Background
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, bringing with it massive lockdowns in the need to provide more safety to the people, the issue of the competition between traditional and online education became most prominent. Nowadays, as schools and universities are able to come back to their familiar working modes, experts began to debate what is more effective: traditional or online education. However, with the world becoming more and more globalized with each passing year, it makes it a priority to find a compromise between the two approaches in order to create the most efficient learning environment.
Pro Online Education
In the aspect of efficiency of learning – the amount of skills and knowledge students are able to acquire – online education outshines the traditional one. According to Bettinger and Loeb, online courses can provide better opportunities for challenged students who struggled with traditional education (para. 1). The secret of this approach lies in the ability to create a flexible and individual program for each student, while in a traditional school, this is not possible.
Another advantage of online education is that is facilitates connection between students and teachers, which positively affects both the learners’ motivation and instructions’ effectivity. When working remotely with students, much more productive communication is built through consultations on all emerging issues, assistance in developing a complex topic, additional information in the chosen direction, and other factors (Palvia et al. 235). With traditional school, such high degree of communication cannot be achieved due to teachers’ increased workload.
Pro Traditional Education
Traditional education outperforms online courses in terms of students’ socialization opportunities – it offers more social enrichment through constant group activities and communications. Research suggests that students attending online education are less likely to partake in collaborative learning and experience diversity that those who study offline (Dumford and Miller 452). Online courses cannot provide this level of connection between students which may negatively affect their social skills in the future.
There is also the issue of additional learning opportunities that is yet to be addressed by online education but which has been successfully resolved in traditional schools. Bee states that “traditional learning environments often feature extracurricular activities, clubs, and groups that can all contribute to personal development and resume building” (para. 7). By attending specific after-school courses, students can increase their chances at being accepted into their college of choice.
Common Grounds
Both learning approaches have the students’ best interests in mind and value the quality of education above all. Moreover, online learning, as well as traditional, try to accommodate challenged students and provide most opportunities for growth and further education. Their common concerns lie with the need to raise the efficiency of the learning process, its comprehensiveness, and facilitation of the student-teacher connection.
Compromise
There is an acute need to create a healthy compromise between online and traditional approaches to education. For example, both should agree to incorporate one another’s practices into their educational processes. Online learning should use traditional strategies of offering socialization and extracurricular activities, while traditional learning needs to incorporate remote educational opportunities into the programs.
Benefits for Each Side
By agreeing to such compromise, online education would be able to design ways of eliminating its disadvantages and develop further as a viable educational approach. Moreover, it would simultaneously be able providing its learners with a more enriched environment and collaborative opportunities. Whereas traditional education could use online practices as a means of expanding the students’ pool, communicating diversity. Additionally, this would provide traditional schools with strategies for building more individualized teaching approaches.
Works Cited
Bee, Alexandra. “The Advantages & Disadvantages of Traditional Education.” EHow UK, Web.
Bettinger, Eric, and Susanna Loeb. “Promises and Pitfalls of Online Education.” Brookings, Brookings, Web.
Dumford, Amber D., and Angie L. Miller. “Online Learning in Higher Education: Exploring Advantages and Disadvantages for Engagement.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education, vol. 30, no. 3, 2018, pp. 452–465., Web.
Palvia, Shailendra, et al. “Online Education: Worldwide Status, Challenges, Trends, and Implications.” Journal of Global Information Technology Management, vol. 21, no. 4, 2018, pp. 233–241., Web.