Online Classrooms

You do know that in the future, there will be more and more online classes. I know that in some states, especially for high school, some students choose to do their classes online rather than go to school.

I can tell you that it is a very different environment. There are pros and cons to it though. I went to U.H. when I majored in English and it was a great learning environment. It was wonderful interacting with all ages, some younger, some older than me. Depending on the classes you took, some were 300 to a class with one professor and 4 assistants while others were smaller classes similar to the ones in high school.

I then went on in my later years to take my Masters in Education via online with the University of Phoenix. It was a pretty awesome and mind-boggling experience. I think that I am pretty shy and therefore in face-to-face classroom situations, I had a lot of problems expressing myself. However, in the online situation, I was the most active member in the class. What is difficult with online classes is the amount of work involved. We had individual threads to discussion questions to answer every week and we had to respond to our peers' comments too. Then we had to do individual projects or papers while we did group projects simultaneously. What was sad was that we, as individuals, were penalized when the rest of our group members did not hold up their end of the deal and our project was deducted points due to their shortcomings. :(

(I know this sounds so geeky but... I ended up in one class with an "A-" rather than the "A" that I deserved and... I could not be valedictorian.)

Also in the online environment, because you weren't physically there, the teacher only knew you were there when you checked in and participated in discussion. In a regular classroom, all you had to do was sit there and show your face and the teacher knew you were there.

But I enjoyed both situations. Of course, when you are younger and you want to socialize rather than just trying to get a degree as soon as possible, avoiding traffic, working a job, then you should go to the regular college. However, if in the future you decide that you want to earn a degree while working, or you decide to change jobs altogether, you might consider getting a degree online. :)