5 Advantages Of Online Learning: Education Without Leaving Home

    Although online education has its limitations, there are several advantages of online learning that explain why e-Learning may be the greatest revolution in today’s education. Here are 5 of them.

 

Traditional Education And Advantages Of Online Learning

    There are several problems with the traditional system of education. First of all, you need to pay thousands of dollars per term to attend a prestigious school. With all those budget cuts, busy classrooms, and course shortages, you won’t always get the chance to study exactly what you want.

    It’s no wonder why millions of students from all around the world opt for online degree programs or take at least one college course through an online platform. Online learning has to be the greatest revolution in contemporary education. It made a huge change in the system and opened great opportunities for everyone who wants to learn something.

    Nevertheless, online education is still related to stereotypes. People often think that online students are not smart enough for a traditional college or university, they are lazy, and they don’t get “real” degrees. These claims discourage many people from taking online courses, so they get stuck in the traditional educational system that consumes a huge deal of money, nerves, and years of their lives.

    Allow us to explain why online learning is more awesome than you think. We have 5 advantages of online learning that will make you reconsider your attitude towards this type of education.

Advantages Of Online Learning

1. You can learn whatever you want!

    You can pick the program of your dreams in traditional education, too, but that would involve traveling away from home, living in a completely unknown city, and struggling in an extremely competitive learning environment. With online education, you can take any program or course present in traditional four-year universities.

    For example, let’s say you’re mostly interested in neuroscience. All it takes is a Google search for such online course, and you’ll easily find the online programs offered by some of the most prestigious universities from all around the world. You can take such a course even if you have no aspirations to apply that knowledge in your future profession, but you’re simply curious to discover new interests and understand how the human brain works. The great variety of online programs and courses is a huge advantage of this type of education. It doesn’t matter where you live and what you want to study – you can always find a suitable course or even a degree program that you can follow from home.

2. Comfort

    Forget about attending classes for hours, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, and suffering from back pain by the end of the day. You will not be bound to physical class session when you opt for online education. All lectures and needed materials are provided via online platforms, so you’ll easily access them from the comfort of your home. You will not take public transport to get to campus, you won’t have to spend money on gas for your car, you won’t have to get up early to get dressed for class… the list of conveniences goes on and on.

    Comfort is a strong advantage, but it can go both ways. You mustn’t allow yourself to get too comfortable when studying from home, so it would be best to abandon the couch for few hours a day and set up an inspirational studying environment in your home. All you need is a large desk and a nice, comfortable chair.

3. Online courses look great on a resume

    It doesn’t matter where your career stands at this moment; an online program will always look good on your resume. It will show potential employers that you’re committed to learning and you’re eager to obtain more knowledge and new skills. Hiring managers don’t see online degrees as inferior to traditional ones. A degree is a degree. If you obtain an online degree from a prestigious university, you’ll boost your career with the speed of light. You will certainly become a better candidate for a job promotion, and your resume will look much better when you apply for new positions.

4. Self-paced learning

    When you start browsing through interesting online courses and programs, you’ll notice the Self-Paced label on most of them. What does this mean? Self-paced learning means that the students can start completing the targets at any time, and he can arrange a learning schedule that meets his individual needs.

    When you enroll in a traditional college program, you’ll have to forget about work, hobbies, and even family. In such setting, studying has to be a priority. That’s why many single parents and people who work decide to forget all about their dreams to get a higher degree.

    A self-paced system enables them to make progress with rhythm that suits them. This type of system does not require attending live sessions; you can access the materials at any time that works for you. If you have to work or take care of your home and children during the day, you can study at night. That’s an advantage the traditional educational system cannot beat.

5. Lower costs

    The fact that online programs are cheaper when compared to the ones held in a traditional campus setting is enough to convince you to consider them. The average tuition for online courses depends on multiple factors, so it varies from one program to another. If, for example, you want to enroll in the Big Data Specialization program provided by University California, San Diego through Coursera, you’ll pay $399. You also have an option to pay $49 per course. Financial Aid is available for learners who cannot afford this fee, so that’s something you should always keep in mind.

    We saved the best part for last: many online courses are completely free of charge. MIT, for example, offers all course materials online without any charges. Free courses don’t usually come with certificate of completion, but they are still more than useful for anyone who wants to learn from prestigious educators.

Online Education Is Totally Worth The Effort

    Online courses and degree programs are more convenient and cheaper than their counterparts in traditional education. Those are the two main advantages of online learning that lead many students to opt for online platforms when they want to earn a degree or certificate.

The best thing about online learning is that you can learn in a relaxed manner even if you don’t want to get certified. You only need passion for learning and a quick online search that will take you to the right course. From that point on, you will be the master of your own education.

Is online learning the future of education?

    In the past, if you wanted to get a qualification, or even simply learn something new, you would sign up for a course at a bricks-and-mortar institution, pay any relevant fees, and then physically attend class. That was until the online learning revolution started.
    Last year, the e-learning market was worth an enormous $166.5 billion. It’s been estimated that this will grow to $255 billion by 2017. Its growing financial value is matched only by the swelling numbers of students choosing to follow an online course.
    In the latest Global Shapers Survey of 25,000 young people from across the world, 77.84% of respondents reported having taken online courses in the past. So is online learning the future of education?

 What is online education?

    Let’s start first by looking at what exactly it is. Online education takes two major forms. The first: for-credit courses where students enrolled in tertiary education take online classes offered by home or other higher education learning institutions for credit. Some well-known cases include the MIT OpenCourseWare and the Harvard Online learning.
    The second form of online education consists of professional training and certification preparation. Such online learning is usually targeted at professionals or students seeking training or preparing for certification exams. Popular courses include training in foreign languages, accounting and nursing.
In the Global Shapers Survey, close to half (47.79%) of respondents said they would be willing to pursue certification for certain skills, including online certification, once they have started their working careers. This again speaks to the large potential and market for online education.

Overcoming the challenges in online learning

    Regardless of these concerns, online education has made great strides in recent years. For starters, more and more institutions of higher learning have introduced or reinforced their online education platforms, the main considerations being cost reduction for students and recruitment expansion in face of rising competition. As a result, online education has become an increasingly important part of tertiary education, with colleges and universities using world-famous faculty members and professional support teams to promote online courses.
    To tackle the question of teaching quality, a number of providers have turned to user rating and internal evaluation. Star teacher, for instance, has become a popular teacher evaluation mechanism in China and South Korea, two of the largest e-learning markets.
    Overall, such progress seems to have eased the doubt about the quality of teaching, and 40.56% of respondents in the Global Shapers Survey said online education is as strong as traditional learning in a classroom, with another 11.76% saying they didn’t know.

Education for all

    Undoubtedly, with the even wider spread of technology and deepening of the global mandate of education for all, online education’s potential to become complementary – or in some cases alternatives – to traditional education cannot be overlooked.
    Instead of worrying whether or not online education can ever be as good as more traditional formats, perhaps we should instead focus on how we can use it to deliver quality education for people all over the world, particularly the poor and underserved.
    This won’t be an easy task – online education is in dire need of regulation. Outstanding issues include the question of accreditation and quality control. This gets even more complicated when you consider the international dimensions. For years, cross-border credit or degree accreditation has been a major issue for various education systems. The flexibility of online learning will only make that harder.
    The obstacles are real but not insurmountable. And the opportunity to make good on the promise of education for all is too big to miss.

Why Did That Student Fail? A Diagnostic Approach To Teaching

When students struggle in school, it can be for a variety of reasons.

From their grasp of content and literacy skills, to their engagement level, to behavior and organizational issues, to teacher actions, to the proverbial “stuff going on at home,” the possibilities are maddeningly endless. The following 8-step process is a valuable tool for me as a teacher, so I thought I’d share a version of it here in hopes that it might help you. It was useful not only for me to see what strategic responses I had available to me as a teacher, but it was also useful for students to come to know what to expect.

It also was valuable in teacher conferences, and in discussions with district folks during walk-throughs when they wanted to know how I “responded to non-mastery” (beyond reteach the same busted content in the same broken form with the same ineffective strategies that failed the first time.)

As you can see in the image below, this functions as a kind of hierarchy. The first step is the most broad and most powerful, and worked for the largest number of students. The second step is a bit more narrow, and wasn’t necessary nearly as often as step 1, and so on until step 8 which was necessary for very few students. This model worked effectively in grades 8-12, though I have never used it in elementary.

The Goal Of Diagnostic Teaching

It is important to keep in mind the goal of this process–diagnosis. What’s wrong? What’s the hang-up? What’s getting in the way of learning, or of students proving what they in fact actually know?

No matter what process, model, system, or flowchart you use, as long as you have something designed and documented, you can use and refine it accordingly, keeping you from knee-jerk reactions to non-mastery like repeating yourself, talking louder/faster/slower, holding students after class, calling home, issuing poor grades, having them partner with “good students,” giving them the majority of the answer, and so on.

Diagnostic Teaching: An 8 Step Process To Support Struggling Students


1. Student goal-setting & progress monitoring

2. Complete all missing or incomplete assignments

3. Differentiate assessments on non-mastered standards

4. Isolate and prioritize standards for mastery

5. Choose new materials/resources that feature more transparent illustration of standard

6. Daily use of student exit chart

7. Fundamental curricular & unit design

8. Beyond-the-classroom support systems

Conclusion

The big idea behind Diagnostic Teaching is to illuminate and remove barriers to student understanding. When students have problems, you need to be able to systematically identify and fix them. This probably isn’t a huge difference from what you already do. There may be a slight change in practice, however.

This isn’t about good grades, high-level thinking, compliance, or even understanding. Rather, the goal is to establish a pattern of diagnosis–of diagnostic teaching–so that you shift your focus from teaching & reteaching to systematic, guided diagnoses of academic performance barriers.

This is a seemingly minor but important shift from thinking like a delivery driver or manager to thinking like a doctor or scientist. Another benefit? Helping students and parents see the process so they can begin to do the same.

Is Online learning important in education?

When it comes to online learning in education, the model has been pretty straightforward - up until the early 2000s education was in a classroom of students with a teacher who led the process. Physical presence was a no-brainer, and any other type of learning was questionable at best. Then the internet happened, and the rest is history. Online learning is a rapidly growing industry, the effects of which we can trace back to the 1980s and even well before that (in the form of distance learning and televised courses) – these will be discussed later in this eBook.

Now that affordable online learning solutions exist for both computers and internet, it only takes a good online learning tool for education to be facilitated from virtually anywhere. Technology has advanced so much that the geographical gap is bridged with the use of tools that make you feel as if you are inside the classroom. online learning offers the ability to share material in all kinds of formats such as videos, slideshows, word documents and PDFs. Conducting webinars (live online classes) and communicating with professors via chat and message forums is also an option available to users.

There is a plethora of different online learning systems (otherwise known as Learning Management Systems, or LMSs for short) and methods, which allow for courses to be delivered. With the right tool various processes can be automated such as a course with set materials and automatically marked tests. Online learning is an affordable (and often free) solution which provides the learners with the ability to fit learning around their lifestyles, effectively allowing even the busiest person to further a career and gain new qualifications.

Some of the most important developments in education have happened since the launch of the internet. These days learners are well versed in the use of smartphones, text messaging and using the internet so participating in and running an online course has become a simple affair. Message boards, social media and various other means of online communication allow learners to keep in touch and discuss course related matters, whilst providing for a sense of community.

In the fast-paced world of online learning the available technologies to make a course new and exciting are always changing, and course content can and should be updated quickly to give students the very latest information. This is especially important if the online learning training is being given to employees in a sector where keeping up-to-date on industry developments is of the utmost importance. This is one of the reasons why many businesses are now offering training via online learning - other reasons includes low costs and the ability for employees to study in their own time and place.

Overall, traditional learning is expensive, takes a long time and the results can vary. The importance of learning is now a given fact and it can offer an alternative that is much faster, cheaper and potentially better.

Benefits of M-Learning Video Lectures for IIT-JEE

Your success in this exam, besides your efforts, depends on the how you plan for this examination. Almost all the students are hoping to succeed in the test start early. The drive comes from the student, and the family provides the necessary support with finances and a proper study environment.

Do Self-Analysis

The importance of an appropriate plan for the preparation can't be overlooked. Take some mock tests and check the scores with rest others. This self-analysis will help you understand your current level of readiness and will all also motivate you to plan accordingly.

Integrating Preparation from 10th Std. Study

For students in 9th & 10th, it is advisable to include the Board Exam study, with JEE prep. It not only lays an early foundation, but also gives you enough time to imbibe the concepts and practice them later on. The pressure is less as well during this period.

Get up before it's too late

The last minute preparation can put too much pressure on you. So start it before it's too late. You can utilize the time after your 10th examination to see some IIT-JEE math video lectures to get a taste of the preparation and coaching beforehand.