Pros and cons of online classes

This week the entire class was done online allowing for an interesting experience. In some ways I found the online class much easier than regular class and, during other times, I found certain aspects of it more difficult. So for this blog I decided to go look up the pros and cons of online learning. I found many benefits for online learning along with many cons.

In an article entitled, “Why Do Students Like Online Learning?” fifteen benefits were given for online learning. Now I will not go into all of them; only the ones that I experienced during this past week of classes. The first benefit was “students can ‘attend’ a course at anytime, anywhere.” Usually I would take a nap after my 8:10 class and wake up for this class at 10:20. With the course being online I could sleep until whenever and then “attend” class once I was awake. The seventh reason was “participating online is much less intimidating than ‘in the classroom.’” I found that the anonymity presented by an online course allowed me to say what I wanted without the fear of seeing “looks” from other classmates. This is only a few of the benefits that I received from having the course online this week.

Now moving on to the cons of having a course online; in an article entitled, “The Pros and Cons of Online College”, a few cons were mentioned about taking courses online. One mentioned, that I found very true this past week, was “self-discipline is a must.” It was extremely easy this past week to go to the discussion, briefly look at it, and then sign out telling myself I would do it later. I had to self-discipline myself to do the assignments given. It was much harder to do this without a teacher reminding me to do it. Another one I found true this past week was “no immediate feedback”. In a classroom you can just raise your hand and the teacher will call on you and hopefully be able to answer your question right away. While in an online course you would have to email your teacher and wait until he or she had time to answer you back. There were a couple other cons that were also important but the two just mentioned were the only ones I found prevalent to the past week.

So looking reflectively an online course, like any other thing, has pros and cons to it. It really just depends on your style of learning and what kind of person you are whether or not you should enroll in an online class. Even so this past week of experimentation with an online class, in my opinion, was a valuable learning experience.