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Students Choose Online Courses For Students

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Students take online courses for many different reasons. Those students are usually older, have more hours at work, and need to commute long distance in order to take a class on campus (Huh, Jin, Lee, & Yoo, 2009). Also for some students it is convenient since it may be hard to handle family responsibilities and attend traditional classes at the same time. Thus online classes are a good way to work the education into their busy schedules (Brown, 2012). In other cases students perceive online courses to be easier than traditional ones due to more learning enriching environment in the traditional courses. In fact, according to Driscoll, Jicha, Hunt, Tichavsky, & Thompson (2012) this is related to a higher percentage of lower performing …show more content…

Inversely, in a different study it was revealed that it may be easy to fall behind in web-based courses because there is no atmosphere of a classroom, and it’s hard to keep up with long-term assignments and remember to log on to the study session consistently (Brown, 2012). Driscoll et al. (2012) argued that online courses can provide sufficient interaction which is an important feature of the online learning environment. However, sometimes students find that there are actually not enough small or large group discussions (Kirtman, 2009), and online courses lack sufficient interaction with the instructor, which students perceive as crucial for their academic success (Shieh, Gummer, & Niess, 2008; Driscoll et al., 2012). There is another contradiction among recent findings about the online classes – different views on self-pace and autonomy. Some students assume those notions to be crucial for their positive learning outcomes even though it requires self-management. However, Buser, & Peter (2012) state that those who organize their own schedules academically perform worse. In online courses the quality of knowledge, that students gain from it, may be questionable. Sometimes there is such a huge load of the course work in online classes that students try to meet the quantity of the assignments required rather than engage in the in-depth learning which may negatively affect their academic performance (Shieh, Gummer, & Niess, 2008).

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