Agreed. I got my MSLIS from UIUC's online program; I enrolled in 2006 and was a member of their 11th cohort, so they had already been doing online learning for a decade by the time I attended. They really had things figured out. Online students paid the same tuition as on-campus students.
We attended synchronous online lectures while logged into an IRC server. You could listen to the lecture and chat with classmates about it in real-time as it was happening without interrupting the lecture, and it was delightful and extremely engaging. Frankly, I found it superior to the in-person class meetings I had in undergrad.
Also, class discussions are hardly the only way to engage learners, there are all kinds of active learning techniques that can be employed. In my own teaching, I'm personally fond of using live polling tools to ask formative assessment questions. Many online meeting tools have features for things like breakout sessions where you can ask students to do a think/pair/share.
If a student is not engaged in an online learning environment, I think that points more to instructors not being prepared to teach in that setting rather than an inherent limitation of the setting itself.
We attended synchronous online lectures while logged into an IRC server. You could listen to the lecture and chat with classmates about it in real-time as it was happening without interrupting the lecture, and it was delightful and extremely engaging. Frankly, I found it superior to the in-person class meetings I had in undergrad.
Also, class discussions are hardly the only way to engage learners, there are all kinds of active learning techniques that can be employed. In my own teaching, I'm personally fond of using live polling tools to ask formative assessment questions. Many online meeting tools have features for things like breakout sessions where you can ask students to do a think/pair/share.
If a student is not engaged in an online learning environment, I think that points more to instructors not being prepared to teach in that setting rather than an inherent limitation of the setting itself.