Formal Essay 2 Rewriting

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Hyongwon Jeon

Prof. Kyle Brebner

IERW(04)

20. November 2015

Degree behind a Monitor

Nowadays, more universities are adopting online courses for student convenience. There are universities which offer a full degree solely from online classes and more cyber universities are newly established every year. Although the courses can be effectively used in a short period of time, colleges should not make the choice of using them in the long run. To explain, online courses have negative effects for both the student and the professor: being unable to learn the value of school life, being lazy about studying, and providing difficulty for evaluation for professors.

To start with, online courses deprive students of the opportunity to learn the value of school life. After three years of harsh high school, university is a place where students can build up life experiences other than only studying. Since online courses offer ubiquitous environment for studying, many students who study online choose to both study, and work in a society. Compared to schools which provide students with various ways to develop themselves by extracurricular activities such as volunteering and clubs, relatively limited chances are given for students who take online courses. Unlike universities, a society is known as a competitive battlefield. In companies, workers compete for promotion and are sometimes forced to make harsh choices for their career. To add, society regards school life as a major factor to decide whether to employ a worker or not. While most students are focused on studying exams during high school years, university can be a place to learn social skills, such as cooperation from team work. Also, students are able to learn how to behave with responsibility through making a choice on their own without the help of others.

Another reason for online courses being negative is that these can have a danger of weakening the pupil’s will to learn. We should remember that laziness is a result of freedom. In other words, when students are given a specific amount of time to take the class without checking each student’s attendance, they tend to delay the learning until right before the due date. The learning is no longer a priority to the students on Mondays. Students live happily during the six days and get busy on Sunday night, which disturbs them to think deep and study in a relaxed environment. On top of that, it is much easier for students to lose concentration during class hours online. Students mainly use computers or smartphones for cyber lectures, which disturb students to mainly focus on the lectures. While studying online can be intervened by various situations as students can choose to learn on their own, common university courses enable students to actively concentrate, and participate during class since a professor has the control for the class.

Professors may also struggle while evaluating students when students are allowed to take all their classes online. In normal classes, the professor can easily communicate with a pupil in real time, and set the level of difficulty for the lecture. Additionally, learners are exposed to a lot of irritating factors from people around, their learning tool, or even themselves: the inability to control their laziness. Professors cannot know whether the learner really heard the lecture or watched a movie while chatting with his or her friends. Thus, the efficiency of class can be critically lowered. The fact that students cannot do face-to-face communication with the professors further causes a major problem of online classes: the test unable to be a fair evaluation tool. Even though alternative assessments could be possible, Korean universities still rely deeply on the tests to see whether students understood the lectures content. Provided that students substitute school from online courses, the test simply becomes an open-book test. There is a risk of pupils using materials from the book, media or even friends.

 To conclude, although online courses are preferred by many people for their comfort, students should not be able to take all their classes online. Rather, schools should provide various activities other than studying and support their learning with strict control in classrooms. With outline courses, professors are also able settle their evaluation systems while communicating with students in class. Before simply adapting all online courses, we should ask the following question. Does school only exist for studying? Can Internet control learners?