Online education is a new art form so to speak, one that we have yet to master. Every major market in the world is seeing a surge of new universities that claim to offer all the benefits of your brick & mortar university. These claims sound plausible given the amount of educators that are seemingly running to join in on this education tool. Yet can we really trust the vast amount of online education organizations just because some of them have actual educators with actual experience? One would hope that the human race would have improved online education seeing as it has been around and running since 1994. I will provide you with some insight I gained from my experience with online education.
Pros
Online education was full of pros that truly made the education experience one that I felt in control of. Gone were classrooms as the world become my classroom. I remember my first time finishing a test at a restaurant in D.C. just thinking that this technology was amazing. If you were assigned homework and you didn’t understand some of the material it was effortless to find a teacher that was willing to help you. Something I found public schools lacking in regardless of what services they may claim. This self-governing approach to my education helped foster a sense of urgency and motivation which I was not fully familiar with. I also loved the simplicity with any student account issues as they were always solved promptly. Student support in general was reliable and impressive far surpassing the quality that I had become used to in public schools. So I won’t deny that online education did have some facets to its operation that I appreciated. Question is, were these appreciated areas of online education worth the various cons that seemingly plague its existence? Read on to see.
Cons
Now we get to the meat and bones of this story, what exactly is wrong with online education? Well for starters the image they try to sell to you (like so many other companies) is highly exaggerated in terms of how effective the schooling will be both for your intelligence and your future career opportunities. The reason I claim that online education isn’t exactly as effective as claimed is due to the lack of supervision given to the students while in these virtual classrooms. The system essentially runs without anyone making sure that the students are not simply cheating by copying and pasting the answers. I mean we all know that rewriting sentences in order to avoid plagiarism sensors is simple. This lack of quality means that online education is lacking in effective standards to measure how much a student actually did learn as opposed to copied.
Conclusion
I simply do not feel that we are ready for student to begin switching to online education en masse. In fact I believe that online education should be studied further in order to build a better framework for future online classrooms to base themselves on. Perhaps even a future in which online education is integrated into public school systems and allows students to essentially be in a classroom regardless of where ever they may be. This would be benefited by the fact that real teachers would be gauging these students and they would be able to tell if a student was cheating based on how well they did in class.
This article was provided by Eduardo Dieguez, blogger for www.Edu-Advisor.com. An avid computer enthusiast, Eduardo spends countless hours tinkering with electronics both new and old. He is is currently in pursuit of his AA Degree at Valencia.