What is Online Education
- Image by Brooklyn Museum via Flickr
Online education is a new concept altogether. It has been made possible by the computer and the internet that have revolutionized the institution of education. Today you don’t need to go to classrooms to attend lectures by professors. The internet has brought classrooms into your home. Libraries or schools and colleges not the only places which provide education.
There are many ways you can gather information online. There are online encyclopedias and dictionaries, blogs written by users on specific topics, virtual classrooms, videoconferencing, online tutoring, live lectures found on streaming video sites, online classroom discussions, social networking sites, discussion boards integrated into online education environments, E-mails, and even virtual field trips.
Wikipedia is an example of online encyclopedias. In it you will find exhaustive articles submitted and edited by users on almost any topic. For example, if you type “motor vehicles” on your browser and add the words “wiki” to it, the search engine will take you to a Wikipedia page where you will find a well-researched material containing everything known to mankind about motor vehicles, beginning from the birth of motor vehicles to the latest, the fastest models and the most futuristic designs.
There are blogs and communities on almost anything anyone on the face of earth would care to write on. Be it an interesting global event such as the Olympic Games or opinions on some political or social topic.
Online tutoring is a popular alternative to the conventional classrooms. A student sitting at his home can have his arithmetic sums worked out for him by someone located in another country. This is what outsourcing is all about. This is very popular in first world countries such as the United States of America where students often outsource tutoring jobs to teachers from third world countries.
Thus online education has made the process of learning easier.
