The trend of homeschooling is gaining momentum by the year. Many children are obtaining primary and secondary school at home, but things get more complicated when it comes to college and university. Yes, there are ways to obtain degrees online, but the low completion rates scare most students away. Nevertheless, free online courses are making constant progress, so there is one question that comes to everyone’s mind: will they ever replace college education?
Let’s consider the pros and cons of online education before we come to the final conclusion.
Advantages of Free Online Courses
● They are free, and this is the most obvious advantage. Colleges are becoming more expensive than anyone can afford. Parents start saving for their children’s education since very early, but most of them still can’t cover the high tuitions. With free online courses, everyone can get the education they want without being worried about money.
● Online education is very flexible. You will most likely need to attend virtual classrooms, but you’ll still be able to manage your time very effectively. You’ll have enough space for studying, and you won’t have to put your social life on a break during your studies.
● The convenience of online education is irreplaceable. If you attend an actual college, you’ll have to waste time going from one end of the campus to another. You’ll have to buy tons of textbooks and enroll in extracurricular activities. On top of everything, you’ll have to deal with frustrated professors who won’t teach you how to write an essay, but they will still expect you to complete superb academic content. Thus, you’ll have to spend money on hiring an essay writing service rated on sites like Essaywolves.com, to do the work for you. Most online courses also involve academic writing, but the pressure is not that terrible.
● Thanks to online education, you can learn anything you want. You started studying history, but you suddenly became interested in sociology? No problem! You can always find free courses that will satisfy your hunger for knowledge. Of course, you need to stay focused if you want to gain an online degree at some point.
Disadvantages of Free Online Courses
● The flexibility of online education is a great advantage, but it’s also a trap. You might think there is always enough time to get to the end of the course, but you’ll lose your interest somewhere along the way. This is not the case at an actual college, where you’ll be tied down to a strict schedule.
● Employers still don’t value online degrees that much. Unfortunately, the reputation of these programs is not high, so you’ll have to try much harder to land an interview. A degree from an on-campus program is much more valuable for most employers.
● Most college courses are dependent upon practice. For example, you cannot complete a chemistry course without lab experiments. The online environment may simulate the experiments, but you cannot obtain practical skills in such setting. These types of courses cannot be limited to online classes.
Will Free Online Courses Replace College Education?
One of the biggest disadvantages of online courses is the lack of human dimension. No matter how interactive the programs are, a computer can never replace the connection you get on campus. The colleges that provide online degrees try to fix this flaw by offering online lectures, as well as direct communication between the students and their teachers.
The feeling of watching an online lecture from your favorite chair cannot be compared to the classroom setting. Thus, this type of education still cannot supplant brick-and-mortar colleges for now. Nevertheless, free online courses remain an effective way of gaining supplemental knowledge, or even a complete degree for people who are not able to afford high tuitions. We can only wait and observe how this type of education evolves. 😀
