How Online Education Works

Set Your Schedule

The greatest benefit to getting an education online is the flexibility that students have in setting their schedule for when work gets done. Rather than needing to show up at a physical classroom at a certain time on certain days every week, online students are usually only required to log in to a message board in order to retrieve their weekly assignments as posted by the instructor. Some instructors are even more lenient, providing students with a schedule of assignments at the beginning of the semester and not requiring weekly logins or postings at all. As long as the student has their assigned work in by the required dates, they will do well in the course.

Technology Lends a Hand

Obviously technology will play a significant part in any online education. The degree of technology used will vary from class to class or university to university. Some courses will make only minimal use of technologies, while others will be very highly technological, using the latest applications and features of the Internet in order to facilitate the online education. Some of the technologies you might expect to use in getting your online education include:

• Discussion Boards: Arguably the most simple and most common means of communicating, the online discussion board uses posts entered by the instructor and the students as a means of communicating information. It is possible that files (assignments) may be attached to message board posts.
• Chat Rooms: Chat rooms enable instant communication between multiple people. Unlike discussion boards, chat rooms allow for more limited (usually one or two sentence) postings that, once submitted, become instantly viewable to everyone else in the chat room who may then type and send their own text in response. Chat rooms are not a very popular method of online education due to the difficulty in organizing any number of students to be online at once.
• Podcasts: Podcasts are used by instructors as a way of verbally communicating information to their online students. A podcast is an audio recording that can be 'posted' online to be listened to by anyone or only by the person whom it is intended for. Popular with instructors who prefer the 'personal touch' as opposed to just typing information into a discussion board or e-mail, podcasts are most often used in order to enable a professor to respond to a student's work.
• Video: Standard video (as in television or tapes), is becoming a less popular method of handling distance education with the advent of Internet technologies. It is still used at some schools and for certain degrees, however as a way of conveying visual information.
• Streaming Video: Gaining in popularity, streaming video enables an instructor to videotape themselves or a procedure (such as a dissection) and have it streamed instantly to any number of watching viewers. Combined with chat or voice conferencing ability, this actually enables students to experience something very much like a classroom environment while still in their own home.
• E-mail: Pretty much guaranteed for any online educational experience, e-mail is a way of facilitating private, written communication between students and between the class instructor and students.

With such a diverse and powerful set of communication and interaction tools available, the ability to teach any number of subjects through online education has grown exponentially. Universities are continually finding new and innovative ways to offer courses both in a traditional classroom environment and online, and some universities now offer certain courses or degrees exclusively online.