07/02/2020
Advantages of Online Learning
On-Demand: Participants can access the learning content whenever it’s best for them. The teacher can also give the participants control over when they see the content and at what pace they see the content.
“Whether [the students] do a deep dive into content to get a better understanding or they skip over some resources and focus in another area. It’s really giving that control back over to the participant,” Sarah says.
Curation/collaboration of content: Another major advantage to online learning is the ability for the class to curate and collaborate on content in the LMS hub. Sarah explains how she asked her students to help build out the resources she needed for course topics in detail below.
“In an online format, you can create really robust curated libraries of content. You can tag them and organize them in ways to make it really easy for the participants to find what they’re looking for,” she says.
“I remember developing one online course and instead of going out as the instructor and finding all the resources I needed to teach a topic, I actually made it a challenge for the participants. I said, ‘go find resources related to these different topics and choose your favorite ones.’ So with the participants, I built this curated library that they had a hand in creating.”
Modern medium: Many students and working professionals are on their laptop, tablet or smartphone for a large part of the day. So much content and information is acquired through the internet now. Online learning gives many different mediums for students to absorb information in the method that’s most effective for them.
“When I switched to teach online, I found that I used so many different media formats. I was using podcasts, videos, I was having students create videos. You just get opened up to so much more technology in different media formats,” Sarah says.