Technology has changed our lives in so many ways. One of the most interesting ways in which it has changed our education sector is the proliferation of online education in recent years. Universities and colleges have been adopting online education for decades, but the situation completely changed after the COVID-19 pandemic, when students had no option but to stay home and take their classes online. Some universities and colleges, like Edison College, offer diploma programs, such as the medical laboratory assistant diploma, which are either 100% online or hybrid. This means a student can take the theory part online while doing the practicum by working in a private laboratory.
Online Education vs. In-person Learning
There are some obvious and major differences between these two types of learnings. Some of the top benefits of online education include saving commute time, less travel expenses, low CO2 emissions due to fewer cars on the roads, and students living in other cities and countries can access the same kind of teaching quality. In 2017, a study conducted on the advantages and disadvantages of online education in the higher education institutions in the Netherlands revealed that online education significantly decreased the CO2 emissions. The debate about which kind of teaching is better has been taking place for a long time, and it will continue to be like this because both have some strengths and weaknesses that cannot be ignored.
A 2022 report by McKinsey & Company noted that online education is getting more popular with each passing year, and it is now up to the educational institutions how they handle this demand. The report also noted old assumptions of students about college life have drastically changed, while the competition among online education providers has also increased over the years.
The core benefits of in-person learning include better student-to-teacher interaction, better student-to-student interaction, and more commitment of students in the class. Studies show that in-person learning provides more space to students to react or show the signals when they do not understand something during the class. Some students also believe that in-person learning is better because it provides an opportunity to develop social skills, including presentation and communication skills.
What Makes Online Education A Good Competitor?
The concept of online education was getting popular by the middle of the 20th century in the US; however, since there was no internet available at that time, the results of those experiments were limited. However, by the mid-1980s, some leading US and Canadian universities started offering partial or full-time online programs. The progress continued to pick up the speed during the 1990s with the fast increasing accessibility of the internet in the industrialised countries of the world. However, by the turn of the 21st century, internet availability increased very fast in other parts of the world, and with it, the popularity of online education also increased with time. Fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020; perhaps the biggest jump in the use of online learning came during the COVID-19 pandemic because, due to lockdowns, students were not able to attend schools, colleges, and universities, and online learning was the only option available.
According to the World Economic Forum, Coursera registered 21 million new registrations in 2021 compared to 2020, a three-fold annual increase compared to the previous annual increase in registrations of 7 million each year. It was noted that people were opting for online courses to meet the fast-changing demands of the labour market, and it has also become an extremely important instrument to reduce the ever-expanding global skill gap. Moreover, it was also noted that the people from emerging economies were adopting online education at a faster rate than the developed economies. As expected by some experts, after the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are getting used to online education, though now they have the option to go back to in-person learning. Some believe the time and money that they save in the online option far exceeds all other benefits.
What If Online Programs Have Practicum?
While the popularity of online programs is undisputed, there are some colleges that offer hybrid diploma programs. This means that you have the option to take the coursework online and then opt for the practicum or training part of the diploma at a later stage. For instance, Edison College offers a Medical Laboratory Assistant Diploma that is both in-person and online. The duration of the program is 36 weeks, including a 6-week practicum at Lifelabs Clinic, during which the graduates are prepared to meet the competency requirements of the field. This medical laboratory assistant diploma program prepares graduates to work as Medical Laboratory Assistants at a medical laboratory within a variety of institutions, both in public (hospitals) or private settings (such as LifeLabs, etc.).
Conclusion
As we have noted above in this blog, the outburst of online education has only become more and more notable. If it was not effective and convenient, it would not have been accepted by so many people in so many regions of the world. Online education has been accepted on a much wider scale today, and it is expected that its rate of proliferation will only increase in the future.
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