THE
BENEFITS OF ONLINE LEARNING
While there are all kinds of
benefits that are associated with learning and furthering your educational
goals there are even more benefits to those who wish to pursue online
learning in order to achieve those goals. I hope you will find that many
of these benefits are quite enlightening and carefully consider whether or
not online learning for your online education needs will be in your best
interests.
1) Convenience. This is a word we
are quite familiar with. Right along with instant gratification. We are a
society of people who have lived with drive thru banking and fast food and
are rapidly moving in the direction of drive thru pharmacies and dry
cleaning. We live in a fast paced world and when we can work education
into our busy schedules and on our own terms we find that this is
something we tend to like a lot. I recommend that you watch for a growing
number of online classes and online students in the coming years as more
and more professionals decide to further their degrees and their careers.
2) Flexibility. You can take these classes or do the work during your
lunch break, while the kids are practicing soccer, or while cooking dinner
(depending of course on how well you multitask). You do not need to be in
the classroom every night at 6:00 pm for the next five years in order to
get the same degree of education. This by no means indicates that you will
not have to do the work. The work will not change nor will the fact that
you have a limited time in which to complete the work. What will change is
that you will have the option of doing the work in the morning, afternoon,
or after those 2 a.m. feedings when you can't seem to get back to sleep.
3) Location. There isn't enough that can really be said about this. Online
education comes to you wherever you happen to be able to connect to the
Internet. Whether you are at home, at work, or your favorite Internet café
you can have the convenience of taking your work with you and enjoying the
environment in which you are completing your work.
4) Less Expensive. No more convenience meals, childcare expenses, or gas
guzzling trips to a college campus that thirty minutes away. You can now
enjoy in your own home the benefits of an education without many of the
financial hardships that are often associated with attending college.
Internet access seems like such a small price to pay when compared with
all the reasons mentioned above.
5) Believe it or not, online courses help you brush up your online
abilities. Seriously. You will be better at dealing with email, bulletin
boards, online research, and you will learn countless other skills along
the way that you probably never realized had anything to do with the
courses you are actually taking-because they don't. In other words, you
are getting more of an education than you bargained for when it comes to
online learning.
6) Individual attention. Online students often have more one on one
interaction with their professors than students in a classroom. The online
classroom is virtual and correspondence through email is essential in this
particular learning environment. For this reason it is quite possible that
your professors will know more about you and your learning patterns and
needs than they will know about most of the students they see two or three
times a week in their classrooms.
While these are just a few of the benefits of taking online classes you
should carefully weigh the benefits with the things that may be
problematic about this particular type of learning situation before you
take the plunge. Learning is a lifelong process but if you are seeking a
degree you do not want to jeopardize that by taking a course that will not
address your specific learning needs. If you feel confident that you can
be successful in this particular type of learning environment than I feel
you will truly enjoy the experience and the flexibility it brings to the
educational process.
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