How Online Classes Help Students

Online courses are the one of the successful stories in the learning system. Fundamentally, it is a new revolution in education system where the communication between students and instructors is not face-to-face but virtually through the Internet. Therefore, online classes allow the students to learn and gain knowledge at anytime and anywhere.

However, there has been a big debate about whether online courses could replace traditional courses. People tend to agree that online courses are effective in their life.  For example, most students who are to busy with their life schedule prefer the online education to earn their degree. Others agree that the concept of digital education should solve many issues. For example, the distance between cities and countries prevent the students to get their degree. Thus, many people have started to use technologies because they have been shown to make life easier.

As a result, online classes offer several benefits, such as flexibility, and growing the performance of students. However, these classes also have some limitations such as missing the interaction with

teachers and classmates.

To begin with, one of the important advantages of the online courses is flexibility with attendance. According to Wim Jochems, Jeroen van Merrienber and Rob Koper (2004), professors in the Educational Technology Expertise Center (ETEC) of the Open University of the Netherland (OUNL),  “Flexibility is a fertile concept with many relevant aspects, but for flexible learning there tow prevailing perspective: flexibility with regard to time and place, and flexibility with regard to student need ”In the past, students must attend a class physically, and many of them usually face some difficulties attending their classes for many reasons. For instance, having a job or living far away from campus are two main obvious reasons.

Online courses, on the other hand, have changed this restricted role. Students who take the online courses have the plasticity in getting their degree. Hence, online classes have been shown to overcome most of the attending classes issues. Another important advantage of the online courses is they give the students more options in recording lectures and accessing the need resources. For example, students who have a job can access lectures online during working time, or they have the ability in accessing the session later. Consequently, there is no restriction on either time or location, and the students will be convenient with this type of education.

Online classes will also improve students’ performance in terms of understanding. There are many reasons that increase the students’ performance using online classes. First, online classes have different and effective methods for providing contents. Moreover, the contents can be interestingly demonstrated by sounds, pictures, and videos. For example, an online pronunciation class could show different ways to help students to clearly say a word by giving a lot of media techniques.

Second, online classes offer sources availability. Therefore, student easily can access these external resources such as links to other websites, download videos, or audios to gain the appropriate knowledge about some the unclear points.

Third, online classes also have an important feature that is the recorded lecture on the web. This advantage helps students to control the lecture by pausing and repeating the recording lectures. On the other hand, in the old-style lecture students might miss important information during the lectures. Another important drawback of the traditional lectures occurs when the students cannot interrupt an instructor. For instance, regular students often find it hard to take other students time for clarification due to time limitation. In the online lectures students have the ability to replay the lecture leads to enhance their performance. For these reasons, online classes show to extend students ability in realizing the topic.

Online classes have in fact a major disadvantage when compared to traditional classes, and that is the social commination between classmates and teachers. According to Anna (2012)“An important component of classroom learning is the social and communicative interactions between student and teacher, and student and student.” Students in traditional classes obviously have a lot of opportunities to ask questions directly to their teachers, listen to other questions from other students, and ability to debate in classrooms. This communicative interaction develops many learning skills such as sharing ideas.

However, all of these features are in fact missing in the online classes. For instance, when the students cannot understand the lecturer’s topic well from the teachers, they can understand it by many different methods like asking other students and group discussions. That is a big advantage of learning as all students in universities often helping each other’s. In contrast, students in online classes miss all of these skills even tough some online classes offer online discussion but limited to the Internet connection. Students can study or learn by themself, using some software tools, but they will have missed the advantages of sharing ideas and quotations.

Governments should fund online classes to help in educating students with low income. Online classes have grown and used rapidly. According to Lenderman (2013), in fall 2011 online classes were taken by more than 6.7 million (30%) of students enrolling in either universities or collages.

In fact, online classes can save students money when comparing to traditional classes. For example, students who are enrolled in old-style classes are usually responsible of paying a lot of fees such as meal plans, campus housing and transportation. Online classes, on the other hand, show to be economically effective with regard these fees in addition to not making students paying fuel cost.

As a result, online classes are considered better options to low-income students, Williamson (2010). To sum up, in my opinion, founding and supporting online classes by government will contribute in building educated community.  

People live in a fast and challenging life with a lot of responsibilities. The ability to gain knowledge with no restrictions such as time and a place shows a ray of hope for education than before. The combination between technologies and education systems offer a big relief to solve many problems of traditional education system. Thus, helping many people to gain their degrees and improve their skills has become possible.

While some people argue that online classes have fewer interactions than face-to-face classes, many online education systems have been working to solve this issue. In conclusion, online classes have been shown to have many significant advantages than disadvantages, and they should be established and supported by Governments.   

      

References:

Jochems, W., Van Merriënboer, J., & Koper, R. (2004). Integrated e-learning. Retrieved from:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=q7sUhM4WyP8C&printsec
=frontcover&dq=
editions:JVwrGw7MFIwC&hl=en&sa=
X&ei=qOYwVLLRHoj3aszSgdAG&ved
=0CBoQ6wEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Ni, A. Y. (2013). Comparing the Effectiveness of Classroom and Online Learning: Teaching Research Methods. JPAEJOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2, 199. Chicago Retrieved from:

http://www.naspaa.org/jpaemessenger/Article/VOL19-2/03_Ni.pdf

Lederman, Doug. (2013). Growth for Online Learning. Retrieved from:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/08/survey-finds-online-enrollments-slow-continue-grow

Williamson, Jennifer. (2010). The Key to Low-Income Student Completion. Retrieved from:

      

http://www.distance-education.org/Articles/Online-Education--The-Key-to-Low-Income-Student-Completion--257.html