This week’s reading is about the beginners’ guide to Open education. In “Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice” Claire thinks today college class should include some online components. I agree with Claire’s point that college classes should include some basic online component such as course space, which students can use to check schedule and download document from the class, or communicate with teacher. However, I disagree to teach online. Nowadays, with the progress of science and technology, many people think that e-learning is a normal thing, nonetheless, I think that there are still many aspects of online courses that are not perfect.

First of all, online courses and face-to-face courses are two completely different ways of education, without face-to-face communication, inexperienced online teachers can easily lead students to completely wrong way, learners may easily get lost without immediate support and feedback from the educators. It is also difficult for students to fully understand the expectations and requirements by only reading the instructions that are given online. During classroom-based education, teachers and students can make full use of class time, asking teachers questions and communicate with one another. On the other hand, an online section may be distracted by technical problems or hardware problems. Similarly, online courses reduce the communication between students as well. For example, Students can consolidate their knowledge by educating others, but online section deprives students of this opportunity to learn from teaching each other. It is very important to communicate with other peers in order to improve get feedback from different people. All in all, even though there are some benefits for online course in terms of accessibility and efficiency, I believe that it still cannot achieve same level of education as face-to-face classes, there are drawbacks such as, students not being able to get immediate support and feedback from educators and lack of communications between peers.

 

Johns, H. U. P. (2015). Teaching online : A guide to theory, research, and practice. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca