Distance education is the process of getting educated without attending the regular college or school. You just need to be at your desired location and access the educational necessities. You can easily complete your academic educations through accessing study materials supplied by the universities and online classes. Online learning is the recent method of the system known as distance education. The traditional method used to be correspondence learning where students were connected to the college through postal materials.
Online learning is very famous when it comes to higher studies such as post-graduation(PG), Ph.D. and much more. Students can easily go for any courses they want to learn. Earlier, distance education was not given so much importance due to some myths. But nowadays Colleges as well as few schools are also based on distance education. Distance education universities are growing day by day and they are helping in building better career prospects. Through distance education, you can save a lot of time, as you need not travel to college daily to attend class. It also provides an advantage of attending class from any part of the world and at any
time (depending on the college and institution it may vary from flexible to fully strict). You just need to be connected to the internet. The main advantage of distance education is you can have one sitting degree through distance learning (one sitting degree is the compression of 3 or 4 years degree into a one-year study and attend one-exam at the end of the degree). Even with all these advantages and the popularity distance education has gained, it still has the negative response from few people like lecturers, regulators, people from the academic community. This is because of few myths in the minds of people. I would like to list few myths often heard about the distance education today.
Myth 1: Online learning will reduce the need for faculty.
There is a myth that due to online learning the demand for faculties will be reduced. They feel “If the number of students coming to college is less, then the number of faculties needed will proportionally reduce”. In fact, there will be more demand for faculties in distance learning as the ratio of students in online education is 20 to 25 per faculty. This ratio is strictly maintained by the distance learning compared to traditional schools and colleges. So, there is more need for qualified faculties and it does not reduce the demand.
Myth 2: Knowledge Accesses through distance education is not good as compared to the normal education system.
There is no significant difference between the students of the distance education and traditional education. There is a talk that if you learn through distance education you get lesser knowledge compared to the traditional way. A survey of 5 to 10 years says that there is no difference between traditional learning and distance learning. So, you can confidently take up distance learning if you are not interested in traveling and attending the classes.
Myth 3: Credentials earned online are not accepted by employers.
Again, it’s not true that credentials earned online are not accepted by employers. A survey conducted on the same phenomenon has proved that the candidates from traditional education and distance education are not filtered based on the mode of education but
are filtered on the bases of the institution they are graduated from and quality of education. In fact, the survey told that the candidates selected were the students of distance education rather than the traditional education. Thus, the distance education can be taken up by students as normally as the traditional schooling.
Myth 4: You don’t know if the person doing the work is the person receiving the credit.
The main problem with distance education is that you don’t know if the student is the registered one or if he is taking some aid to complete the exam. But the distance education industry has taken many measures to fix this issue. They have come up with the ideas like using the 360? camera to monitor the surroundings of the student, asking personal questions (vehicle number, properties) to
validate the student’s identity, retinal scanning, fingerprint, keystroke analysis etc… Hence there is no issue regarding the credits given to the people through distance education. So, the companies have no problem recruiting the students from distance education institutes.
Myth 5: “Online” instruction is synonymous with “for profit” institutions.
There are colleges who give lectures online. Not all colleges provide it online though. So, there is no difference between for-profit and proprietary institutes. The institutes who provide distance education are no different from the institutes of traditional institutes. Hence the distance education can be said is same as traditional education.
Conclusion
In this fast world, no one wants to spend time on traveling. The optimal way is to have distance education through which you can reduce the effort of traveling to college, reduce the duration of the degree and get the benefit of degree one sitting courses. So, distance education has come up to the level where there is no difference between distance education & traditional education system.
What is your opinion on distance education & e-learning process? Do share your thoughts on this. You can comment below if you have any suggestions or queries.
