The Online Educational Experience

The title isn't too terribly creative I'm afraid. Quite simply, the topic for today is online education, and some of its pitfalls and advantages.

It appears to be common knowledge in the circles I run in that online education is expanding. No surprise there. Online content is expanding everywhere. Business, recreation... remember when having a business webpage was special? Now it’s practically mandatory. We know its expanding. However, what are the reasons why?

An easy answer is supply and demand. There is a demand for online education. Why is there a demand? Lots of reasons I suppose. Pursuing education has widened across to a great many age demo graphs in a great many fields.

What are the advantages of online education? The advantage I hear most often is that people can continue pursuing their educational needs without too much disruption to their daily lives. A guy can take online courses and still work that 8-5 job. This advantage is the reason for many entering the online educational community. The flexibility. In fact, this flexibility is often advertised by various educational institutions.

As of late, however, I have come to ask myself if the flexibility really exists, or if it is a false promise. A lure, if you will.

People that need the flexibility of an online class are often busy people. Working people. People with families that take a large portion of their time. For some reason or another, these people don't have time for the standard classroom educational environment, so they go online. The truth of the matter is that online classes really aren't well suited for the people that they attract and advertise to. If anything, online classes are more work-intensive than a "standard" class.

Since there is no standard meeting to bring conclusion to the end of a school week, online classes essentially run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is no standard class meeting times; any time is a potential meeting time. The result of this is that there is a large influx and dispersement of information from students participating in the class diffused across a never-ending cycle of time. The influx of feedback from instructors follows the same pattern. The end result is that instead of taking off time to visit a physical class a few hours a week, you're always in class. Every day. Every hour.

The way to offset the never ending class is time management. But does time management in an online class really exist? If the class never stops, than isn't time management a different way of saying controlled procrastination? And if its procrastination, than how do you shake the perception of a never ending class?

So where then do online courses fit in? Not so much for the busy people, if the flexibility is in fact a myth. Or if the flexibility does exist, is it currently being overshadowed by other factors inherent to online education?