E-learning raises many questions

I wonder who is really listening to students attending secondary school?
In a race to reduce costs and seemingly to reduce teachers in Grades 9 through 12, the provincial government is mandating students take 4 courses on-line in their high school years beginning next year.
It is interesting that 95 percent of the over 6,000 secondary students surveyed reject learning from online courses.
Only Ontario–in all of North America–has shifted education to the technology forcing students to take a minimum of four courses online to graduate.
This change in required courses will not begin until the 2020-21 school year.
In rural areas, students are already being forced to take courses online because the schools that they attend can’t offer the full spectrum of courses that a big city school can.
Instead, the students often listen to pre-recorded lectures and are assigned reading and work that is either emailed or mailed to the lecturer.
Often students will be taking these courses at different times of the day and different months of the year.
Will the on-line teacher be available on demand to work individually with all students regardless of time of day or month of the year?
One of the important questions needed to be answered from testing e-learning is whether there is a higher drop-out rate than currently happens in the classroom.
What seems to disappear are the questions that a student forms as a teacher is delivering a lesson that can be immediately answered by that same teacher. It often leads to more questions by others listening in the classroom.
It used to be known as “interactive learning” with a teacher providing addition information on a topic.
Will online learning teach students to problem solve? Will online learning force students to do more research on-line using apps like Google, Bing and Yahoo?
It is estimated that 85 percent of jobs in 2030 do not exist today and the ability to learn the skills to do those jobs will force all Canadians to do more focused learning on the web to enhance their skills and be able to work in those new jobs.
But this gets us back to the question of whether or not forcing students to take four courses online is good.
One must also examine whether a more important skill that must accompany online learning is the ability to do good research to understand the nuances and concepts that are being taught online and to also be able to determine what is accurate information to use and what is false.
We, as citizens, already struggle to determine what is accurate and what is false.
In traditional classroom settings, students often do projects as teams needing to work and collaborate together.
Will e-learning be able to build collaborating teams to handle projects?
These are but a few of the questions that should be answered by educators and the provincial government.