February 23, 2010

My thoughts on being an online student are that its awesome! It allows someone like me - a single mother working full-time with kids involved in various activities and an active church member – an opportunity to complete my degree non-traditionally and with a lot of flexibility. The anonymity doesn’t hinder or help me in any way and I actually had one instructor that encouraged us to post a photo of our self in “doc-sharing” so that we might (as cyber-classmates) be able to put a face with a name. Unfortunately, not everyone participated so I guess it didn’t work as planned. In other courses many of the students became friends on Facebook and other social networking website and this seemed to be helpful at least from my own experiences.
In regards to the self-directed style it actually works well with my learning style, I guess I’m a self-starter, so it’s been working well for me. However, I know people that need the face-to-face interaction with classmates and instructors to grasp concepts and this type of learning might not work well for them. I’m not sure that creating a closer class community would be something I would be in favor – meaning I wouldn’t recommend anything however I wouldn’t be oppose to it either. The same reason why Kaplan works for me is the same reason why I wouldn’t recommend ways to create a closer class community…I’m too busy.
Being the big supporter of online learning that I am, I do, however, have reservations about online learning becoming the “norm”. In a world of social networking, telecommuting and text-based communication, I fear that the future generations will loose the art of communicating face-to-face. One problem with electronic communication is that you cannot distinguish tone or mood and there is little sense of emotion (unless emoticons are used). If we ever progressed to this scenario I feel that it would be a travesty. I view this type of learning as ideal for individuals that are beyond the “college experience” phase of life and really just needing to earn a degree to help them along their career path (which they usually already have experience in) or for individuals wanting to earn a secondary degree without the “college experience”.