¶ … Technology has become increasingly prevalent in the delivery of education, in particular making use of the Internet to lower the cost of delivering education. Online courses in particular have become more popular over the past twenty years. They appeal to a large target market including people who live in remote areas, and working parents who are able to continue their studies at home. The convenience of online education has brought it to the mainstream of the education system, and most schools offer some form of online education.
Because the earliest forms of online education were typically offered by low-grade private schools, online education earned a poor reputation for its quality, in particular in relation to a traditional classroom education. As online schooling has become mainstream, however, technology has evolved to address some of its shortcomings. One commonly-cited shortcoming is that online classes create a lack of personal interaction between the students, and between the student and instructor. The use of online chats, video chats and message boards, however, allows students at online schools to remain in contact with one another, and with the instructor. Despite the perception that the lack of personal interaction makes for a lesser education, the reality is that digital interaction is common among students at traditional schools as well. There is less direct personal interaction, but as that becomes less important in traditional education, it is reasonable to argue that this difference is overstated.
Another cited difference, in the level of interaction between student and instructor, is also something of a red herring. While the level of interaction between students and instructors might be high at a small liberal arts school in the Maritimes, the reality for most Canadian students is that they have little opportunity to interact directly with their instructors, especially in the first couple of years of university. At best, they will...
At online schools, the interaction between student and instructor might not be in person, but there are usually set hours for chats, and instructors can answer emails and participate in forums, just the same as would occur at a traditional school.
One of the areas where the two types of education differ significantly is in the immersion level. Online students will often be part-time, and do their work either from home or from the office. Students in the classroom will often commute to their school, and a larger percentage are full-time. It is difficult to determine what effect this has on the quality of education, as both will offer a fairly high level of diversity of students. It could be argued that a student taking online classes, because they are doing so outside of a strictly academic environment, is subject to more distractions, but that is not necessarily the case, and in any even the average lecture hall has students on their phones and tablets, not paying attention to the material either. Whether one chooses to immerse themselves completely in their education is entirely up the student, regardless of the mode of lecture delivery.
At their heart, both online classes and lectures offer the same opportunity for students. They bring together a group of people with a common interest in studying a particular subject, and provide them with an opportunity to do just that. A student learning accounting in a classroom or online is still learning accounting, so in that sense the work is the same. Ultimately, the knowledge and even the degree carry much the same weight in the real world. The different for the student is that the online classroom may well open doors to students who otherwise would not have had the ability to obtain that education, something that can hardly be taken as a meaningful difference one way or the other.
The choice between online and traditional classroom…
