“Once you stop learning, you start dying.” This quote by Albert Einstein perfectly sums up the importance of continuous learning in life. While we never stop learning new things in life, the conventional education system restricts formal and structured learning to the first 20 years of a person’s life.
Continuing with your education after you have completed your degree and have joined your occupation is an extremely complicated task. You can either attend classes after work, or you can take a hiatus from work for a year or two to get a degree after getting a job. Online education has become popular primarily because it negates the disadvantages of the conventional system of education and, further, offers some unique advantages to students.
How Online Learning Boomed
The meteoric rise of online learning is evident from the fact that around half of all highschool courses are expected to be taken online by 2019. Some schools have even begun insisting on the completion of an online course as a prerequisite for graduation. A large number of educational institutions, including Maryville University, offer online courses to students from all over the world.
The popularity of online education is evident from the fact that it is no longer treated as a fad or an exotic variant of the real deal. Instead, online courses are now being treated as the real deal!
Why Online Learning Over Traditional Learning?
Apart from obvious benefits such as lower fees, greater flexibility, and wider accessibility, online education offers certain benefits that the conventional system just cannot match. For starters, online education can transform the way that students are assessed and tested. Unlike the existing setup of daily instructions and periodic tests, e-learning can focus on real-time assessment of the student’s learning abilities.
The current negative-oriented setup of grading students into successes and failures can be replaced by a setup where big data obtained from online learning is used to tailor the curriculum and teaching methods to a student’s requirements. Instead of a debilitating competitive system, education and learning can be a benign and collaborative system where each person is helped to achieve his or her potential.
Secondly, online learning can render metrics such as teacher-student ratio – often used for comparing different institutions – obsolete. The combination of artificial intelligence with the virtual courses can help students to enjoy personalized instructions. While a human teacher may struggle to impart instructions differently to different students, machines and virtual courses can be programmed easily towards this goal. Directing human effort into creating better and more versatile technology solutions for virtual learning can make knowledge truly accessible to all.
Thirdly, virtual learning allows institutions the freedom to create micro-structured courses catering to the requirements of a niche segment of the student population. Not all conventional universities can offer a course on cyber security or online creative writing since there may not be enough students in nearby cities who require such courses. An online course can be accessed by students all over the world, which means that even specialized courses meet the requisite financial parameters established by educational institutions. Simply put, geographical distances and limitations become irrelevant with online learning and virtual education.
Finally, e-learning breaks the time lapse between real-world developments and academic qualifications. Newer technologies are being developed at breakneck speed, and you need to equip yourself to meet new-age challenges. This often leads to a situation where a fresh graduate discovers that his or her skills have already become obsolete. For middle-aged individuals with virtually no scope for going back to school in the conventional setup, such a disruptive change in the business environment can lead to disastrous consequences. With online learning, you can incorporate continuous education as part of your regular routine.Instead of choosing between improved qualifications and continuity at work, you can combine the two by simply joining a suitable online course.
You may want to join a new course merely as a hobby or as a more productive way to utilize extra time. Or, you may be seeking faster growth in your career and may be planning on joining a degree to make yourself more attractive to employers. Or, you may be planning a fundamental change in your career and may be seeking academic training to prepare yourself for the same.
Online education is the only option that combines credibility with flexibility and allows you the freedom of exploring newer avenues for growth and development with minimum risk and disruption to your routine life.
