The online environment for learning

I love the asynchronicity of the course I am doing but one can really get far behind. One of the questions I was going to post is that if we as a community of (paying) learners are finding it hard to engage and maintain connectedness( and the assumption is that we have the requisite skills to read, synthesize, evaluation and assess and give back to the community since that is ultimately how we learn in this milieu), then how is it that we are going to get secondary/1st year students to engage. Their immediate gratification stage lasts into 1st year post secondary, maturity and skill levels are often times nonexistent or are at such low levels that frustration and disengagement ( as the path of least resistance ) are the choices made. This is not even tenable in a public system now let alone a for profit institution such as a university where students can rack up huge debt just trying to get basic skills they didn't receive due to apathy, laziness, poor attitude or lack of competent programming/teachers.It's all good a fine to take the utopian view but the reality 'on the ground' leads one to a somewhat more skeptical view. I think that by putting the onus back on the kids at 1st year level you will get them to engage or drop out. At my level when we take 'all comers' so the funding can remain in tact ( and this is the over-arching focus no matter what we as teachers espouse) this simply will not be the case for using these democratic online social tools. We are answerable to the community and society as a whole and in general it appears that their wishes are 'paths of least resistance for their kids.