Online education is a part of the education field not
everyone agrees with. However if online
education is free, this would be something only a small fraction of the people
in the world would complain about. www.coursera.com has over five million
courses that are absolutely free, along with having them be given by some of
the top countries in the world along with their professors. Though some people may argue this is not the
best form of education one can receive, most of us can see how websites such as
these give opportunities to people with complicated situations.
I personally believe that online education is the future for
the education system. Especially since
many times in school teachers are lecturing for most of the time, this does not
have to be done repetitively. Lectures
should be given by the “best” professors and students should learn from those
professors. Education should be a place
where students can digest the content and actually utilize all of the people
that are gathered up and being interested in the topic. Online education would not be replacing
schools, but it will be changing the purpose of having everyone gather
together. During this precious time of
having a group of people who are interested in the same thing, professors and
teachers should use this opportunity to have students learn from each other and
help each other to learn.
Coursera does a
wonderful job with allowing this to happen.
It gives the facts and the knowledge to students individually. Once the facts and the knowledge is obtained
the students can start to work on more of the fun things, such as analyzing or
using their creativity. Schools should
start to weave online education more into the curriculum having students to
learn independently. Having students
learn to be able to gain information on their own, and becoming confident to
figure out problems that they come across.
This is a great TED talk that talks about this: http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html?quote=1807
I love the Ted clips. I did not know they were popular until someone asked me where to find them, and telling me they needed to watch a clip for one of his classes. Ted talks about so many great ideas in a nice short amount of time. Online education is one interesting factor of school that some people are pushing away and some people are embracing. I feel as though we have to embrace it and give it a chance. I went to a previous institution before Montclair and they were much better at embracing online classes. None the less I agree that it is not in place of schools but in addition to.
ReplyDeleteRaymond, this is something that I wrote about on my blog. I think its great to have free online education for us future educators. I believe the these online courses can contribute to educators to learn more about their content and explore new teaching strategies.I actually sign up on a course in museum teaching strategies. The course advocates the importance of instructional modeling based on the professional practices of art critics, art historians, aestheticians, and artists as a way for students to learn about art.
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