Some tertiary institutions provide e-learning courses to replace traditional face-to-face classes for students. While acknowledging its upside in terms of convenience, I believe conventional teaching courses should be maintained as they bring about crucial factors for one’s successful academic path.
To start with, it is irrefutable that distance learning can be convenient in some cases. Firstly, this teaching approach can remove the geographical and chronological barriers which means students no longer need to travel from a faraway distance to go to universities as what they need is only one smartphone or laptop connected to the Internet to study. Similarly, it can also be useful whenever there is extreme weather like floods or heavy snow that hinders people from commuting. Furthermore, this learning also alleviates the burden of maintaining and upgrading the facilities for the universities as libraries or classrooms have been replaced by online-stored documents as well as E-classrooms. This highlights the benefits of a virtual classroom for its flexibility and accessibility.
However, this cannot completely eradicate the orthodox learning method. Chief of the reasons is that students still need communication and direct interaction to foster their social skills. Granted, by creating debate sessions for online lessons, students can still maintain interpersonal ability to some extent. However, this cannot be as effective as real conversation because of its limited social connection. By the same token, students studying online often struggle with the lack of hands-on experience as they can no longer use the laboratory and receive direct instruction from the lecturers. Finally, some people are also concerned about the quality assurance among these students for their academic integrity and plagiarism when handing out the assignments. The reason for this is that Internet-based learners can use various tools to facilitate their tasks, for example, using ChatGPT, a tool that seeks information without quoting the original sources, illustrating issues related to the self-learning process and academic ethics.
In conclusion, while conceding that learning online can be beneficial for students when learning from far distance or in some unfavorable weather conditions; I believe that this form of teaching should only support the on-campus classes so as not to undermine social skills and lower academic outcomes.