Error 500.

I'm fairly inexperienced with online education, in terms of personal experience, so this post will involve my (limited) first-hand experience with the online education system, followed by thoughts and such.

I've taken a grand total of one online class in my educational history.  It seemed like a fantastic idea at the time - I could work on stuff for the class in my bits of free time, at my own pace, with no class to slow me down.  One of my biggest problems in high school was that I learned at a much quicker pace than most of the other people - as they discussed the same things over and over, I grew bored, and things went downhill from there.  But in the online setting, I thought, I could proceed at my own pace, and things would be awesome.

What happened?  I'm sure just about anyone can guess.  I procrastinated, and forgot about the class, and ended up pulling an all-nighter the night before everything was due just to complete the assignments.  I had to race through them, speed-reading to try and grasp the concepts that I'd need for the quizzes and such.  I passed the class with an A (don't ask me how), but that entire experience did a great job of showing me that I wasn't ready for online classes.  By their very nature, they require a lot of self-motivation and efficient time management, and those were two areas in which I was lacking.

Granted, that was years ago - I know that I've gotten a lot better with both time management and self-motivation (well... maybe not so much, with the latter).  But would online classes be a good idea for me?  I don't know.  I'm really not sure whether I learn better from reading or from interpersonal interactions.  One of the key components of any online course is the lack of interaction with other people, so that restricts people who require that sort of thing pretty severely.  As Kelsey mentioned earlier in the week, the (potential) lack of feedback can be both infuriating and crippling.  I don't mind doing something "wrong", as long as I can have my mistake(s) explained to me, so that I won't make them again.  This isn't something that you'll always get with online courses - it really feels like you're expected to somehow know what you did wrong and fix it yourself.  This seems terribly inefficient and... well, stupid.

But for my concerns, I can't dismiss the idea of online classes entirely as a plausible option for myself, or other people.  I'm getting ready to start taking classes again, and I have absolutely no idea how that's going to work out.  Taking online classes would make my schedule a lot more flexible, as long as I motivated myself to set aside an appropriate amount of time for my schoolwork.  It's about 13 miles from my house to where I'd be taking classes, about 11 miles from there to where I'd (likely) be working, and about 23 miles from there back to my house.  On any given day that I both had classes and worked, online classes would cut a third of my commute distance off.  Assuming a minimum of three class days a week, that would quickly prove beneficial.

I really don't know for sure if online classes would work for me.  I do think that they're geared towards a very specific type of student, as has been discussed, and I think that they'll become more and more common as time goes on.  For the sake of our future, though, I hope they don't become the only option available.