Internet Vs. Traditional Learning Effectiveness
Few things have weighed on the minds of parents as intensely as the education of their children. Schooling is so important to parents that it can be (and often is) the determining factor of where a family chooses to live. Like a never-ending checklist of specificity, parents try to narrow their search for the best possible learning environment that they can for their children. How good are the state standards? Does the school district do an adequate job of maintaining high marks? Which is the best public school in town? Is that the best teacher for this grade? This process of search-and-satisfy is exactly one of the problems that online schooling has promised to replace. Instead of students being limited in their education by where they live, online institutions answer all parental questions by proclaiming that students can get a world class education, right in the comfort of their own home.
As you can see, the argument for the value of online learning is something that many people can relate too, and nearly anyone could understand the value of students having access to top-notch teachers and education from around the country (especially in rural areas). But exactly how good is that education that students are receiving? Or, more specifically, how does it compare with a traditional education that students would receive if they were to continue to pry themselves up and out of the house each morning? The article presented below, which was written by the editor of the Heritage Foundation (learn more about them here) explores that very same question and provides some statistics about what researchers are finding.
Works Cited
- While this video does not have an incredible amount of criteria in common with the debate between online and traditional class learning, it does do a fantastic job of rapidly piecing together many of the highlighted benefits of online learning in a very fast and entertaining fashion. The video supports the rising growth of online education and defends the practice against the basic misconceptions against it. The expertise of those that published it is well-known and have been on the tip of the spear in education since the break-through of the computer age. I feel as though the video's assessment on the advantages of online learning is accurate; however, it is exceptionally one-sided and does not do a good job of presenting the information or the arguments from the other side of the debate.
Lips, Dan. "How Online Learning Is Revolutionizing K-12 Education and Benefiting Students. "The Heritage Foundation. N.P., 12 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 Sept. 2013. <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/01/how-online-learning-is-revolutionizing-k12-education-and-benefiting-students>
- This article tackles the subject of the growing debate between online learning and traditional, in-class learning. While the article is a bit aged, especially considering the topic criteria, it does still emphasize many of the ongoing debates between the two poles in the conversation. The article also points out that the use of online schooling is growing and has already established substantial enough numbers that it is perhaps time to accept that online learning is here to stay. The article is very clear in its support of online learning and supports its proclamations with the presentation of a lot of raw data. I agree with nearly every aspect of the article and agree with it in regards to its assessment that, not only can online students be just as capable as traditional students, they can also excel beyond them by benefiting from a more personalize educational approach. Most of the data in the article pointed to that exactly, that students of online learning typically receive consistently better performance then their traditionally taught counterparts.
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