When we talk about doing any course, then the picture of the classroom that we can imagine is of a room filled with the students, and a professor or a teacher is explaining the concepts on a white or green board with the help of a chalk. But with the advancement of technology, this concept of the classroom is changing slowly. Now the classroom is also going online just like any other services. This online classroom is called a virtual class or e-learning. This e-learning is also of two types –
- Live sessions: In this type of classroom, the students interact with the teacher to live in the class through a video conference.
- Recorded sessions: In this type of session, the faculty records a class in the form of videos. And one can access these videos for learning.
This evolvement of technology has changed the education landscape for good.
- In online certification, the classes are conducted in the virtual form, meaning that the students have not to come to a particular place to attend the class.
- No attendance criteria for the students in the online certification program, whereas attendance, is very compulsory in the regular courses.
- The regular classes have a fixed capacity of taking the student, whereas the online classes can take any number of students.
Online certification has given a new dimension to education. There are certain perks of online certification courses which are drawbacks of regular classes, and these are –
- Flexibility: Even if you have skipped a lecture in the online course then there is absolutely no problem as even the live sessions are recorded, and these are made available to the students who are not possible in regular classes.
- Education from your home: As the online certification programs allow you to access the course from anywhere this means that you need not travel anywhere, and can easily log in to the course from your home.
- Various Options: While doing an online certification one can select from the various course options available. You can also do more than one course at a time.
- Self-Paced Learning: This gives one the flexibility in the learning. One can start and end the course depending upon his learning pace.
- Lower Cost: They offer the course at a price much lower than the regular courses, as you can save on many things.
Despite redefining the conventional education techniques, online certification does have cons, which are-
- Lack of accreditation: Various online courses are available that do not have any accreditation or proper affiliation. For example, Distance MBA is one of the most preferred online certification courses. Therefore care must be taken while selecting an online program so that the efforts and the time do not go in vain.
- Little or no face to face interaction: This is a major drawback that a student has almost no face to face interaction with the instructor. As a consequence, a student might not be able to clear his queries if any.
- More Work: As more and more universities are providing online education hence their standard has increased a lot. This means that the student has to really work hard to get through these courses.
- Self-Discipline: Due to the lack of face to face interaction, one can feel to be isolated. Thus he has to be self-motivating to complete the course.
There is no denying that both online and offline education system has its own pros and cons. Therefore, one has to select from the two, which suits him/her the best.