Although I've only taken one course online, my experience with online education has been unsatisfactory, to say the least. During the last decade or so, the population of residents in my county has grown significantly, and the county's one high school has to educate more students with a far greater student to teacher ratio than ever before. As a result, there are more students in every class, and the school doesn't have the physical space or monetary funds to hire more teachers. By the time I reached my senior year of high school, I had taken every math course that the state tests required and the school was able to offer in classroom, and that's pretty sad considering that I'm not very mathematically inclined. At this point, I didn't really have to take another math class, but the other course options during that class period were limited, so I ended up choosing to take statistics online for community college credit. The only math options available were calculus and statistics, and there was no way that I would take a calculus class without a teacher in the classroom who could answer the many questions that were liable to come.
I'm usually a pretty upbeat person, so I'll start off by stating the positives of online education:
1) Pretty flexible. I was able to take my statistics course in a computer lab during a class period in the school day, but I could pretty much do all of the electronic assignments like discussion board postings, quizzes and such whenever I wanted to, just as long as they were completed and sent in by the due date. The only assignment I had to complete offline and during the class period were the tests, which were proctored. I had my online class in the morning, so it was nice to be able to use that block of time to study for a class that had a test that day... or to finish reading the addictive Harry Potter series for the first time... I'm more of an afternoon person than a morning person, so I ended up doing a lot of my work for that class at home after dinner when my mind was fully awake and functioning.
2) Options. If online classes weren't offered, then many schools wouldn't be able to offer a great variety of courses to students. Even though my online class was not the greatest, if I wasn't taking online statistics, then I would've had to take up a spot in an elective course, like cosmetology or auto shop, that I wasn't really interested in. At least I was able to earn college credit for taking online statistics.
Now that I've touched on the positives, I can move on to the numerous negative aspects of online education, which I feel can be summed up in this two word statement:
Minimal interaction. I took my online class in a computer lab with a teacher to "babysit", and bunch of other students, each of whom were also taking online courses. But, there were only three other people in the lab taking the same course I was, so if none of the four of us could figure out a concept, we would either have to wait until the end of the week to get help from the teacher after school, or one of us could email the teacher and hope that she answered the email before the period was over and we wasted an entire class stuck on one particular concept. This was sometimes made difficult when one of us was absent or doing something else not class related (and by the middle of the semester, no one really did much work in class anyway unless someone couldn't figure out one of the concepts from the day before). Everyone enrolled in the class at my high school was required to post and answer questions on a discussion board, which was largely unhelpful when it came to fostering interaction between teacher and students, which I gathered was the purpose of the exercise. Everyone just seemed to be going through the motions so they could get their discussion board points. Classroom interaction is such an important component of the entire learning experience. Being able to ask live questions and get live examples is very important to me in a classroom environment, especially in a subject like math.
I mentioned earlier that my limited experience with online education left much to be desired. Now that I've given credit where credit is due, I have to say that while online education has its merits, in my case it just didn't get the job done. Yes, I walked away with college credit, but I don't feel like I walked away with the knowledge I should have gotten from an introductory statistics course. While online education may be a better alternative in many situations, it rarely replaces the real classroom experience with constant interaction between peers and teachers.
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