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What is the best kind of education: Traditional courses
or online education courses?
The vast majority of studies undertaken in the
education field concludes that there is no significant difference between
traditional learning and e-learning. A well documented study recently showed a
completely different picture.
The study we are talking about was conducted by Michigan State University. They
found that students in an online economics course performed significantly worse
on examinations than the students in the traditional economics course. They also
found that e learning or online courses are better when it comes to teaching
basic concepts rather than more complex analytical skills. They advise students
to carefully consider the advantages as well as the disadvantages before they
decide whether or not to take onnline courses.
The Professors in economics, Liedholm and Byron Brown compared student
performances in one of their courses, where two sections of the course were
taught the traditional way in a classroom. In addition the course was held twice
in an online format and once as a combination of traditional classroom
instruction and e learning.
The e learning variant contained a variety of typical e learning activities and
online learning tools like for example streaming videos of classroom lectures
synchronized with text views. The online courses were recordings of the same
lectures as the classroom students got. A performance comparison was done by
analyzing the answers of 37 questions given at the examination of all the
students, whether they had gone through the traditional classroom course, the
online course or the combination course.
The online courses seemed to be more effective than the traditional courses when
it comes to learning basic concepts
The traditional classroom students did significantly better than the online
students with regard to learning more complex issues and concepts and how to
apply those concepts on problems that typically require analytical thinking.
According to the professors, the explanation of these findings may be a
reflection of theories that emphasize the advantages as well as the significance
of the direct face-to face student-teacher interactions found in traditional
classes.
Conclusively, the overall test performance of the students from the traditional
education courses was well above the performance of the students that took the
online education courses. There was no significant difference in gender
performance.
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