5 Potential Disadvantages of Online Learning
Because everyone’s different the following may not prove to be true for you. Because we’re all very much unique individuals, we all have specific learning methods that best help us make it through our educational pathways. Some learn best through hands-on methods, others have great memories and find that sticking to text books enables them to best retain the material at hand. If you’re going to spend your valuable time and hard earned money getting an education, then you need to make sure you learn with the best methods possible. A fast growing trend for pursuing higher education today is through online learning, colleges online.
Here are 5 disadvantages of online learning to keep in mind when searching for your potential college education institution:
No facilities: Most traditional colleges offer their students facilities to use such as fields, university centers, libraries, gyms, student stores, computer labs, research labs, study areas and more. Online learning can’t provide these tools that are commonly part of the “college experience”
Potential for limited social networking opportunities: Being a member of a physical college organizations is a good way to network and something you can place on your resume, but your organization options are limited in the online learning environment. While you might have an online discussion board or chat room with discussion chats or threads with fellow classmates, you have not placed the name with a face, and you might be from different parts of the state, country, even the world, making in person networking less likely
Access to Professor: Sitting down with an instructor to discuss a topic from class or reasons for a certain grade can be difficult to do when you can’t physically visit them during office hours. True, you can still email or chat online with an instructor for an online course, but there is something to be said for person to person face time and a regular conversation instead of words on a screen.
Potential for limited interaction: While clearly the flexibility of online learning might provide for you to work from home, one disadvantage can be the lack of interaction you may get with classmates and your instructors. Online learning can limit the amount of public speaking practice you may gain from in-class presentations and debates & discussions, something that is naturally built into tradition classroom structures.
Missing out on non-verbal communications: Non-verbal communications are as important, if not more important than verbal communications, and it’s almost impossible to see non-verbal communications online. Similar to the need for face-to-face conversations with a teacher, non-verbal cues are impossible online, and can be more communicative than actual words.
