As worries over COVID-19 continue into the new school year, online learning and teaching will be the dominant mode of instruction for most students in higher education in several jurisdictions this fall. We are frequently asked whether online learning at colleges and universities as successful as face-to-face learning as an education researcher can ever be who has studied online education and as a professor who has taught in both face-to-face and online contexts for more than a decade.
Students and Parents Can Benefit From This Advice
Many academics urge against media comparison studies, which compare outcomes from one medium, including face-to-face, to some other type of media, such as online. How can students know they’re getting a solid education if they enroll in online classes in the fall? What characteristics do you think an excellent online course should have? Here’s what kids (and their parents) should be looking for as learning moves online.
Issues of equality and justice are at the heart of an effective online course. It considers social, political, and cultural factors, as well as students’ origins and financial conditions, to provide a fair learning environment. This can take a variety of forms. This may imply a reading list that is both diverse and intersectional. It refers to audiovisual content that does not discriminate against, humiliate, or degrade individuals. It might imply that open educational resources are given precedence over costly textbooks.
Interactivity is crucial for a good online course. A successful online course not only delivers material such as texts or lecture videos but also incorporates interactions between professors and students. Students may receive individualized feedback, support, and advice because of interactions between professors and students. Debating diverse subjects or cooperating with classmates to solve a problem are examples of student interactions. A good online course may easily transform into a social learning environment, allowing for the growth of a thriving learning community by delivering digital certificates or badges as the student finishes the course.
Online Learning Opportunities
An excellent online course will keep you interested and challenge you. It encourages pupils to join, stimulates them to contribute, and piques their curiosity. It makes use of students’ enthusiasm for learning and pushes them to improve their skills, abilities, and knowledge. A great online course will test your cognitive abilities.
Practice is an important part of a good online course. Students should be “doing” — not simply reading and watching — “doing again” and applying what they’ve learned in good courses. Students in a writing class could create a short tale, get comments on it, modify it, and then write another piece. They may develop a block of code, test it, and then utilize it in a bigger program that they wrote in a computer science class. They could be expected to explore links between different variables in an econometrics class, explain the implications of their findings, and then apply those approaches in fresh scenarios.
These aren’t characteristics of good online courses. They are, without a doubt, characteristics of good courses. Physical closeness isn’t a need for a successful education. When we compare one type of education to another, we lose sight of the truth that all types of education can — and should — be improved.
