Online college education vs traditional - Essay Example

Online College Education Vs Traditional (in room) College Education Education shapes the destiny of a nation. It is the main asset of a person which makes him an important person for the nation for transforming the economy. The traditional classroom has existed for hundred of years and has evolved by passing through various stages. The first stage where in the teacher used to teach the students using blackboard and chalk. In the second stage virtual aids like Over Head Projectors (OHP) and multimedia took over the traditional system of imparting education. In the fourth stage the internet revolution in the form of online education1. The use of the Internet has impacted the lives of people in the way they do their work. The internet revolution has also affected the educational sector. There are many sites which offer online courses especially at the college level and higher. It would be rare to find a university in the U.S. that has no internet connection and reasonable technology infrastructure. However, the use of the internet in classroom teaching is not as widespread as the use of the internet for information, entertainment, communication, and research (Scagnoli, 2005). With the internet the barriers of time and space have been ended. Online education is internet enabled technology driven education that allows you to study anytime, anywhere, as per your convenience. Online education is one of the ways of imparting effective education to the aspiring people, residing anywhere in the world. This has helped people to pursue and advance their learning process, without messing up with their professional responsibilities and duties. Online learning helps to increase the educational experiences irrespective of age and geographical diversity. The World Wide Web empowers the University to deliver training and critical information to its wide spread student base no matter where and what time zone the users are in. The students just access their training materials or start studying whenever they want from home or from office. Online education gives the students the flexibility to go through the programme content at the time that is most convenient to them and thereby achieve an appropriate balance of work, family, community and educational commitments. A most important benefit of online learning is cost savings. Lot of amount can be saved in travel and downtime alone by using internet. Training materials can be updated for fraction of the cost of revising materials distributed by other means1. In traditional education, students have to attend a particular college/institute and study as per a fixed time-table and time. Most probably the learners are regular students who don’t have regular engagements and can attend regular classes. Online college education gives the flexibility to learn anytime, anywhere, this doesn’t require going to any educational institute/college and don’t have to study as per a fixed time table. In this all kinds of people from all walks of life can learn at their own pace and their own place. It also allows working professionals, housewife’s etc. to learn along with their busy schedules of work. Traditional education requires books from various authors as part to the courseware and requires the student to make notes according to the lecturers/teachers teaching, which may not be self explanatory. This leads to poor retention levels and dissatisfaction among the students and they merely mug up the courseware for passing the exams, whereas in online education, interactive multimedia rich courseware can make learning interesting and engaging. This intuitive content integrates audio, video, graphics, pictures animations, visuals, demonstrations and case-studies and is imparted via a virtual classroom. The student/learner has a choice to select notes/training materials from different author from different sites. Students studying in regular colleges/institutes can avail a library facility containing a limited number of books. In case of online education students can access information from digital libraries of colleges and universities world-wide via comprehensive online library. Majority of the regular colleges/universities in the world still follow the traditional blackboard-chalk method of imparting education. While in online education, in order to improve the quality of education, some universities are now starting to use synchronous learning technologies like VSAT to provide live lectures from the university to the study centre. This facility can help students that are globally dispersed to view the lectures from faculty and subject experts in real-time. The advantage of the regular education is that student can interact and ask questions to the faculty. However, many students still feel shy to ask questions in a classroom as most of them hesitate in front of the faculty due to varying knowledge levels. In online education students can ask any number of questions in both real-time through chat and whiteboard and offline through discussion forum, emails, ask doubt facility. As faculty is not physically present, the students can easily post their queries without any hesitation. In the regular education the lectures given by a faculty in a classroom cannot be repeated or accomplished and are lost as the faculty walks out of the classroom or the students need to prepare notes according to the lectures speech or teachings. Since the course materials at the college level is quite enormous preparing notes and updating information through library search forms an important part in this traditional educational systems. This is a tedious process when compared to the online college education. In E-learning the sessions between the student and the faculty can be reviewed or documented by the students as many times as required to understand the topics. In regular educational programmes the students/learners can be only from the particular locality or the nearby localities which will be most probably limited to the locals of the area. Whereas in online education the students can be from anywhere in the world, the students can register from any part of the world, make payments and study via the virtual campus. Besides, the students can write the written examination at a university designated examination centre1. It is a well-known fact that online teaching requires a considerable amount of time to design and develop, as the initiative will call for curriculum and course structure reviews, re-design as well as implementing alternative teaching methods and assessment (Lim, 2001). The instructor must shift from the role of content provider to content facilitator, gain comfort and ability in using the Web as the primary teacher-student link, and learn to teach effectively without the visual control provided by direct eye contact (Williams & Peters 1997). As in the case of traditional teaching, online teaching requires a careful planning of learning tasks, activities and support. Moore (1993) suggests that there are three types of interaction necessary for successful online education: 1) learner-content interaction, 2) learner-faculty interaction, and 3) learner to learner interaction. The first type of interaction, between learners and content material, is often termed as interactivity. Online teachers need to ensure that all three forms of interaction are maximized in their subject structure. Consistent interaction with focus on learning is cited as the most important, essential component of any successful online courses (Lim, 1998). Social interaction is very important in the learning process (face-to-face or online). In online learning, the physical, geographic isolation requires that students learn new communication strategies. However, many online-learning students have not had the opportunity to communicate and/or interact socially via a text-based medium. In order to overcome this problem, Bowman (2002) suggested one effective method to pair/group students during the first unit of the class. This allows students to become adept at communicating one-on-one with another student and provides a bridge to communicating in a whole class discussion. The success of effective discussion depends upon the involvement of students and instructor. In a joint classroom, instructor and students share in both the teaching and the learning. As students participate, they assume responsibility for furthering meaningful discussion2. The instructor provides guidelines for each discussion by designing activities that include problem-solving, case studies, brainstorming, group activities, etc. The students bring to the discussion knowledge and opinions based experience, reading, research, and interactions with others. The instructor maintains responsibility for guiding discussions and keeping students on track, contributing insight and further knowledge, maintaining group harmony, and weaving the various discussion threads into a summary of points that correlate with the course content. This emergence of online identity may make the whole worry of online cheating a disputable point. Often stronger one-to-one relationships (instructor-student and student-student) are formed in online courses than in face-to-face classes. Other advantages of online classes result from psychological aspects of the medium itself. The stress on the written word encourages a deeper level of thinking in online classes. A common feature in online classes is the threaded discussion. The fact that students must write their thoughts down, and the realization that those thoughts will be exposed semi-permanently to others in the class seem to result in a deeper level of discourse. The asynchronous nature of the background means that the student (or lecturer) can read a posting and consider their response for a day before posting it. Every student can and, for the most part, does participate in the threaded discussions. In online classes, the instructor usually makes class participation a higher percentage of the class grade, since instructor access to the permanent archive of threaded discussions allows more objective grading. This differs from face-to-face classes where, because of time constraints, a relatively small percentage of the students can participate in the discussions during one class session. Because of the lack of physical presence and absence of many of the usual in-person prompts to personality, there is an initial feeling of anonymity, which allows students who are usually shy in the face-to-face classroom to participate in the online classroom. Therefore it is possible and quite typical for all the students to participate in the threaded discussions common to Web-based classes. This same feeling of mystery creates some political differences, such as more equality between the students and instructor in an online class. The lack of a face-to-face persona seems to disarm the lecturer of some authority. Students feel free to debate intellectual ideas and even challenge the instructor. One student indicated that in a face-to-face class the instructor initiates the action; meeting the class, handing out the syllabus, etc. In online instruction the student initiates the action by going to the Web site, posting a message, or doing something. Also, it can be thought that students and instructors communicate on a more equal footing where all of the power dynamics of the traditional face-to-face classroom are absent. Students are sometimes aggressive and questioning of authority in ways not seen face-to-face2. The challenge for the high school educator is that many students that are taking advantage of online education are those with problems in the regular classroom. These problems may include behavioral as well as students in need a more advanced curriculum. Faculty prepares online program prior to the launch of the class and this ensures a common thread runs through each of the lectures. These tasks place an extra burden on online faculty, requiring advanced preparation, and planning than is necessary for the traditional classroom faculty. It is a common expectation that online faculty will be available to respond to students questions five to seven days a week. Some institutions offering online classes expect faculty to be prompt in responding to students’ questions, often within 24 hours. Online learning environments require the instructor to facilitate extensive written communications. While the hours are long involve posting and responding to threaded questions, evaluating student work and answering concerns and questions, the upside is ‘the learning appears more profound as the discussions seemed both broader and wider’. Further, online communications forces the voicing of all the students whereas in a traditional classroom, learners may not contribute to discussions. In a face-to-face class, students wait for the instructor to start class, handout syllabi, and follow the instructor’s lead. Smith, Ferguson and Caris, (2002) noted, ‘in online instruction, the student initiates the action by going to the website, posting a message or doing something’. Additionally, due to anonymity, students may feel certain equality with faculty while posting messages. Faculty, however, enjoy the dynamics when proper communication takes place. Once the initial challenges of a paradigm shift are overcome, faculty report that teaching online is an ‘intellectually challenging forum which elicits deeper thinking on the part of the students,’ and ‘has some definite advantages that may make the work worth the effort’ (Smith, Ferguson, & Caris, 2002). In a study comparing traditional and online education programs, it is found that students who were involved in online discussions created responses that were more thoughtful because they had more time to read and think about their responses compared to students in a face-to-face setting. It is also found that the student in the online class earned higher grades than that of the student in the traditional classroom (Christopher, Thomas, & Tallent-Runnels, 2004). It is also found that flexibility was a key satisfaction indicator for online learners; the learners can study anywhere, anytime according to their flexible timings. In face-to-face learning there is a direct interaction with decreased procrastination and immediate feedback fostering more meaningful learning experiences than that which is found in an online forum. In online education there are various methods of communication and take his/her flexible time to analyze the problem or answer, which increased student confidence (Turner & Crews, 2005). The use of Web technologies has had an impact on classroom teaching, but this influence is not as widespread as it is in communications and entertainment.  Educational institutions have invested in hardware, software, and wired classrooms, but not as much in resources for research, or in training, and support. Therefore, the center of knowledge creation—teaching and learning—still remains very much unchanged. Both the impact and the implications of online learning for classroom education need to be seriously addressed. As both modes of teaching have its own set of strengths and limitations, they can be used in complementary to each other in order to bring out the best of both. This approach has increasingly gaining popularity in creating hybrid courses, in which there are both online and face-to-face components of teaching. Depending on the instructional outcomes and requirements, they can be also used as a supplementary or a replacement of one another. Bibliographies Christopher, M., Thomas, J., & Tallent-Runnels, M. (2004). Raising the Bar: Encouraging High Level Thinking in OnlineDiscussion Forums. Jusri, D. and Lim, G. (2003) Significance of Online Teaching vs. Face-to-Face: Similarities and Difference. Paper accepted for presentation at E-LEARN 2003, the World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education, held in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, November 7-11, 2003. Lim, G (1998). Replacing Classroom Lecture With Web-based Instruction: Implications for Courseware Design & Development. Proceedings of ICCE98, Vol. 2, 142-144. Lim, G (2001). A Framework for Integrating Technologies in Teaching and Learning. Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference (SITE) Volume 2001, Issue 1, 2751-2756. Moore, M. (1993). Three Types of Interaction. Distance Education: New Perspectives, eds. K. Harry , M. Hohn and D. Keegan. London: Routledge. Scagnoli, N. (2005). Impact of Online Education on Traditional Campus-Based Education. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, October 2005. Smith, G. G., Ferguson, D., & Caris, M. (2002). Teaching over the web versus in the classroom: Difference in the instructor experience. International Journal of Instructional Media, 29(1), 61-67. Turner, F. and Crews, J. (2005) Bricks and Clicks: A Comparative Analysis of Online and Traditional Education Settings. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, April 2005. Williams, V. & Peters, K. (1997). Faculty Incentives for the Preparations of Web-Based Instruction. Web-based Instruction, ed. B. H. Khan. 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