Undoubtedly, students and their teachers/professors lessen the risk of falling ill with Covid-19. Moreover, many educational institutions practice distance learning for many years and enjoy success. Nevertheless, this approach has definite drawbacks as well. It’s necessary to review this issue from different angles to draw the right conclusions and determine the effectiveness of learning via the Internet. Therefore, we suggest reviewing the main advantages and disadvantages of online learning during the pandemic.
The Main Advantages of Online Learning
First, we’d like to discuss the main benefits of learning via the Internet. This method is not a novelty and hundreds of educational institutions use it to teach students. It has crucial advantages that cannot be omitted.
Flexibility
One of the main prerogatives of online learning is the flexibility of the educational process. It’s very fast to complete all kinds of academic assignments using technology and the Internet. Students can quickly find solutions using special online applications. They can improve all their learning skills and overcome typical learning issues. The most popular and useful applications are:
- Grammar checkers and editors. These intelligent programs check every text almost instantly. Most of them are free of charge and provide detailed feedback on your mistakes. They outline them, provide correct versions, and may even explain why it’s considered to be a mistake. Using their editing and writing tips, students automatically improve their skills and expand their knowledge.
- Plagiarism checkers. All students have to meet the compulsory demand for originality. Their academic projects must be 100% authentic, and so they cannot simply copy and paste the words of other writers and researchers. They should stick to the official writing formats, such as MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, Turabian, and others. At times, students either forget about the rules or don’t know they plagiarize somebody. Thus, they can use plagiarism-checking tools, which provide feedback on all possible matches. They help to detect non-unique elements and rework them before the project is submitted.
- Topic generators. Many students get stuck even before they begin to write their assignments. Many of them don’t understand what makes a good topic. Fortunately, this obstacle can be easily handled by smart topic generators. If you lack ideas, it’s enough to write at least one keyword. The smart tool will provide you with the relevant topics that are related to the written keyword.
- Organizers. Time is one of the worst enemies of all students. It always seems to slip away when they have to meet short deadlines. Besides, many students are too busy and tend to forget about some of their assignments. Thanks to digital organizers, they can store all their tasks and solutions to them in one application. Digital organizers allow for creating tasks with subheadings, descriptions, and details. Students can schedule their weeks and months ahead, set meetings, appointments, etc. Many organizers likewise allow for taking instant photos and sharing information. These benefits increase the discipline and flexibility of students.
You should only try different applications to understand which ones suit you best. Many apps help to resolve a problem in a minute or so. Most of them are free of charge. Besides, your flexibility is boosted if you actively communicate with your teachers and other students. Technology and access to the Internet easily ensure this possibility.
Access to Information
Another huge advantage is the accessibility to relevant data. All you need is to open the browser and specify a precise keyword combination. Your search engine will provide you with all the relevant information resources. It’s a huge advantage that must be valued because previous generations could depend only on printed books.
Students can write any scientifically-based assignment using the Internet. They’ll be provided with multiple results of studies, researches, and surveys. They may access educational and governmental websites to get trustworthy evidence. Besides, youngsters can sufficiently expand their knowledge by reading useful articles, newspapers, articles, and so on. They can even download whole virtual libraries to read from their e-books or other digital devices.
Individualized Learning Style
While online learning provides students with multiple informative sources and the flexibility of learning, students can adjust everything according to their preferences. Students can create flexible schedules, apply smart learning applications, use different trustworthy sources of information, etc. These benefits help to find a perfect learning style, which fully meets students’ talents, skills, interests, and knowledge.
Enhanced Collaboration
Another crucial advantage is the enhancement of collaboration in all possible ways. We mean all the participants who are interested in the educational process. These are:
- Students-to-students;
- Student-to-teachers;
- Teachers-to-parents.
All the participants can quickly receive the necessary information. For example, students receive their assignments and teachers the results to check the progress. Parents can communicate with teachers to learn how good their children are.
The Main Disadvantages of Online Learning
Of course, we cannot omit the potential drawbacks. If they aren’t taken into account, students and educators will inevitably face complications without realizing them. We want to highlight them as well.
Lack of Control
We believe that most students are diligent and honest. Notwithstanding, many youngsters play hooky. They miss their online classes, don’t complete homework assignments, aren’t diligent, etc. They don’t contact their teachers physically and it leads to disciplinary problems.
Unequal Access to Technology
Not all students have equal access to technological inventions. Many students come from low-income families and cannot afford high-tech laptops, smartphones, and Internet connection. Therefore, they don’t follow the pace and fall behind the others.
Problems with the Use
Another sufficient disadvantage is the level of technical skills. Not all students are good with technology and are slow learners. It’s especially problematic when it comes to small schoolers. Their parents cannot be always near because they have to work and some of them likewise have poor technical skills. Moreover, many teachers aren’t quite good at the use of digital devices and need to pass special courses.
Undesired Form of Learning
We’d like to mention one potential drawback, which is commonly unspotted by most people. Many students don’t want to learn at home. They want to attend their classes at colleges and universities to be in touch with the possible experiences of life on campus. Some of them are forced to graduate online and it may potentially lead to severe depression and anxiety.
What Conclusions Can Be Drawn?
Now it’s time to summarize our informative article. There are four major pros and cons of online learning. Accordingly, students may reap benefits and suffer from certain inconveniences. It’s necessary to consider both sides to optimize the educational process during the pandemic.
Memorize all the points mentioned in our informative article. If you identify the potential problems, you can overcome, and avoid them. Thus, the off-campus learning approach will be beneficial until the pandemic is over.
