20 Pros and Cons of e-Learning in Live Virtual Classrooms
New to online teaching? The pros and cons of e-learning can be a bit unclear at first. Still, as our classrooms and our world grow farther and farther apart, now is the perfect time to learn about the what, why and how of digital education.
Here’s a bumper list of 20 pros and cons of e-Learning in a live virtual classroom, plus 4 free tools that can help your classes attract more distance students!
12 Benefits Of E-Learning
- flexibility
The ability to study from anywhere without commuting is probably one of the greatest benefits of e-learning.
- It’s an absolute lifeline for those students who…
- Live in remote areas .
- To get public transport to go to school.
- Should be closer to home for medical or other reasons.
We’re not just talking about geographic flexibility here. Flexible hours mean that teachers who have a lot of authority over their course schedules can tailor their online classes to fit students’ lives.
If it’s sunny outside and you’re one of the ‘cool’ teachers, your students may have no problem rescheduling their lessons for the evening.
2.Huge improvement in independence skills
Students learn to work independently; one of the pros and cons of e-learning.
The fact that group work in distance learning isn’t straightforward isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It places more emphasis on independent work, which may later in life form most of the work students do .
In fact, this is especially beneficial if you are teaching middle (high school) students. More personal work prepares them well for university entry, where they will work largely independently.
Of course, this is not to say that group work is completely off the table. Most video calling software allows breakout rooms where students can perform group work in a separate video call before rejoining the main video call.
3.Prepare for the distant future
Of all the pros and cons of e-learning, this one may have the greatest long-term impact on your students’ future jobs.
We all know we’re heading towards a remote working future , but statistics suggest it may be here sooner than you think:
By 2025, approximately 70% of the US workforce will work remotely for at least 1 workweek per month.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of long-term remote workers is expected to increase from .
We probably don’t need a crystal ball to see a future with a lot of Zoom calls to your students. Setting them up for this skill may not seem like a skill right now, but being familiar with online video calling will definitely benefit them later.
4.Be more interactive
The sad truth of the modern school system is that it is not modern at all. We still teach our learners primarily through the same one-way dump of information as in the Victorian era.
E-learning gives us the opportunity to flip script.
Online interactive tools available in 2021 allow teachers to really engage students through two-way and group discussions. Here are some ways students can be barely prepared
Q&A – An organized question and answer session where students can anonymously (or not) ask teachers questions about topics. These Q&A sessions can be saved to revisit at a later date.
Live Voting – Live multiple-choice questions for students to vote at home. This can be used to gather opinions or test understanding of a topic.
Brainstorming – Open-ended questions and word clouds allow your students to freely present their ideas and discuss the ideas of others.
Quiz – A super fun, points-based way to test comprehension in a team or solo is a live quiz . In some software, each student’s quiz answers can be tied into an analysis report.
5. Using online documentation is superior
Like we said, education isn’t the only thing coming online in 2020. Collaborative online software like Miro, Trello, and Figma really stepped up their game at the turn of the decade.
For teachers, one of the biggest benefits of e-learning over the past few years has been Google Drive . Completely free, it allows them to create and share documents and folders, track homework, and collaborate with other teachers to create materials for students.
For students, access to shared folders means that everything is perfectly organized for them. They can comment on anything they don’t understand and have teachers or classmates answer those questions.
6. Super Green
This is one of the pros and cons of e-learning and can have a huge impact on a student’s future.
Switching to online learning means staying away from wasting energy in physics school. Lights, gas, equipment, etc., are all energy-saving! Not to mention that the average school can save students and teachers millions of liters of fuel every year.
Of course, this has many positive knock-on effects. In addition to benefiting everyone’s future, you may also feel quite the health benefits in your wallet.
7. Easy to organize and review
In offline mode, lessons are just very brief bursts of information that have to contend with the daily distractions of growing students. Students often have difficulty remembering what they just learned yesterday.
Online, this is not a problem. Students can access previous information much easier:
Q&A – A written Q&A session means that all questions asked during the course are recorded.
Recording Sessions – Live video software allows you to record lessons and share the entire content or selected portions of it with students.
Shared Folders – All students can access Q&A logs, video recordings, documents, materials, and more from a shared online folder.
In e-learning, everything is permanent. There are no one-time classes, discussions or polls; everything you teach or discuss with students can be recorded , recorded and called upon whenever information needs to be revisited.
