Online Courses Are the Future of Education

Education, over the last decades, has greatly improved the standard of living financially and healthwise. It is one of the greatest tools of developing any country. According to the saying that knowledge is power, education therefore equips its lovers with the necessary knowledge required to scale their influence to the economic growth of any society, community, and country at large.

During recent years, technology has also influenced the speedy progress witnessed in education today, and this has greatly impacted the availability of educational services today. The internet has become a tool to propagate knowledge to the populace and education is simply the process of giving or receiving systematic instructions to result in an enlightening experience.

Today, different levels of education are available online in the form of courses structured in a manner to foster the growth of knowledge and develop a learning experience that boost and improve assimilation.

A course, in higher education settings, is a unit of teaching that typically lasts one academic term. It is led by one or more instructors, and has a fixed roster of students. A course usually covers an individual subject. Courses generally have a fixed program of sessions every week during the term, called lessons or classes.
Wikipedia

An online course is usually not different, but is available on the internet for a broader range of learners. The learning experience it provides could be visual, written, or a mix of both (which is very common with popular online courses). Paid online courses also supplement this by providing mentorship to learners in a way that can easily replace on-site courses, because it creates the opportunity for learners to interact with creators whenever any issue arises.

Some of the benefits of online courses are:

Flexibility: This gives the learners the freedom to study whenever is convenient to them and with whomever they choose to study with. They also have the freedom to spend quality time with friends, families, and loved ones. Sometimes, this level of freedom can be a disadvantage to some, because it can affect the level of discipline they put into ensuring they are consistent with these courses.
Accessibility: This is an important benefit of online courses as it gives learners the leverage to study from home, or wherever they want to. Online courses are almost always accessible from any part of the world, hence a learner in Nigeria can access quality educational content packaged as a course and created by a tutor or instructor in the U.S. (for example).
Targeted at Individuals: In onsite courses taught in traditional universities, there is no individual attention, i.e. these courses are taught to a group of people, and there is a high probability that not everyone will understand the topic discussed in a lesson or class. Conversely, online courses are created with individuals in mind. The tutor or instructor puts himself/herself into the shoes of the learner and therefore ensures that the content is very well structured to support learners of all races and gender.
Life-long Learning: Online courses support and promote continuous learning. A learner, whether introverted or extroverted, has a direct pipeline to the instructor and therefore can easily send questions to the instructor via email if need arises. This encourages the learner to learn and foster a healthy learning environment.

There are more benefits of online courses and this article explains many more benefits that you can learn from.

These benefits make online courses even advantageous to both the learner and the tutor. Universities such as MIT, Harvard have also adopted this approach to education to provide great content for a broader range of people.

As technology advances, education is becoming more digitized and tools that support this digitalization and evolution are evolving too, and this is an indication that online courses are the future of education.

What is your take about online learning, do you prefer it over on-site learning? Please leave your comment below. Shallout!!!