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Online classes aiding laziness or ability in students -Crystal Snyder
Life is short and time only goes forward with no pause button available to take a break and think things through. Our economy strives to make more time free for more to be accomplished and to obtain more experiences in life through the mass production of anything that brings convenience to one’s life.
Over the years, technology has brought convenience education, scrolls and ink to the printing press, physically writing assignments to typing them on a computer, doing research in encyclopedias and books to Internet education sites or Wikipedia.
Online education is a lifesaver for some people. There are single parents trying to manage a household so they should be able to take online classes as a way to further a career.
Online classes force the student to retrieve more information than those in classes. You are forced to think more independently on the subject of the class than have constant influences of the teacher.
I have learned that many students come to class with none of the reading done. Many students don’t take notes to record any extra information the teacher might give for a test.
Another habit teachers have is spending most of their class regurgitating information then leave only 10 minutes in class to discuss opinions or thoughts.
Really, education is not about being physically in a classroom or even enrolled in school. A real education is self-seeking and constantly challenging all the information around you so an education is not something received or bought, it is solely determined by the information retained through one’s own motivated curiosity.
Some of the most intelligent people I know never had any education beyond high school. There really is a difference between education and organized education. Just like there is a difference between religion and faith or belief in something.
Want differs from need for online classes -Jeremiah Allen
Online classes suffer the same burdens of any technology—of the web, nuclear fission, etc.—in that their value is only as good or bad as the people who take them.
Guns don’t have to kill people, computers don’t have to hack the Department of Defense and online classes don’t have to act as a haven for the apathetic, the dishonest and the lazy. But they do.
In an ideal world, bullets are used to put dinner on the table and e-mail helps us communicate with long-lost friends and relatives, and busy students try to earn an education while working around a schedule that includes careers, babies and mortgage payments.
But let’s be honest with ourselves. We don’t live in an ideal world and Mother Culture doesn’t use the word “earn” like she used to.
Now an education’s simply “something we get,” another hoop to jump through before getting on to the “next stage” of our lives, and hardly anybody appreciates the benefits of wisdom because the effects aren’t always readily apparent.
Few work for an education because few really want it—learning not for learning’s sake but because of that flammable little sheet of compressed tree fiber that supposedly enables us to “do what we really want to do with our lives” (which typically only amounts to languishing in a cubicle and being a good little Capitalist, dedicated to all of our possessions and the incessant need for more, more, more).
Knowledge isn’t power; it’s a speed bump in our Sisyphian quest for instant gratification and the Hedonist bent of an office Christmas party, and online classes are just one more way for us to downgrade the learning process into something quick and easy—though the real buzz word now is “accessible”—with a negligible impact on our social lives predicated on alcohol, sex and mindless minutia (also known as “the really important stuff”).
It’s not the technology that’s flawed. It’ not online classes that are the problem: it’s us.
We don’t understand that education isn’t a microwave. You don’t just punch in a few numbers and wait for it to ding, and we’re abusing the technology. Learning is something that should be cherished and shared, something lifelong we seek to enrich ourselves with but it’s not. They tell us it is but we all know that “they” are lying.
The path of least resistance leads colleges to continue adding online courses to their books out of a necessity to cater to a culture that values shortcuts and illusion more than it does the tenets of a liberal arts education.
Thanks to the web, class curriculums from colleges all over the world can be viewed and saved, books can be ordered online and—with tools like Wikipedia, Sparknotes and Google—the only thing keeping us from pursuing independent learning is a tendency to be dependent.
The fact of the matter is, anyone with the Internet and a drive to learn can know what anyone else knows, do research and interact with others in the field and belong to peer groups who will evaluate one’s work and offer support. And they don’t have to pay $20,000 a year to do it.
What I’m saying here is, we pay a lot of money for the privilege and opportunity to sit in an interactive classroom situation with (multiple) degree-wielding professors, to use the excitement of class participation and the fluidity of conversation to our advantage, and no online class could ever hope to replicate this precious experience.
Sure, there is a handful of non-traditional students who are going above and beyond to learn for the sake of learning, and those are the ones who benefit from online classes—you know, the ones who are outwardly motivated already.
But what we have now are online classes mostly just serving as a cop-out for people with an embarrassment of cop-out riches. They’re diminishing the value of learning and facilitating an entire subset of students to lower the bar because “all we gotta do is make it through.”
Organized education is the process of retaining information receiving and award for going through the necessary provisions for reaching a goal. The more degrees or higher the education one has obtained in our society the more recognition and respect on gains.
It’s all about doing what is expected to receive credit from the ultimate authority. If one has not gained approval in these traditions, laws or decrees, they are condemned in a number of ways.
The questioning of online classes is not important, it’s really about what education has become. Whether you receive this education online or in a classroom, this has still been cheapened by the ideas of the low expectations and the social normal we have been raised to believe since kindergarten.
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