Katherine Olave

Text and Use

December 09th 2015

Online courses: good or bad choice?

Education is one of the most important steps in the progress of a country. In the
past decade, online courses have become very popular, as it is a very convenient way to
get a degree while you work and you are very busy to go to the university. Online courses
had improved open access to education, including access to full degree programs
(Zameer, 2010). There are several advantages for e-learning students, as well as
disadvantages. The educational approach is very different to the one we can appreciate in
a classroom environment, but collaborative e-learning is a way to solve these issues, as
there are others. Online courses are very complete, as they use forums to answer
students questions, the classes are recorded, so the students can go back in order to get
information that was not clear at that time. Through time, audios, videos and blogs have
been added in order to improve these programs.
Online courses, commonly known as e-learning courses are widely used across the
globe, as they are a very effective way to learn, using different technological resources
and virtual tools. Nevertheless, it may be a problem for those people who are unable to
have access to computers or any other technological resource. The worldwide e-learning
industry is largely economically significant, and was estimated to be over $48 billion in
2000. E-learning history began in 1960, in the University of Illinois, which had a system
based on computer terminals, where students could access resources that were in audio
and video formats (Wooley, D. 2013). Nowadays, we can found a lot of audio and videos
about all kinds of topics, and courses that fit our busy schedules and give us opportunities
to study, while universities do not give us this opportunity. So, it is very easy to get any
kind of course you want from wherever you are and whenever you are.
Online courses offer us a great amount of information and knowledge, but it is
entirely different to an actual course, where you interact with classmates and teachers. For
instance, when students have doubts about any topic, they cannot go and ask directly the
teacher about them, while in actual courses you can do it and interaction is more fluent. In
online courses, there are groups or blogs where students can write their doubts and
questions on an online wall, and share experiences, that is far more useful than ask the
teacher individually, mainly because more than one student may have the same doubt or
question and these blogs helps a lot to all the learning community of that particular course.
Instructors have been working on improvements about collaborative work in online
courses, Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) uses instructional methods
designed to encourage or require students to work together on learning tasks. CSCL is

similar in concept to the terminology, e-learning 2.0" and "networked collaborative

learning" (NCL) (Trentin, G. 2010). That improvement has helped a lot since students can
now interact with each other in order to complete a task, giving more opportunities for
interaction in online learning.
However, some people disagree with online courses due to personal instant
feedback. In the traditional face to face classes teachers can tell if the learners do
understand simply from their facial expression and it is considered as the most important
advantage of a traditional course. In contrast, the message which is delivered by internet
has a huge distance between teachers and students. In other words, there will be less
immediate feedbacks while having e-learning courses.
Although some people do not believe in the effectiveness or are against online
courses because they think e-learning courses are not actual courses and people would
never learn as good as in universities or school. Schools do integrate students into a
learning community and give them tools to overcome the levels of study in the school or
university they are part of. However, they do not include a sharing platform like a
repository, so they lack structuring of the material that is aimed to make it easier to share
and reuse the experience. Also, it is evident that adopting well-designed collaboration
process models for supporting empirical research about the role of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) and its influence on pedagogy-related concepts
(various kinds of implementations, inclusion problems and solutions, envisioned benefits,
etc.) (Di Blas, Fiore, Mainetty, Vergallo and Paolini, 2014). and all institutions and schools
should include or at least think about offering this courses because currently, adults work
too many hours per day and have family too, so it would be easier for them to have access
to education. The adult is a person with employment, family, and social obligations; and
so for an adult there are costs in enrolling in an educational course says Moore and
Kearsley (2005)

Sources:
Di Blas, N; Fiore, A; Mainetty, L; Vergallo, R and Paolini, P. (2014). A portal of educational
resources: providing evidence for matching pedagogy with technology. Retrieved from:
http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/22906.
David R. Woolley (2013). Wolley, David, and as so many people had insisted. Group
Notes is one. PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community. Retrieved from:
http://www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm.
Zameer, A (2010). Virtual Education System (Current Myth & Future Reality in Pakistan).
Retrieved from: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1709878.