What’s the best online course you’ve ever taken?
That question made me reflect on the best online course I’ve ever taken. But whose “best” do we mean—the best I personally took, the best for me and other students, or the most profitable product for the seller? The prompt assumes a straightforward answer. Mine is not.
I have never taken an online course. I do pick up bits and pieces of information online now and then, but I don’t consider that “taking a course.” To me, a complete learning experience requires not only content but direct interaction with instructors, as in a physical classroom. So my answer to the prompt is: none.
Still, I earned several degrees in different fields through in-person classes. The last—a Master of Laws from a prestigious university—was three decades ago. Those experiences came at a price: long drives, expensive travel, hours of commuting—not to mention missing the ease of a cup of coffee or a sandwich by the computer that an online course from home affords. I paid that price for years. Yet it was all worthwhile.
I fondly recall attending degree courses with other hungry students. Even after a tiring workday, it gave me a strong appetite for knowledge. Direct contact and interactive conversation with professors and professional lawyers inspired both explicit and tacit understanding of complex legal concepts—the kind of understanding that comes not from a screen but from a room.
My friend’s experience ran the other way. After failing her first year in the law programme at my university, she enrolled in an online law course at another university. The course had no assignments. The degree was granted purely on examination performance. She studied the material and found it dry and mundane, and passed the exams well enough to finish. But she finished with a bad degree—and finished her interest in further courses, online or in person.
Her experience is personal, of course. What is one man’s poison is another’s rose. Many online courses serve as key educational tools for people of diverse circumstances and learning styles. So it doesn’t matter which courses—online or in person—are best for the majority. What matters is whether a course suits your learning appetite and your goal.
And perhaps that is where the real question lies—not in the format, but in what we are really seeking. The longer I live, the more I notice how much we learn from those who have walked ahead of us. We treasure books, and rightly so. But we sometimes overlook the living treasure sitting quietly in the next room—a parent, an elder, a friend who has already travelled the road we are on. Their wisdom is not indexed or searchable. It is simply there, waiting to be asked.
Knowledge can be delivered. Wisdom, it seems, must be received—often from a person, not a platform. And the deepest wisdom of all is not something the world can hand us, however advanced its courses may be. It comes from another source altogether—the One who gives generously to all who ask (Proverbs 2:6; James 1:5).
—
