Rise of online education

Hello, guys today we are going to discuss online education, its causes, and its pros and cons. We will also look at the methods to handle the cons of online education. In 2021 almost everything is available from notebooks to MacBooks so education nowadays is available online.

Amidst the chaos of COVID-19, we have witnessed a boost in the online education industry so new start-ups in this sector have been emerging with great potential. Online education was in trend before COVID-19 but it was not rising at as high rates as compared to the time of quarantine.

The biggest factor responsible for the abrupt rise of online education is of course the COVID-19 pandemic which pushed the whole world into quarantine, which ultimately led to the shutdown of all the educational institutes for a considerable long period of time. Living with no other choice, but to keep up with our education, we choose online education.

Besides all these factors one major factor for the boom of online education is the availability of the internet nowadays at affordable prices and the availability of a variety of electronic gadgets at reasonable prices. Now even after 2 years of the pandemic, everything has gone back to normal but still, online education is becoming popular day by day because of the package deal it offers to a learner that is ” learning on their own convenience”. With COVID being the reason for online education, there are some other reasons also.

These reasons are mentioned below:

1. Cheap and Affordable: online education is much cheaper than offline mode of education. Indeed, it is affordable to economically weaker students.
2. Easily Accessible: it being affordable makes it accessible even for economically fragile students and students from remote areas. Everyone gets a quality education without any barriers.
3. Cut off expenses: it cuts off extra expenses of travelling, hotel, room rent, food and other expenses.
4. New opportunities: it paves the way for new educators or platforms to grow. As education is not limited to schools only, new educator also gets a chance to show their teaching skills.
5. Distance learning programs: online education made distance learning a lot easier, students from different corners of the world can learn from institutes and teachers they wish to learn.
6. Provides free options: online is not necessarily to be paid, there are other platforms like YouTube where tutors provide free education and guidance to students.
7. Available 24*7: online education does not bind students to study at a fixed time. Students can study according to their will, which increases the effectiveness of their study time. Online education provides time flexibility so that working people can easily pursue their higher studies without compromising their income source.
8. Variety education: online education also provides the students with the liberty of choosing their mentors based on their subject of interest and the language they prefer.
9. Increases interaction of students: online education provides a lot of interesting methods for students to learn. They can get a better understanding of concepts by these attractive methods of explanation. Like a coin has two faces online education has also two aspects; one of them is the bright side which we have discussed above which is quite fabulous the other one is a little shady, and has some drawbacks, which are of course not dangerously harmful but still impactful.

Drawbacks of online education:-

1. It deprives a student of real-time interaction and fun with the teachers and classmates or batchmates. Thus, it affects the social life of students.
2. Medical issues; to access online education students have to sit in a chair for prolonged hours continuously staring at the mobile or tablet’s screen. The blue light radiated from the screen of these devices affects the eyes and brain leading to mild chronic headaches or a person feeling exhausted all the time. Continuous exposure to the blue leads to impaired memory and kills the creativity of a person.
3. Also, prolonged sitting sessions cause many chronic problems in joints and may result in faulty posture. We all are very well aware of the fact that faulty posture is a root cause of many medical conditions like back pain, spinal dysfunction, joint degeneration, rounded shoulders potbelly and many more.
4. While online education is a good option for adults but for children it is not as great as it sounds because it will restrict children to a chair, which means children will spend less time in playgrounds which will definitely affect adversely their physical growth and may even cause obesity in them, which itself a damn good reason for many diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoarthritis, sleep apnoea, heart diseases, gallstones and counting goes on.
5. Being restricted to their tech devices for most of the time of their childhood teenage children are able to interact less with other children and people around them which ultimately results in a lack of social skills, leading them to a poor social life. At the same time, it will adversely affect their emotional and mental development.

All these potential threats are like hidden parts of an iceberg at first these seem insignificant.

It’s not like that, there is no middle ground between the advantages and potential dangers of online education, there is. All the things you have to do to take full advantage of online education without compromising your health or your children’s overall health and growth are: –

• you have to keep in check the number of hours you or your children spend on their tech devices.
• You have to make sure that you or your children takes proper healthy diet and sleeps for recommended period of time for their age.
• You should do minimum workout daily or periodically/ your children go to playground daily and also do some exercises.

At last, I won’t say that online education is a great source of education that perfectly blends with the modern lifestyle and it has some drawbacks, but we can tackle them with the small efforts mentioned above.

Hope you guys liked it. Support us to grow by sharing it with your friends