Online Education Argumentative

The Benefits of Online Education Introduction To a degree, all educational institutions have migrated some of their services online, taking advantage of new media and new technologies to improve service delivery, cut costs, and enhance the learning environment. From eBooks to cloud-based collaborative work projects, the online environment adds depth to the classroom and expands opportunities for students from different backgrounds including those with special needs.

It is therefore no surprise that enrollment in online education programs has been steadily climbing, with the greatest growth in the private non-profit school sector (Allen & Seaman, 2016). Online learning might never fully supplant traditional in person classroom learning, but it can help educators and students reach their mutual goals. Educational institutions should in fact work harder to improve their online education offerings, to promote social justice goals in education, enhance student engagement, and expand opportunities for a broader client base.

Enhancing Student Engagement Online learning has the potential to either enhance student engagement or to isolate students due to the lack of social support that comes from traditional classrooms. Some studies show that dropout rates are actually higher in online educational programs because educators and administrators are not doing enough to enhance social presence through ongoing communications, offering students opportunities for video or voice chats or even real life meetings, or helping students to make adaptations that suit their educational goals (Gazza & Hunter, 2014).

On the other hand, online education presents educators and students alike with “opportunities to engage in lifelong learning without the restrictions of time and space,” (Gazza & Hunter, 2014, p. 1125). When online education programs are designed to be student-centered, program retention rates will be high. For example, Kuo, Walker, Schroder, et al.

(2014) found that while most types of student interaction with the online learning environment proved essential for overall satisfaction rates, the most critical indicator of student satisfaction was actually leader to content interaction and not learner to learner interactions. In other words, the most effective means of enhancing student engagement in the online education environment is to create programs that have engaging content but do not have artificial means of facilitating social interactions such as through mandatory participation in group projects or forums.

Cutting Costs Online learning should be incorporated into every educational institution if for no other reason than it helps to reduce waste and cut costs. The online education model reduces waste in a number of ways: cutting down on the use of printed material, reducing the amount of time students and teachers spend in traffic, and liberating physical spaces for classes that require them.

In fact, when schools adopt more online education programs, they free up funds that can be used to attract low-income students and provide them with the financial aid they need to matriculate and stay in school until the completion of the degree program. One study has already shown that online learning “bends the cost curve” in education (Deming, Goldin, Katz, et al., 2015, p. 496). By doing so, educational institutions expand their client base and therefore create a win-win situation.

Conclusion: Online Education and Social Justice All educational institutions should consider creative ways of migrating existing content or creating new content for online learning opportunities for a broad client base. Online education opens educational pathways for people who might otherwise lack the funding or time to attain their degree. In fact, the most important reason to promote online learning.