Gissette Perez Cod 20191265078

 

Traditional education vs. online education

During the last years and because of the pandemic situation we have seen how digital sources have gained some room in all life aspects: entertainment, work, and even education. In this article, we are going to analyze the differences between traditional and online education, their cons and pros, and their impact on the learning process.

 

One of the main differences between virtual education and traditional education is the interaction between students and teachers. One my experience is quite different to take one class on a virtual scenario in which you only hear voices, and in the better of the cases you see some avatars from your partners; but you don’t have the opportunity to see any body- language neither expression, which for me is pretty important to have some visual representation about the learning process, to know if you are being clear with what you are saying and also to know if the other person is catching you up. When you are in a virtual scenario you don’t know if another person is paying attention to you, they may be sleeping or using their phones or doing something different than being in the class, and you would never know. This may affect seriously the learning process, because the information is not being received in a correct way for the student, and the communication channel is being interrupted by distractions. On the other hand, not all the students have the possibility to access virtual classes could be because they don’t have access to the internet, or maybe because they don’t have the necessary devices to connect to virtual classes, which of course does not allow the students to continue with their educational trail. 

 

But, not all about virtual education is bad, if we place a fictional scenario in which all the students have the necessary resources to access to this type of education we can analyze some advantages, such as saving some time in the transportation that can be implemented for other things; developing a hobby, studying, helping at home, working and so on. Also, one of the things that I consider amazing about virtual education is that you have the advantage of the atemporal of the internet, you can watch and rewatch one class all the times needed, and you have tons of information about the topic that you are studying just by doing one click, in addition, there are a lot of digital sources that you can implement in your classes to do them more efficiently and dynamic, which on traditional scenarios is a little bit less effective or it takes more time while you are designing the material.

 

Something that comes to my mind is that the “evolution” of education was because of a necessity and that we are on a transition period between traditional education and virtual one, is not a secret that nowadays the virtual spaces are more recur than even real ones, and that a lot of life aspects are migrating to digital platforms. Even the way that we are conceiving virtual education now is going to change with the pass of time and with the new necessities that are going to start to arise, so in my opinion, we have to start to think on ways to improve those areas of opportunities that we already have mentioned in order to improve the learning process.