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Online Learning Vs Face-to-face

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Published: Aug 24, 2023

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Advantages of online learning, disadvantages of online learning, advantages of face-to-face education, disadvantages of face-to-face education.

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Online Classes Vs. Traditional Classes Essay

Online vs. in-person classes essay – introduction, online and traditional classes differences, works cited.

The article compares and contrasts online classes and traditional classes. Among the advantages of online classes are flexibility and convenience, while in-person classes offer a more structured learning environment. The author highlights that online lessons can be more cost-effective, although they lack support provided by live interactions. Overall, the online vs. traditional classes essay is very relevant today, and the choice depends on the individual student’s needs and preferences.

Modern technology has infiltrated the education sector and as a result, many college students now prefer taking online classes, as opposed to attending the traditional regular classes. This is because online classes are convenient for such students, and more so for those who have to both work and attend classes.

As such, online learning gives them the flexibility that they needed. In addition, online learning also gives an opportunity to students and professionals who would not have otherwise gone back to school to get the necessary qualifications. However, students who have enrolled for online learning do not benefit from the one-on-one interaction with their peers and teachers. The essay shall endeavor to examine the differences between online classes and the traditional classes, with a preference for the later.

Online classes mainly take place through the internet. As such, online classes lack the regular student teacher interaction that is common with traditional learning. On the other hand, learning in traditional classes involves direct interaction between the student and the instructors (Donovan, Mader and Shinsky 286).

This is beneficial to both the leaner and the instructors because both can be bale to establish a bond. In addition, student attending the traditional classroom often have to adhere to strict guidelines that have been established by the learning institution. As such, students have to adhere to the established time schedules. On the other hand, students attending online classes can learn at their own time and pace.

One advantage of the traditional classes over online classes is that students who are not disciplined enough may not be able to sail through successfully because there is nobody to push them around. With traditional classes however, there are rules to put them in check. As such, students attending traditional classes are more likely to be committed to their education (Donovan et al 286).

Another advantage of the traditional classes is all the doubts that students might be having regarding a given course content can be cleared by the instructor on the spot, unlike online learning whereby such explanations might not be as coherent as the student would have wished.

With the traditional classes, students are rarely provided with the course materials by their instructors, and they are therefore expected to take their own notes. This is important because they are likely to preserve such note and use them later on in their studies. In contrast, online students are provided with course materials in the form of video or audio texts (Sorenson and Johnson 116).

They can also download such course materials online. Such learning materials can be deleted or lost easily compared with handwritten class notes, and this is a risk. Although the basic requirements for a student attending online classes are comparatively les in comparison to students attending traditional classes, nonetheless, it is important to note that online students are also expected to be internet savvy because all learning takes place online.

This would be a disadvantage for the regular student; only that internet savvy is not a requirement. Students undertaking online learning are likely to be withdrawn because they hardly interact one-on-one with their fellow online students or even their instructors. The only form of interaction is online. As such, it becomes hard for them to develop a special bond with other students and instructors. With traditional learning however, students have the freedom to interact freely and this helps to strengthen their existing bond.

Online learning is convenient and has less basic requirements compared with traditional learning. It also allows learners who would have ordinarily not gone back to school to access an education. However, online students do not benefit from a close interaction with their peers and instructors as do their regular counterparts. Also, regular students can engage their instructors more easily and relatively faster in case they want to have certain sections of the course explained, unlike online students.

Donovan, Judy, Mader, Cynthia and Shinsky, John. Constructive student feedback: Online vs. traditional course evaluations. Journal of Interactive Online Learning , 5.3(2006): 284-292.

Sorenson, Lynn, and Johnson, Trav. Online Student Ratings of Instructions . San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2019, April 25). Online Classes Vs. Traditional Classes Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/online-classes-vs-traditional-classes-essay/

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How Effective Is Online Learning? What the Research Does and Doesn’t Tell Us

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Editor’s Note: This is part of a series on the practical takeaways from research.

The times have dictated school closings and the rapid expansion of online education. Can online lessons replace in-school time?

Clearly online time cannot provide many of the informal social interactions students have at school, but how will online courses do in terms of moving student learning forward? Research to date gives us some clues and also points us to what we could be doing to support students who are most likely to struggle in the online setting.

The use of virtual courses among K-12 students has grown rapidly in recent years. Florida, for example, requires all high school students to take at least one online course. Online learning can take a number of different forms. Often people think of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, where thousands of students watch a video online and fill out questionnaires or take exams based on those lectures.

In the online setting, students may have more distractions and less oversight, which can reduce their motivation.

Most online courses, however, particularly those serving K-12 students, have a format much more similar to in-person courses. The teacher helps to run virtual discussion among the students, assigns homework, and follows up with individual students. Sometimes these courses are synchronous (teachers and students all meet at the same time) and sometimes they are asynchronous (non-concurrent). In both cases, the teacher is supposed to provide opportunities for students to engage thoughtfully with subject matter, and students, in most cases, are required to interact with each other virtually.

Coronavirus and Schools

Online courses provide opportunities for students. Students in a school that doesn’t offer statistics classes may be able to learn statistics with virtual lessons. If students fail algebra, they may be able to catch up during evenings or summer using online classes, and not disrupt their math trajectory at school. So, almost certainly, online classes sometimes benefit students.

In comparisons of online and in-person classes, however, online classes aren’t as effective as in-person classes for most students. Only a little research has assessed the effects of online lessons for elementary and high school students, and even less has used the “gold standard” method of comparing the results for students assigned randomly to online or in-person courses. Jessica Heppen and colleagues at the American Institutes for Research and the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research randomly assigned students who had failed second semester Algebra I to either face-to-face or online credit recovery courses over the summer. Students’ credit-recovery success rates and algebra test scores were lower in the online setting. Students assigned to the online option also rated their class as more difficult than did their peers assigned to the face-to-face option.

Most of the research on online courses for K-12 students has used large-scale administrative data, looking at otherwise similar students in the two settings. One of these studies, by June Ahn of New York University and Andrew McEachin of the RAND Corp., examined Ohio charter schools; I did another with colleagues looking at Florida public school coursework. Both studies found evidence that online coursetaking was less effective.

About this series

This essay is the fifth in a series that aims to put the pieces of research together so that education decisionmakers can evaluate which policies and practices to implement.

The conveners of this project—Susanna Loeb, the director of Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and Harvard education professor Heather Hill—have received grant support from the Annenberg Institute for this series.

To suggest other topics for this series or join in the conversation, use #EdResearchtoPractice on Twitter.

Read the full series here .

It is not surprising that in-person courses are, on average, more effective. Being in person with teachers and other students creates social pressures and benefits that can help motivate students to engage. Some students do as well in online courses as in in-person courses, some may actually do better, but, on average, students do worse in the online setting, and this is particularly true for students with weaker academic backgrounds.

Students who struggle in in-person classes are likely to struggle even more online. While the research on virtual schools in K-12 education doesn’t address these differences directly, a study of college students that I worked on with Stanford colleagues found very little difference in learning for high-performing students in the online and in-person settings. On the other hand, lower performing students performed meaningfully worse in online courses than in in-person courses.

But just because students who struggle in in-person classes are even more likely to struggle online doesn’t mean that’s inevitable. Online teachers will need to consider the needs of less-engaged students and work to engage them. Online courses might be made to work for these students on average, even if they have not in the past.

Just like in brick-and-mortar classrooms, online courses need a strong curriculum and strong pedagogical practices. Teachers need to understand what students know and what they don’t know, as well as how to help them learn new material. What is different in the online setting is that students may have more distractions and less oversight, which can reduce their motivation. The teacher will need to set norms for engagement—such as requiring students to regularly ask questions and respond to their peers—that are different than the norms in the in-person setting.

Online courses are generally not as effective as in-person classes, but they are certainly better than no classes. A substantial research base developed by Karl Alexander at Johns Hopkins University and many others shows that students, especially students with fewer resources at home, learn less when they are not in school. Right now, virtual courses are allowing students to access lessons and exercises and interact with teachers in ways that would have been impossible if an epidemic had closed schools even a decade or two earlier. So we may be skeptical of online learning, but it is also time to embrace and improve it.

A version of this article appeared in the April 01, 2020 edition of Education Week as How Effective Is Online Learning?

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Onsite and Online Education, Essay Example

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With the development of the internet, technology and education has changed greatly in order to adapt.  The research methods that are available as well as the type of education and the delivery method by which this education is being offered have also changed.  A recent television commercial from Kaplan University pits a fictional professor in front of an online viewership and a full classroom discussing the failures of higher education.  The actor playing the professor appropriately states that it is time for the education to adapt to the student instead of the student adapting to the education.  For this reasoning, the development of internet-based education has become a popular trend in higher education and it appears that even more traditional schools are taking this liberal idea of an online education and involving it into the core curriculum.  Nevertheless, the two main types of education, both traditional and online, have pros and cons and each is beneficial to a specific type of student.

First of all, the traditional education provides a student with a classroom environment that is available for a class of students to sit in front of a professor and receive a lecture.  This environment has adapted somewhat to engage students in more discussion-based lectures, but overall the general concept of the traditional classroom has remained.  In this setting, the professor is the expert on a particular subject matter and the students are sitting in class to partake of the knowledge that is able to be bestowed upon them by the great, illustrious professor.  Within this environment, students are able to take notes and are often required to be in attendance in order to receive attendance points or to even pass the class.  Professors often demand that students have read in the textbooks or performed the homework in between class sessions.  This is critical for the class to be able to cover new information in the class instead of focusing on content that should have already been learned.  Most of the classes range anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours in length depending on the availability of class and the days of the week that it is being offered.  The onsite environment allows professors to write notes on the chalkboard or dry erase board as well as showing a power point or video with the students.  This alternative delivery method has grown to utilize technology in the classroom to ensure that students are receiving the most knowledge possible in a given class period or term.

The online classroom setting has been designed to effectively emulate the traditional environment.  For instance, many professors require online discussion posts to a forum thread as an example of participation for the week.  There are also online quizzes and tests that are typically multiple choice or true and false that help provide immediately feedback to the student whether the information provided was correct or incorrect.  This method also provides more freedom on the professor to be able to concentrate on reading and responding to threaded discussions as well as grading papers or written exams.  One key benefit for online education is that is can be accomplished anywhere and usually at any time.  Most schools have attendance requirements where students must log in to the course for a specific amount of time or number of times each week.  Furthermore, many schools provide textbooks to students through an electronic format called an e-book as opposed to students purchasing large, and often very expensive, textbooks.

Clearly there are many similarities between these two educational delivery formats.  First of all, the professor is still considered the expert on the topic and remains available to students in either format to contact for questions and further comments on anything discussed in the course.  Students still continue to utilize textbooks even though the available format of the text is slightly different.  Textbooks are critical for learning to be conducive so that students can learn from a source other than the professor’s lectures.  Within both delivery formats, students are often required to attend and participate.  Much of the learning within a class involves discussion and allows students to use critical thinking skills as a group to solve a problem or gain clarity on a specific topic.  Overall, the main goal for education is to utilize the tools that are available to provide students with necessary information to enrich their lives and prepare them for a strong career.  This goal is successfully maintained within both delivery styles.

Although there are many similarities, there are specific differences that separate each delivery style.  For instance, the online delivery format never requires students to be present in class with a large group of students.  Much of the learning is performed in a single, one person environment in the comfort of the student’s own home; whereas, traditional learning often includes a learning environment with ten or more individuals.  Furthermore, many professors are able to include power points to both online and traditional classes; however, the professor is able to expound on the slides with traditional learning.  Professors may include slide notes for the power point presentations online, but these are not always successful methods of learning because there is no true presentation.  In an online format, students are able to log in and complete course work whenever it is convenient for them; whereas, students in a traditional environment are required to attend courses only at a specific time or contact professors during restricted office hours.  Finally, online education teaches students to utilize technology and internet resources more than the average traditional education.  These are often skills that future employers are looking for out of college graduates and it provides students with the ability to be resourceful.

While each delivery method has strengths and weaknesses, it is clear that the educational format is designed for a specific type of student.  Online education is often for students that are busier and need flexibility in time management.  This may also be an excellent resource for students who are intimidated by large classrooms or speaking in front of other people.  On the other hand, traditional learning provides students with more structure and forces them to manage their time effectively without flexibility.  Nevertheless, higher education provides students with an environment to increase their topic knowledge and skills in order to potentially improve their ability to become a successful working adult.

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