Why study online?

  • First determine whether you a good candidate to succeed in an online course. This self-evaluation for potential distance learners will help you gauge the match between you and the demands of this course.

    Now on to the benefits of online study

    1. Variety: Online courses provide a DIFFERENT learning environment from the classroom. Not better. Not worse. DIFFERENT. Online students do more writing than those in a classroom. You get more practice, instruction, feedback, and thus improvement in your writing.
    2. Equality: Online students get to participate in electronic discussions on equal terms. A few students often tend to dominate classroom discussions. Online, everyone is equal, everyone is recognized, everyone can contribute on equal footing. In fact, the WWW is a great equalizer. Many difficulties can be neutralized with computer and web-based technology so that students with impairments of sight, hearing, mobility, or other can participate just as fully online as anyone else.
    3. Richer materials. Your online text, the Interactive History Lab, provides a much richer variety of sources about history than a standard print text. It is particulary strong in visual imagery--take advantage of this benefit (especially you visual learners).
    4. More time for reflection: "Online wait time--a period of sustained reflection about a participant's or a facilitator's posting--can be measured in hours or even days, not seconds around a conference table. This fosters opportunities for rich thinking and response that are unheard of in a live setting." "It can be easier to avoid 'knee-jerk' actions and reactions, because opportunities to reflect, edit, and revise before posting are built in." [George Collison, et al Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators, pp. xvi, 11.]
    5. Logistics: No parking hassles; no sitting on the floor--unless you want to! We're short of space at NC State -- all space: classroom, office, parking, you name it. As Donald M. Norris argues in "Space: The Final Frontier", universities must get more creative in the face of a shortage of this vital resource. "On the verge of the Knowledge Age, urban development specialists and campus planners are creating imaginative facilities for the new epoch. Space design has become an unexpected frontier of innovation. Today's emerging facilities suggest two apparently contradictory but related directions."
    6. Efficiencies: It's obvious that the NC state legislature will never provide adequate funding to meet NCSU student needs. We're short of classrooms, labs, parking space, office space, faculty--you name it. Taking a class online opens up classroom space on campus for other instruction.
    7. Outreach: We need to use new technologies to meet the needs of new populations of students, many of whom cannot attend classroom courses. In "Educating in a Time of Changing Student Demographics,"
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