Process Analysis

Distance Education or Traditional Education

With an increasingly globalized world, and the advent of ever-improving technology that allows people to go as far as to project a holograph of themselves sitting in a chair in Tokyo from their office in San Jose, California, we are starting to reexamine the ways we structure learning. Gone are the days on the one-room schoolhouse, where all learning is completed between eight and three p.m. More and more often, schools are utilizing the significant technological tools that have been developed in order to redefine the way we teach and the way we learn. Indeed, we can now learn math from an online recorded voice while we sit on the couch in our pajamas. In the statement above, the author claims that though distance learning and online educational programs offer convenience, in-class instruction is irreplaceable. Though, distance learning and online educational tools can provide fantastic aids to traditional classroom learning and a great deal of benefit to certain students, they cannot entirely take the place of in-class instruction.

The main reason that distance learning cannot take the place of traditional in-class instruction is that the primary benefit that in-class instruction provides is spontaneity. Students can learn from the questions another student asks, which can make them realize that they do not understand a subject as well as they thought they did. In debates with other students surrounding, perhaps, the Cold War, students can learn from each other based on their give-and-take, something impossible to duplicate in online educational programs. Many programs through reputable universities, such as Johns Hopkins' CTY program or Stanford's EPGY program provide distance learning to secondary school students. In such programs, students complete assignments, email them back and forth with their teachers, receiving comments each time, learn primarily from books or prewritten tools, and only hear their teacher...