This is the first year that Southfield High has offered a number of online courses, such as Mandarin Chinese, German, Spanish 3, and Advanced Placement Calculus. These courses would be preferable with actual teachers in the building, but the online courses provide a more budget friendly solution to the recent cutbacks.
Online courses aren’t new in education. They’ve been used for a while by colleges and universities all over so a student in Detroit, for example, can take a class that was previously only offered at a college in Vermont. The online courses also offered a means by which a college could cut down on costs by not building a campus in another state but still attracting students from that area. Now high schools are catching on.
But is it a good thing? Many would believe online classes to be a devil in disguise. Having a computer for a teacher takes away the personal relationship between a student and a teacher that’s irreplaceable. It’s also difficult for a lot of students to learn online as opposed to learning from a teacher who adapts to the students’ specific learning styles.
With online courses, the computer is unbiased and leaves no room for the excuse of “My teacher just doesn’t like me.” And it’s more difficult for students to know the teacher well enough to ask for a recommendation letter.
The biggest problem, though, is that online courses give the students more responsibility to learn on his or her own. The majority of kids aren’t ready to make this mature transition that is usually taken on in college. A teacher is still needed at the high school level to inspire, encourage and even sometimes yell at them.
Years later when they recollect their high school years as adults, they’re much more likely to remember the teachers who pushed them. It’s difficult to believe that students will be noticeably affected by the proctor of an online course. On the plus side, online coursework can easily be done from home 24 hours a day.
Despite personal opinions on online classes, the rate at which technology is growing suggests that they’re here to stay and there’s quite possibly much more to come.
While the online classes do have their own specific set of cons, they have opened doors and allowed students to learn things they may have not had the opportunity to learn before.