Tuesday 3 September 2013

Elearning Vs Classroom Eduction The Battle

By Donna Willis


With the popularity of the Internet plus the increasing availability of elearning materials, people frequently wonder whether online education is becoming a far better alternative to traditional class room training in the field of IT. In this posting, you'll discover which of these training options delivers the most advantage to the present day learner.

The Difference

Before we go deeper into the actual competition, it is most appropriate to differentiate between elearning and classroom training. First of all, online education and learning or more typically referred to as elearning, refers to any type of learning method that employs electronic media. This media generally refers to the Internet, yet it can also encompass the usage of stored learning materials in the form of training videos, e-books, as well as graphics, provided that it's computer-based or digital-based.

Class room education or training is without a doubt known to most people. In contrast to on-line training courses, it requires the employment of instructors, classrooms, training laboratories, and so forth. Usually, you have to join a given study course and follow the rules of the school in this type of environment. On top of that, the learner has to pay for tuition as well as other school fees before he or she can start going to the class room.

Effectiveness

Schools today quite often lack qualified instructors who can genuinely teach students on various IT subjects, such as software development, networking, web development, and the like. The content of each lesson usually varies depending on the instructor along with the curriculum provided by the school. For this reason, this type of setting is usually lacking in several important aspects of IT education. Nonetheless, the student can easily team up with the trainer and the other trainees at any time during lessons. This makes the classroom setting more suited to the interpersonal wants of learners.

Online IT training, in contrast, delivers a much better foundation for the trainees as the course content of the lessons usually originates from genuine experts in various fields of IT. The content employed in e-learning is also quite consistent as well as pretty-much up-to-date. However, e-learning can be isolating for the learner. Then again, there are online alternatives to the social isolation including the employment of social technologies, discussion boards, video conferencing, chat, and so forth.

Expense

When it comes to classroom education, there are various things that the students have to pay for. First of all, they have to pay their professors (as part of the tuition), college fees, college textbooks, uniforms, daily drive to the college, perhaps housing, etc. If you add together the cost of going to a conventional classroom, the costs can really add up.

In e-learning, you can use re-usable course content over and over again. If you forgot a vital aspect of a certain lesson, you can just review it again. Elearning does not require you to ride a school bus or drive a car on a daily basis. You don't have to invest in books or uniforms. In fact, you can wear your pj's and still get the training you need. All you need to pay for are the e-learning materials, your computer or laptop, and access to the web. You can literally spend thousands of dollars in the usual classroom setting, but you undoubtedly save thousands when you decide on online IT courses instead.

Motivation

In a typical classroom setting, all students are thought to be equal. The learning pace in the classroom is dependent on the entire group rather than on one student. Everything has to be established through the group. The choices made by the class ought to be adhered to, even when you, as part of the group, do not like the choices made. The entire learning discipline has to be influenced by the group as well.

Using an elearning environment, you set the pace for studying. You don't have to go to a more advanced lesson until you have mastered the prior lessons and the choice of subjects to master is always your own. Even so, you need to set the learning discipline by yourself, which can be difficult, given that there are several temptations that may distract you from learning.

Bottom line

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




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