Educational paradigm shift
Through the history, school teachers served as the ultimate knowledge brokers and grading authorities. Education delivery was conducted mostly vis-à-vis by passing the body of knowledge/skills directly from teacher to students. The model has been working pretty well in those old days as the education was kind of rarity, possessed by relatively narrow societal strata; just to mention a few of good historical examples: Plato teaching Aristotle, and, sequentially, Aristotle personally tutoring Alexander the Great. Technological revolution and democratization of society created unprecedented demand for quality education en mass. Universal public education became the matter of quintessential societal concern, serving the strategic national interests of maintaining and extending the US techno-economic leadership and competitiveness.
The need for education reform
Public education in the US has been under intensive criticism for its inefficiency and tremendous cost to the society. The fundamental problem of traditional institutionalized school-centric educational model is rooted in a chronic shortage and geographical disparity of the highly-qualified teachers and the interrelated issue of the educational curriculum/standards currency, which lag behind the trends and needs of modern rapidly changing job markets. Severity of this issue is particular notable in strategically important area of SMET (Science, Math, Engineering and Technology) education. In recognition of this fact and corresponding search for effective solutions, the remote learning model, capable of connecting students with best-qualified educators nationwide, free of geographic or socio-economic barriers, emerged and gradually moved into the focus of public attention.
Online education is an agent of change
Though the concept of remote (aka distant) learning and even its sample practical implementations could be traced centuries back, but the real progress in this area was tightly correlated with the arrival and proliferation of the Internet. Democratic nature of the Web, its global accessibility, inclusiveness and tremendous collaborative capacity made it a perfect platform for the distant education.
Flexible and dynamic Internet-based educational technologies are able to successfully complement the traditional formal institutionalized public school-centric education system, broadening the educational opportunities for the students in economically disadvantaged groups, geographically distant areas, and potentially extending the educators’ base due to involvement of industry professionals in STEM educational activities. Online education is essentially paperless, which means dramatic cost/labor reduction and tremendous positive environmental effects. Online educational materials, presented in modern media-rich inspirational way, provide unparalleled width of subject selection and depth of topic coverage, stimulating self-paced education and collaborative knowledge sharing.
Online education has tremendous potential to deal with students’ learning differences and cognitive disparity, adding the necessary “educational granularity” and adjusting the complexity levels of educational courses in accordance to the individual requirements; the latter is hardly achievable within traditional highly-institutionalized and over-centralized public school system.
Key components of online education
Online education could come in many different flavors, providing variety of quality Internet-based educational resources and opportunities at highly competitive rates or even free of charge:
- Virtual classrooms and lab-rooms
- Interactive paperless tutorials and other instructional materials
- Online knowledge/skills evaluation software applications
- Educational forums and social network, i.e. “kids-to-kids education/tutoring”
- Educational interactive web-TV channels
Online educational resources
- Free online school math Calculators and problem solvers (for desktop and notebook PC)
- Free online mobile school math Calculators and problem solvers (for iPod Touch, iPhone, Zune HD)
- Free online 3 fraction Calculator (rated #1 on Google)
- Online tutoring at K-12 and college level: www.tutor.com (a NY-based Company)
- Online Universities: www.phoenix.edu, www.waldenu.edu, www.devry.edu
- Virtual classrooms software: www.educadium.com
- Free online tutorials, textbooks and other educational material
- Free online practice tests on math/critical reading (SAT, ACT and GED)
Copyright © 2009 Alexander Bell
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