Saturday, September 5, 2009

Internet: The New Classroom

By: Ryan Dettmann


Through the last couple of decades technology has made it easier for teachers to get materials and information to students. Some of the latest advances have been online notes, online homework, and even online courses. These advancements, though they do get information out in the public, do they take away from the experience of a classroom or do students do better in a online classroom and do online courses and notes encourage cheating.

The first question is does online classrooms take away from the real college experience and do students do better in a physical or virtual classroom. In every classroom there is a sense of a connection between teacher and student which can helpful to students. But in The New York Times articles mentioning a study by SRI International for the Department of Education concludes that students do better taking online courses compared to the conventional classroom. Though this may be true many people still prefer to the conventional mode of teaching in a classroom.



One thing that commonly occurs in the classroom is cheating, though unspoken, people do do it. With the increases of electronic classrooms and homework, surprisingly people are studying more in groups and studying more in general as mention. Additionally, with the turn to digital homework and classrooms, some websites have employed special anti-plagiarism programs. They can compare a paper turned in to other ones in the class and countless others outside of the class to see if a big percentage of the paper was copied off another or not.

The anti-plagiarism securities and group collaboration studying add to the study that concluded people learn better online learning. These advancements in technology have made learning more accessible and possibly in a few years most classes will go web-based in some kind of way.

No comments:

Post a Comment