirement for the technology and the means to obtain these
online courses.She talks about a journalist from the New York Times named Thomas Friedman
said how online courses will reduce poverty by granting all citizen equal access to the best
education possible. Coming from a small school, I understand the limitations so many students
have when it comes to getting a better education and with most of them being online and so
many students not having the ability to be a part of those courses, I firmly agree with Claire.
Though the expenses of the online courses can be quite unbelieveable, the flexibleness of
the courses can be quite beneficial. She explains how her sister became ill and fell behind in her
classes. With the online classes available to her, at a non-school based schedule, she was able to
catch up with the lessons that she missed. I believe that when it comes to illness or other setbacks
online courses would be the best situation for the students to be able to get the education they
need.
Claire explains how the virtual nature of the classes simply cant recreate the
environment of intellectual and interpersonal challenge that in important when going through

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life and dealing with business of any nature. In the classroom, you do exercises and projects with
other students that expose you to different people and different ways of thinking. She speaks of
Rick Roth, who was an academic adviser for twenty-four years and taught at the University of
Washington and Skidmore College, who argues that online education is in fact detrimental to the
growth of our critical thinking skills. With the environment of online classes there is little
opportunity for critical thinking and discussions.
With online classes I agree with Claire Giordano with the negative influences outweigh
the positives. The only very useful and beneficial thing about online classes its that they are
available for students who cannot actually go to the classroom. I dont think it would be the best
thing for our future for online courses to become the primary form of learning.