Online universities and programs in American higher education

Online Education

The impact and value of the growing trend of secondary education being conducted by online universities offering online programs.

This essay will investigate the value of online universities and online programs as they are becoming more and more prevalent in our society today. The impact of these educations will be examined and investigated for quality.

Main Body

Online education benefits

Online education disadvantages.

Incorporating reason

Weighing pros and cons

Making a Decision

Future Issues

Online education has boomed in recent years, as the flexibility and quality have increased to meet society's demands. Since secondary education is primarily about training individuals for the work place in one fashion or another, the model stands to serve as both a productive and destructive force in today's academic environment. The purpose of this essay is to explore the transformation of secondary education involving online courses and programs. This essay will give a historic account of this evolution before weighing the pros and cons of this education mode.

History

What exactly is online education. Allen & Seaman (2013) offered a useful definition when they wrote "Online courses are those in which at least 80% of the course content is delivered online. Face-to-face instruction includes courses in which zero to 29% of the content is delivered online; this category includes both traditional and web facilitated courses." This definition was used in their research to measure the historical account of online learning in which they concluded "decidedly mixed. The period of 2003 through 2009 displayed a small decrease in the proportion of chief academic officers reporting the learning outcomes for online education were Inferior or Somewhat Inferior to those for comparable face-to-face courses. This proportion then held relatively steady between 2009 and 2011. Results for 2012 show a substantial improvement in the opinion of academic leaders on the relative quality of the learning outcomes for online education,: (p.28).

Benefits

Online educations are now affordable to students and increase revenues for educational institutions. Online courses are flexible. Online courses provide a wide arrangement of options that can be tailored to a student's desires and/or needs. Student satisfaction is an important indicator of quality in learning,, suggesting that online education models have recently transcended a barrier of a quality that has not been crossed before, (Kuo et al., 2013).

Disadvantages

The main disadvantages that arise from online courses is that the face-to-face element of instruction is missing. This human interaction connects people and creates relationships with stronger bonds. Cheating is also a problem in online education because of the ability to create false works based on plagiarized material. While the quality of this model of education has improved, there are still potential weak spots in the area and poor quality can always be an issue to contend with (Shin & Lee, 2014).