I think the idea of online learning is fantastic, because you can watch lectures repeatedly and read the material until you get it.
However, they need a way to allow a student to ask questions when they are not getting a subject.
This reminds me: I once had a Chemistry class, the second one, with a professor who was complete trash.
Classmates couldn’t decide whether he was Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, since we weren’t sure what his nationality was other than that he had a thick FOREIGN accent.
He routinely insulted the class, comparing us to Brittany Spears, and did not actually teach anything. There was no book for the class, and he would write hieroglyphics on the board, pictures of engines or whatnot, with no complete equations.
I actually shared photos of his lecture boards and recordings with a student who was about to graduate with a chemistry degree. He replied, “wtf is all of this? I don’t understand any of it.”
A professor in another class openly told us that the problem with the trash professor is that he treats the students like they already had a PhD in Chemistry. This was just a Chem 2 class. I was an English major (but I had passed Chem 1 with a perfect score, and ended up taking a ton of science classes just for fun).
Anyway, long story short, in our first exam the highest score was a 50, which was my own.
My solution to this problem was Khan Academy.com. I went through the Chemistry tutorials on my own and ended up becoming such a huge expert in the material I got an A at the conclusion of the course. No thanks to that SOB though.