Why Online Education?

Chapter 13 focuses on the advantages and drawbacks of online education. This has a great influence in our culture today. We see many television commercials advertising online education, or learning at home on your own time. That is one of the greatest advantages to online education, being able to do it on your own time. You do not need to attend a class at a specific time during the day, but instead can do it on your own time when you are fully awake, willing to learn, and willing to give back to the discussion.

In some research, I found a lot of debate around online education and the degrees received from it. Many people were willing to defend online education and "kill" the lies about online education, exclusively found on this website, which also contains a web page including 15 benefits of online education. This site: Online Education Lies includes 5 lies revealed that tend to dissuade people from using these programs.

I think that we are deterred from using these programs because of advertisements we see for them and how outdated they appear. For me, I had no need to use online education and see one of the great disadvantages of it being the lack of possibility to have a hands on experience. Online education, though always accessible, does not allow for the teacher/student relationship that can occur in normal institutional, as well as the non-existence of a campus and the idea of who else is in the class. As students at an institution, we have no need to use online education but it is true that there are many, many people out there that do need this form of education to spend both their time working as well as getting a degree. It will continue to have the advantages and disadvantages that currently exist no matter what may change.