The ever developing information communication technology has revolutionized the education sector mainly in the form of online education. Taking into account, the tremendous potential of online learning, Wake Technical Community College, commonly known as Wake Tech, has proposed an online education system making seventy-five percent of the classes online by 2018. The proposal is open for voting in the year 2015. Even though the online education has its positives that outweigh the disadvantages, it is highly recommended that all students voted ‘NO’ for the online education proposal of Wake Tech, as delivering 75 percent of the academic curriculum online is to be highly discouraged.
Wake Tech’s argument is that adopting online courses will help to reduce the tuition fees considerably in the long run, which makes education cheap and accessible to all. Massive open online courses (MOOCS) can facilitate online degrees in higher education at a fraction of their on-campus price. It also claims that online education can stress the importance of practical knowledge related to mathematics and science skills. Wake Tech believes that a curriculum based on hard skills can be made possible only by adopting online education and this makes the shift to online learning inevitable. The students’ performance and success can be better evaluated in online education and groom them according to the needs and demands of the, technological workplace. All these assertions are great.
Online education makes it easy for the students to attend the classes literally from anywhere without the necessity of being physically present in the college. Students can learn according to their learning style and ability at their own speed. The learners can be more creative in their learning process too. This type of educations helps the students to indulge in other useful pursuits or job while learning in Wake Tech. Moreover, many researchers have come out with findings that the effectiveness of online education is either superior or equal to the traditional classroom learning in many subjects including those having complex concepts or procedures. This is of course is a welcome signal for the online learning.
At the same time, none can ignore some of the main negative aspects of the online learning. Adopting it for 75 percent of the curriculum intensifies the negative effects to a great extent. The main drawback is that online education fails to provide a direct contact with the tutor, interaction with other fellow students and fails to provide a ‘social’ college life. There are more chances that without a routine timetable the students may procrastinate their studies. Seventy percent online learning makes the students to rely heavily on technology giving less importance to human interaction. In that way, many subjects that need practice can’t be understood properly through online learning.
As a solution to all these disadvantages, Wake Tech proposes 25 percent direct classroom learning, thus making it a blended learning situation. But considering college education, it can be understood that just 25 percent of face-to-face contact classes are not sufficient for the clarification of doubts and practice sessions for the better understanding of the concepts meeting up with the tutors. The problem of human communication and interaction can be solved only to a limited extent in this way.
Considering all the pros and cons of online education and the proposal put forward by the Wake Tech for a blended learning with 75 percent online mode can’t be accepted. This will create more or less the same effect of complete online college curriculum, though it will be capable of reducing the tuition fees in the long run. Though it is advisable to utilise all the positive aspects of internet for education, embracing it completely without considering the positive aspects of classroom education is not appreciated. This leads to the stand of saying no to the online education proposal of Wake Tech.
References
IntelligenceSquared Debates. “More Clicks, Fewer Bricks: The Lecture Hall is Obsolete”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 2 Apr. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICWe68IPEmg. 9. Dec. 2014.
Robinson, Ken. “How schools kill creativity”. Online video clip. TED. TED, 19-24 Feb. 2006. http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en. 9. Dec. 2014.
