The internet is not for learning

Pinkie Pie has been doing a lot of homschooling these past months.  She is doing a lot better these days than in the past, though unfortunately she still isn't doing much in the way of getting any official accreditation.  It turns out that a teacher doing things in person is a vast improvement over online learning.

Right now Pinkie Pie is doing math and french with Wendy, and I am teaching her pretty much everything else.  She enjoys my random forays into a vareity of subjects, and she is progressing well in both the more structured learning Wendy is providing and the mishmash I am responsible for.

She is also taking an Learning Strategies course online for high school credit, and that isn't going nearly so well.  I struggle to figure out how to apportion blame for this.  On one hand, teaching a course through a website is hard.  Even if it were perfect, that is not an easy thing to do, and when you add in the requirement to produce documented work and marks it makes things much worse.

If only we had a learning system devoted to learning instead of a system devoted to producing marks!

Regardless of the challenge level though, this course has some issues with the way it is written.  It taught us about learning styles (Kinesthetic, Auditory, Visual) even though the theory about those learning styles is mostly made up.  It tried to use a quiz to tell Pinkie Pie what her learning style is, and the quiz was laughably bad.  Even if learning styles was a real thing the quiz would have totally failed to evaluate it.

The course also has issues with being unclear on what your answers are supposed to look like.  About half of the time Pinkie Pie asks me what the answer is supposed to look like, and much of the time I have absolutely no idea.  I understand the topic, but I cannot fathom what we are supposed to be writing in the answer box.  We end up looking at the sample answers, but then her responses end up looking just like the samples.

I just don't think that this is actually teaching her a lot.  Again, part of that is the format - you can't just let people be creative and do their own thing when you are trying to mark their responses en masse.  We are paying $40 for a course, and therefore I cannot expect much in the way of teacher oversight.  Filling in boxes and getting a mark at the end is the best they can offer at that price.  Still, they could be doing much better with what they have available.

The last section we did had her learning about scheduling.  They provided an app to help with this, and the app let you build a weekly schedule.  Unfortunately it would only take entries in single block hours, would not permit overlaps, and the interface was extremely clunky.  What Pinkie Pie learned from this was that scheduling apps are useless, hard to interface with, and much worse than just keeping it all in your head.

Not what they were aiming for, I am sure.

Learning from a website just isn't going to be good.  Websites can provide direction and facts for a dedicated learner, but they aren't even close to the standard set by a good teacher.  

I wonder if online math would be better.  Learning about something as wide ranging as learning strategies seems tough online, and perhaps math with its right/wrong answers and more linear teaching would work better.  I don't know, but the more I see the way online teaching goes the more I lean towards never subjecting Pinkie Pie to official schooling again.