Online courses
Advantages of online courses over on-site courses?
you take the courses whenever you want to.
and you can visit and revisit the section you are interested in or do not understand.(Pinegrove of the river)
Online courses provide more convenience for students who have time commitments that prevent them from enrolling in an onsite course.
on site courses counts on faculty.this constitutes one of the students' expectations.
Online courses can be convenient for students needing to learn at their own pace, being unable to keep up with classes with a huge number of students where others can get ahead in the assimilation and comprehension process and where they would feel overwhelmed by the amount of information delivered during the course time.
Being able to access the courses at their schedule, spend enough time reading and studying the materials is exactly what enables certain students to end up learning what they need to learn in a course.
Micheline,
This is the value of online instruction! It also provides students with opportunities to "branch-out" and delve deeper into certain aspects of a course that interests them.
Dr. Roehrich
The main advantage of online courses is that they are open 24/7. That does not mean, however, that student can just get in anytime that they feel like it. There are requirements of how many times a student must get in to participate, when assignments are due, how many times a test can be taken, etc.
When our college system first offered online courses, students would either try and complete the course in two weeks or not get in at all until about the sixth week. Experience had taught us that there needed to be deadlines, and routines. When a student says that he/she did not have time to submit something, I remind him/her that the courses are open around the clock.
As far as a student learning at his/her own pace, that would be truer in online than on-ground; it's just that some students have taken that concept as "when I get around to it."
Pamela,
Agreed. Too often schools just entering online instruction believe students should progress at their own pace, unfortunately this attitude is setting some students up for failure. Regardless of the methodology used, students need structure to be successful. Throughout their educational careers they have been in structured environments an online education is no different. What are some of the strategies (with examples), you use with faculty to get them to buy-in to the need for structure in an online environment?
Dr. Robert Roehrich
