If you’ve been attending college
for long enough, chances are that you’ve taken some sort of online of distance
learning class before. Everybody has their own experiences and opinions with
them and some people like them while others don’t. This is one of the few
instances where everybody is right no matter what they think; and it’s all
boiled down to learning styles.
Sometimes teachers have a hard time
adjusting to online classes because they assume that the same students that are
applying to their traditional style classes also apply to their online classes.
However, this is not the case. Many distance education students choose to learn
online because they actually learn better being able to explore the subject on
their own time.
According to a study done in 1991
by Dille and Mezack, distance learning courses often lead to social isolation
and require you to rely more heavily on personal learning skills. Therefore,
students with less of a need for concrete experiences may be better suited for
online learning classes. Students who
prefer online learning also tend to want to know “why” things happen on conceptual
or theoretical terms. Having the internet at your fingertips would certainly
help with this. On the other hand, people who need more concrete experiences
tend to do better in traditional classrooms because they require more
interactions with their teachers and peers. (130)
Even though distance learning courses
may be a better option for many people, it still struggles to be viewed as a
legitimate way to get your degree. Most colleges and universities only accept
online classes that have been affiliated with their own school. Some don’t even
offer distance learning classes at all.
This may be because these classes
aren’t trusted enough. Many online programs are worried about academic
dishonesty coming from their students. Patricia McGee of the University of
Texas states that academic dishonesty includes plagiarism, fabrication,
falsification, misrepresentation, and/or misbehavior. (2) Students may feel
more comfortable doing these things online rather than in a physical class
because they feel a sense of anonymity—even though their name is attached to
it. Information is so easily obtainable on the internet, and it is impossible
for a professor to be able to find all of the sources that a student might have
copied from, and students abuse this knowledge despite many of them knowing
that there are websites and soft-wares available that help teachers find copied
or referenced works.
I had a technology class while I was
in high school in which the teacher told us that if we could find the answers
online then we could use those answers in our work. My friend and I were
excellent at finding what we needed online. At the end of the school year, we
graduated and both won National Technical Honor Society awards; but we didn’t
feel like we deserved them, even though the teacher advised us to use the
internet to our exposal. Honestly, I hardly remembered a thing. Yes, I can take
apart a computer and put it back together again, but I hardly know the
difference between megabytes and gigabytes. I wonder how people who obtain
their college degrees going through classes like this feel.
(Referenced works in the links below)
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