Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Elearning Vs Classroom Eduction The Battle

By Patrick Richards


Considering the availability of the web as well as the increasing availability of elearning training, many people often wonder whether online education is developing into a much better alternative to conventional class room training in the area of IT. In the following paragraphs, you will discover which of these training alternatives provides the most benefit to the present day learner.

Distinction

Before we go deeper into the actual battle, it is most appropriate to differentiate between elearning and classroom learning. To begin with, online education or more popularly known as e-learning, refers to any type of learning process that employs electronic media. This media typically refers to the Internet, yet it can also encompass the use of stored education materials in the form of instructional videos, electronic books, and even graphics, provided that it is computer-based or digital-based.

Class room education or training is definitely known to nearly everybody. When compared to on-line learning, it requires the employment of trainers, classrooms, training laboratories, and so forth. In most cases, a person has to join a particular training course and abide by the rules of the school in this type of setting. Furthermore, the student must pay for (college) tuition along with school fees before he or she can start going to the class room.

Effectiveness

Schools today regularly lack qualified trainers who can truly teach students on various IT subject areas, including programming, networking, web design, etcetera. The content of each class frequently varies depending on the instructor and the program made available from the school. Therefore, this type of setting is usually lacking in many important aspects of IT education. Having said that, students can easily team up with the trainer as well as the other trainees at any time during classes. This makes the classroom more suited to the interpersonal wants of students.

Online IT training, however, provides a more robust foundation for the students since the course content of the lessons usually comes from actual experts in a variety of fields of IT. The material found in e-learning is also very consistent and pretty-much up-to-date. Having said that, elearning can be isolating for the learner. Even so, there are online alternatives to the social isolation including the employment of social technologies, discussion boards, interactive video, chat, and so on.

Price tag

When it comes to classroom learning, there are many things that the students have to pay for. For starters, they must pay their instructors (as part of the tuition), institution fees, books, uniforms, daily drive to the college, perhaps accomodation, etcetera. If you add up the money necessary for attending a traditional classroom, the costs can really add up.

In e-learning, you can use re-usable content again and again. If you forgot a crucial aspect of a specific lesson, you can just go over it again. Elearning does not require you to ride a bus or drive a car every day. You do not have to buy books or uniforms. In fact, you can put on your pajamas and still get the education you need. All you have to pay for are the e-learning materials, your computer or laptop, and access to the web. You may literally spend thousands of dollars in the typical classroom setting, but you undoubtedly save thousands if you choose online IT training instead.

Drive

In a traditional classroom setting, all students are viewed as equal. The learning speed in the classroom relies upon the entire group rather than on one person. Everything has to be established through the group. The choices made by the class have to be adopted, even if you, as part of the class, do not like the choices made. The entire education discipline has to be dependent on the group as well.

Using an online training environment, you set the pace for learning. There is no need to advance to a more advanced lesson unless you have mastered the prior lessons and the choice of subject areas to study is always your own. On the other hand, you need to set the learning discipline on your own, which may be difficult, due to the fact there are quite a few temptations which may distract you from studying.

Summary

Online education or e-learning clearly has better advantages over classroom learning. E-learning is cost-efficient, flexible, and very dependent on the learner and his or her commitment to learn. Even though the student may will often have to study in isolation, e-learning comes with more pros that outnumber the cons hugely.




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