Online Learning: Not For All

By Author: Joey Chee
Total Articles: 91
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Online courses are not actually for everybody. It is not grasped by most who get engaged with online learning. Some examples:

1. Continuing medical studies for the health care professionals. It would seem like a perfect application for online education - the audience is very self-motivated and constantly utilize technology in their work. Though, they are busy people having little control over the schedules so they spend comparatively little time working with a computer. They're not good students for online education.

2. Sales training. In fact, sales people should know something about the services or products they sell; you would think this would be a usual option for online education. But sales people do not like to spend much of their time working with a computer (as their task is to meet new customers to sell them things) plus they are more delightful learning what they should know from others. Till what they sell occurs to be computer-related.

3. Various subject in a K-12 school. Online education has not been extremely prosperous in the K-12 domain in spite of great efforts to make this so. Do you expect ...
... a culture so grounded on physical presence as well as space to choose any form of online learning? And few of such schools have enough computers plus internet connections to make them available to each teacher and student.

4. Wine appreciation. It is not as stupid as it seems for there are certain great web sites dedicated to wine online that you are able to learn much from. But finally you have to taste the wine and, like many parts of the world, doesn't lend itself to distance learning.

There is a strong hope and tendency that over time, more teachers, students, administrators, organizations/institutions, cultures, and subjects, will become open to online education. Still for the present, it is important to think about whether it can make sense to provide a particular program or course an online form plus not to assume it will work good for everybody.