Pros and cons of online education
The graduate education system is going to be changed in the future. It is an obvious fact for all of us. During the corona pandemic, everyone experienced the new face of education. The question is how this change shapes our future and what the pros and cons are. Although it includes some disadvantages, I believe that the new era provides us a great number of advantages.
Time flexibility
First, the time flexibility of remote education is one of the biggest takeaways for graduate students from this process. Flexibility provides students to take lectures whenever they prefer. For example, the one who likes to study at night and sleep during the day can now have a chance to schedule the classes at night. I believe that we can measure the positive reflection of this flexibility on grades if we have enough data soon.
Time efficiency
Second, time efficiency is another advantage of online classes. What do you think about how many hours a college student spend on transportation to reach the school? In big cities having traffic problems, students spend almost 2 hours on public transportation. This is a waste of time. However, it takes only a few seconds to reach the online-classes. Additionally, online education reduces the time for shifting one class to another one that is in a different building. It seems that graduate students have more time in the future to study more or to do more things.
Financial advantages
Last but not least, online education going to be financially better than in-person education in many aspects. Students do not need to be live close to the campus even in the same city. Thus, their accommodation expenses will dramatically reduce. Additionally, they will not spend money on transportation, clothing, or eating on the campus. All of these will provide them to save their money. Similarly, tuition will decrease because the schools will spend less on physical places. Therefore, we can say that taking education is going to be cheaper in the future.
Not good for socializing
On the other hand, online education has some limitations. One of them is that no more social activities and the other one is the lack of peer studies. These are significant problems for students. Many studies show that peer studies are more important than lectures or individual studies. In other words, we can learn from our friends more effectively than reading textbooks or taking lectures. However, online education blocks to face to face interaction as well as peer meetings. Therefore, it seems that students will need more time to learn individually.
What is next?
In conclusion, while the corona pandemic has so many negative impacts on our lives, it will reshape the graduate education system positively in the future. After the pandemic, almost all countries tried to shift education from the traditional methods to remote education. This experience shows us the benefits of online education such as time efficiency, time flexibility, and saving money. Therefore, we will probably meet a new era of graduate education in the near future.
