Human Lives & Education

In the 21st-century, human lives had been more and more dominated by various forms of technology. From a small smartwatch on the wrist to a supercomputer that can run a whole transportation system, technology is how the world is running nowadays. It has undoubtedly made life easier for humans as well as opening a myriad of possibilities that were not so possible in the olden days. Technology has also replaced the traditional ways of doing a wide array of things in our daily lives. One of them is education.

We go to school for education. We sit in our classes assigned while teachers who teach different subjects come and go throughout the day. Indeed, some people love to attend school and think otherwise. With technological inventions such as tablets and computers with high definition cameras and applications such as Google Meet and Zoom, We can take things online, hence, online learning. It is said that online learning will be able to replace traditional classrooms in the future. To what degree this statement will be justifiable? Let us look more into online learning by listing its pros and cons before forming an opinion. Talking about the pros first, it is an undeniable fact that online learning is indeed very convenient. Learning and teaching can be done at home or anywhere convenient for individuals with their laptops and tablets. Online learning opens the possibility for selective learning for students. For instance, students can study the topics they are unfamiliar with and skip the ones which are otherwise. Students can learn at their own pace, unlike in school where they have to catch up with the teachers, which is sometimes hard for some students. Students can take extra time to understand a topic fully or explore different concepts. Online lectures which are done using specific apps are automatically recorded and stored in the class's cloud storage, enabling students to watch it over as many times as they want.

Online learning is flexible when it comes to scheduling. When going to school, the timetable is set, and students have to study according to what is scheduled for the day; it might inconvenience some of them. With online learning, students can save their time to do other productive activities. Study materials needed by students can be conveniently accessed since everything is available online. Not only that, students can become more centered and attentive in meeting their goals. They can enlist the aid of their teachers to make use of real-life situations through video and live teacher-student interaction for improved learning outcomes.

Students will learn new tools that may enhance their learning experience by the platforms provided by online learning. They can keep track of their performances on each subject since the digital tests that their teachers set up mostly have an automated marking system, where it tells where their mistakes were. Learning online skills such as using video and audio materials for assignments and projects and creating and sharing documents is needed for online learning and communication, interaction, and accessing information. Computational skills are compulsory for surviving today's world, amongst other things.

Now that the pros are listed out, it is time for us to proceed to the cons.

First and foremost, online learning can cause social isolation to the individual, whether it's a teacher or a student. The approaches currently used for online learning in education appear to lead to contemplation, remoteness, and lack of contact among the participants. As a result, because of a lack of human communication in their lives, many students and teachers who will eventually spend most of the time online will begin to feel symptoms of social isolation. Social isolation coupled with a lack of communication leads to mental health issues such as increased stress, anxiety, and negative thoughts. Secondly, students cheating during online assessments are hard to be prevented. Unfortunately, this is one of the apparent disadvantages of online learning. With the lack of physical teacher supervision, students are able to cheat on assessments easily using various methods compared to tests in a physical school. The students cannot be monitored remotely during evaluations without video feeds, which makes the prevention of cheating more complicated than traditional testing procedures. Besides, without a proper identity verification system for these tests, students can let a third party take the test instead of themselves, resulting in a totally fraudulent test result.

Last but not least, lack of self-motivation among students will cause online learning to be ineffective. Numerous factors in conventional classrooms constantly lead students to their learning objectives. Face-to-face contact with teachers, peer-to-peer interactions, and strict schedules all work together to ensure that students do not fall off track during their studies. There are however less external influences that push students to perform well. In many cases, students are left to pursue their learning goals without being relentlessly urged. They are often required to learn complex materials in a safe home setting without the physical school's added pressure. This makes it impossible for students who lack self-motivation and time management skills to keep up with regular deadlines during online studies.

In a nutshell, we can agree that the disadvantages overthrow the advantages, making online learning not a good option for students. However, if we were going to justify the statement above, then yes, online learning may replace traditional classrooms in the future. With the rate of technology evolving, it is possible that advanced technology can overpower the disadvantages. As an example, even now, there are anti-cheating tools such as the online application that uses different anti-cheating measures and machine learning to detect fraudulent test-takers. Nevertheless, only time and the implementation of this learning method in more educational institutes will tell if this can be true or not.