Education Kids

Archive for the ‘online education’ Category

No one wants to stop the process of learning. Online education provides excellent opportunities to continue education at ones own ease. Studying was never that convenient before. However as online education is a much newer concept, students have a lot of questions in mind. Three of the most troublesome questions are answered below. The answers I have provided are not concrete, but they are general answers and are applicable to almost all online education imparting institutions. Knowledge of these points will help you as a student to select the right course from the right university or institution for yourself.

Finding the Right Institution:

Online education is now accessible in and from all countries of the world. Thus one must make a thorough search of the institutions available. There may be a university or institution available in your own country or subcontinent offering the course you wish to take. In such case you wont have to search far. The cost will also be then quiet affordable as the currency would be more or less similar to that of yours.

Finance

Whether studying from a local college or an online institution, finance is the biggest area of concern for students. What I have observed is that a degree obtained by studying online is relatively cheaper than the one earned at a Physical institution. The reason behind it is that while studying at some University or college, costs involved in earning a degree are not just limited to the fees. Travel, transport, accommodation fees etc are also included in it. While in the case of online education, the only cost apart from the fees is that of the internet connection and bill. Still this doesn’t mean that online education for all courses may be affordable. In some cases the fees may be out of budget. Or ones budget may be too less to even sponsor a relatively non expensive course.

In such circumstances, mostly, the institution offers various kinds of assistance ships. Some may be in the form of scholarships, while others are student loans with easy installments. There are a few online education institutions that offer job opportunities for students to support there academics. Thus a thorough research of all the factors is very important before opting for an online course.

Course Selection:

Selecting a course that is most suitable to you is very crucial. However terms like associates degree or first level course or HND may be quiet confusing. A high school diploma in your country may be equivalent to intermediate according to the standard of that particular University you wish to apply to. Thus when applying or selecting courses it is very wise to take advantage of the consulting service provided by the university. These services are free of cost at all institutions and are very beneficial. People giving advice are qualified professionals and can do the necessary conversions aptly to tell you what is better for you. A student should always discuss all his matters including financial condition, current education status, current work status etc very clearly in order to get a useful advice.

Online education was reviewed three years ago preceded by Oscar Wilde’s quotation “The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever”. My intention was to amuse, rather than to denigrate online education, although the conclusions reached in the literature at that time about its success were mixed. This special issue comprises a number of articles mainly from people working in various parts of the world; content and technology are nicely balanced.

You will notice that there is a noticeable trend towards getting to grips with the difficult but essential matter of evaluation discussed by Merisotis and Phipps. James Merisotis and Ronald Phipps are senior staff members of the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington.

There seem to be roughly equal number of enthusiasts and skeptics so the conclusions of Merisotis and Phipps are unsurprising. During their review they unearthed “several hundred articles, papers, and dissertations” and list what they consider to be the shortcomings of research on the subject. They believe that “more emphasis has been placed on the Utopian possibilities of the technology and its potential to do as well as classroom-based instruction, but not enough pragmatism has been applied to allow for a discussion of online education’s practical implications as a supplement to enhance teaching and learning”. They also believe that technology can “leverage faculty time but it cannot replace most human contact without significant quality losses”.

Gordon Joyes and Rachel Scott from the Centre for Teaching Enhancement at the University of Nottingham write about the inadequacies of teachers. They are commenting on a ten-university European project called SteelCAL. New learning technologies are not effectively “embedded in the day to day practice of learning and teaching in most higher educational institutions… the main reason is that many academics have had no training and little experience in the use of communications and information technology as an educational tool”. Note that Joyes and Scott mention under “Full Evaluation” that they are comparing “the effectiveness of SteelCAL with an experimental group of students to a matched control group who are taught traditionally”. It will be interesting to hear exactly how they do it. As they say this exercise is “difficult to organize”.

Dr. Martin Oliver, a member of the higher education research and development unit at University College, London, describes the difficulties of evaluating online teaching and learning. In talking about the importance of evaluation he says: “The drive to evaluate has not been matched by support and training for the practitioners who are supposed to carry out these processes”. He concludes that the issues raised in his article “represent only the starting point for an ongoing discourse on the evaluation of online learning and teaching”.

Anthony Rosie’s article is about his experience covering “meaningful engagement and the enjoyment of learning” following the ideas developed by Biggs who suggests that “Relational knowledge involves students in developing systems of interconnection between concepts and learning approaches with teaching as a contributor to this linkage”.

Bernard Scott from the Centre of Educational Technology at De Montfort University talks about the CASTE system for course design and the matter of “conversations” between system and student. Scott was associated with Gordon Pask who died in 1996 and was regarded as a founding father of Cybernetics. The Web of Science shows that Pask’s 1976 book about Conversation Theory has been cited 66 times since it was published. CASTE is being used at De Montford as part of a master’s level program in learning and teaching.

Diana Thompson and Garry Homer are situated at the University of Wolverhampton which is also active at other sites in Shropshire notably at the new town of Telford. Wolverhampton and Telford are two of the few large towns in one of the most rural counties in England with a widely dispersed population mainly engaged in agriculture. The authors describe the way in which IT training is carried out at all levels for people in the county.

Mr. M.J. Wood is the enterprising head teacher of a Maidstone secondary school which recently won an award for its Web site. He is under no illusions about what has to be done “on a scale of 1 to 20 for measuring the potential use of IT in teaching and learning. I would not be confident to place us beyond point 1″. He comments on the climate of opinion at home: “If parents realize that there is a shortage of text books in a school they will be quick to complain but as yet they see access to computers as a luxury. One of our teachers recently discovered that 24 pupils out of a teaching group of 25 have access to the Internet at home. I suspect that one Christmas in the near future our pupils’ stockings will be filled with cheap hand-held devices which, among other features, will provide Internet access”.