Comparing different strategies

A US-based research report has revealed that even though students participating in online courses seem to score at a higher level than when students follow the same course in a traditional setting the report raises a number of questions, such as...can we really compare online courses to traditional? What if for the online course you have an excellent instructor, whereas the traditional course is taught in a mediocre way? What if you have an excellent tutor carrying out face-to-face lectures?
In a way this report brings out the true value of pedagogy... what the teacher/tutor/educator manages to elicit from the students is rather in my opinion irreplaceable but on the other hand, the same teacher has to face the future and adapt accordingly. A nice quote caught my eye, by J. Catone (2009): "Anyone can absorb information from a book or video, but good teachers will always be necessary to draw out that knowledge and help students develop the skills needed to think critically about the information they consume. In other words, online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied."
We are indeed part of the answer to the education of the future... it all depends on the direction we take with our students.
I would suggest we put ourselves in perspective and try to see how our actions may indeed affect the people we have in front of us... as the authors of "Spiderman" rightly pointed out :)) ... "With great power, comes great responsibility", and as Educators, I think we can fairly say that we have great influencing power on many of our young followers within the classroom.