Maybe that is because face-to-face classes offer a richer experience for the students. Also, it doesn't feel so boring when someone is talking to you (e.g. watching a video on the computer screen is not the same as a person talking to you). Although you can record live lectures and replay it afterwards for online classes, I feel it requires a higher level of motivation for the students to watch it and actually pay attention to it.
Of course highly motivated students can fill the gaps alone and don't need this extra motivation from a dedicated instructor in the room. For the rest, I guess face-to-face classes will be the best for a long time.
Turning alberich's observation, I would say that to date online education has provided a poorer experience than live lectures. But I think we are at the point where online can become a richer experience. IIRC Salman Kahn thinks that online should be the rich exploratory experience and live face time should be for tailored help.
I got my undergraduate degree at Harvard. We had some master showmen whose cadence I can still recall 40 years later. We also had graduate student section leaders whose grasp of English and basic teaching were below the minimum for communication.
I think we are at the point, or nearly so, that we can create engaging avatars to communicate effectively with students, and I dont mean just read a script. Sure you could have a lecture about ancient Rome, but wouldnt it be much more effective to have a guided tour?
There is something about that interaction, boring though it may be, that is better than online courses. Some students will benefit from MOOCs but a large majority of the students won't.
I think the silver bullet will be when you can sit down with your own personal Watson have it socratic method you. A really good teacher can find the boundary of understanding and push students to think at near maximum capacity by carefully asking questions just out of their intellectual reach. I think that's the power of lecture and I don't think we're too far from replicating it (50 years maybe?)
Clearly when we have human level AI you can just use those, but depending on energy efficiency and cost of power that may take much longer to be cost effective, even after we have them.
"sit down with your own personal Watson"... "I think that's the power of lecture"
This does not follow. The virtue of a lecture can not be that you are getting personalized optimal Socratic dialog. Only a couple of people in the audience can be getting that at a time.
Optimal Socratic teaching will probably never disappear, but I'm still not hearing a lot of defenses of lectures qua lectures that still don't generally boil down to "It was good enough for me, it's good enough for them".
it does feel boring though when a lecturer is also talking to 30 or more other people at the same time with little to no actual interaction with the class
Of course highly motivated students can fill the gaps alone and don't need this extra motivation from a dedicated instructor in the room. For the rest, I guess face-to-face classes will be the best for a long time.