Distance Education

I think that the strengths of a traditional course are that students have both face to face interactions with themselves as well as face to face interactions with the teacher. I personally feel that it is easier to get to know people when you interact with them during a class rather than online. Another strength of a traditional course in my opinion is that I’m more organized with completing my work and reading because oftentimes you have assignments to be completed by a certain date or the next class period; whereas with an online course I tend to put my assignments off until the last minute. A major weakness of traditional courses is oftentimes there may be only a few or even only one section offered a semester that may or may not fit your schedule. Working out your schedule of classes can often times be quite a challenge. I believe that learning is somewhat different in an online course because you as the student are in a sense teaching yourself; unless there are lectures actually put up online for you to watch or listen to. This leads to one of the skills that I feel is very important for a student taking online courses to have which is motivation. During an online course you have to motivate yourself to complete the work assigned to you or else you will not be successful. Another skill I think that students in online courses need is technology skills because the assignments often deal with different types of technology and the teacher doesn’t teach you how to use them. To me a barrier that a teacher would face teaching an online course would be not being able to get to know your students in person.  You as the teacher only know about your students what they chose to tell you online. I also think that it would be difficult to plan for online courses because in traditional courses sometimes you have group activities during class which you can’t really do well with an online course