In the past 10 years, online learning has developed considerably. Subsequently there has been much debate about its benefits. We have come up with 5 key advantages.
✓ Convenience
One of the key advantages of choosing e-learning over classroom learning is convenience. Students can learn whilst they are at home, in the library or on vacation. This prevents students from having to stick to a schedule and allows them to carefully manage the pace of their own learning experience.
✓ Time efficiency
e-Learning is very time efficient as it eliminates the time you would need to spend on travel, introductions and breaks. Also, students might not be on the same level in terms of knowledge, speed of learning etc. e-Learning is therefore more time efficient as students can manage their own learning experience.
✓ Accessibility
Access to online resources, lectures and other study material 24 hours a day and 7 days a week can be seen as another major advantage. This is particularly useful to those students who need to read over the lecture slides again for revision purposes. Some professors and teachers may even tape their lectures, allowing students to listen to the entire lecture again, regardless of where they are located. Not only can these be accessed, students can also share their own findings with fellow students, permitting continuous synergy to be generated through the learning process.
✓ Dynamic interaction
e-Learning technologies such as Moodle allow online discussions to be generated. A teacher may ask an open question to the students in order to make them think about a certain subject matter, in preparation for a test or seminar. These online discussions can be seen as highly valuable, as this not only allows students to think carefully about the question but also allows the teacher to reflect and provide feedback to the students.
Besides this, online discussions allow students to help each other. For example, if one student fails to remember a specific course or a related book, the student can ask his or her fellow students through the learning platform. Not only does this allow them to find answers quicker, it also allows students to control their own learning experiences by filtering out the answers most relevant to them when reading over fellow students’ comments.
✓ Creativity
There is no doubt that creativity is important in teaching and some argue that e-learning facilitates greater creativity as ideas, resources, knowledge, understanding and skills can be shared easily, regardless of the location. Also, as students are more exposed to other students’ ideas, there is room for new, innovative ideas to be created, which in turn can be used by the teacher to provide an example of students’ work on the blog.
