Online Education: A Technological Advance On An Ancient Practice

8 Pages 1997 Words

tudent must have in order to complete an Internet course. Participants have been known to spend more time preparing offline for their class than online.
The interactivity in an online course has been argued among many scholars: is it not efficient enough for the student or is it better than a regular classroom? What about the equal opportunity among the students? Is gender a factor in online courses? Many of these questions have been asked and answered with adequate results. “Interactivity is likely to be critical to the success of distance education,” stated M. Yacci to the controversial idea of online education. Especially in an “asynchronous” course, one that is not live, as opposed to a “synchronous” course, a live lecture, the interactivity is minimal among the students and the instructor; it is the most controversial aspect of interactivity since the students aren’t communicating on a live basis. In opposition to the amount of interactivity in online education, a review by the Institute for Higher Education Policy listed that interaction in online courses between the teacher and students was one of the “24 benchmarks of quality online instruction.” (Larson 265) On the contrary, advocates of online education say that it “exceeds” the communication and activity levels rather than those in a regular classroom. The emails and “computer conferencing can facilitate interpersonal interaction” with the students. (265) In a lot of the courses offered online, the teacher will have cooperative projects the students can work together on. This kind of interaction online tends to lead the students to get to know each other better rather than a structural classroom. (Siegle 30) Fearless students can dominate discussions in a traditional...