Online Education Trends
Nowadays digitalization is no longer a futuristic and hypothetical term which appeared as a topic on business conferences or seminars. It is our present and guarantee of a stable development in any sphere and line.
Digitalization became a must in a state policy same as in business. And both business and governments in all countries understand a role of education. Competent staff is the same resource and advantage as machine tool was years ago. In some spheres role of staff’s strength is even deeper. It is especially relevant for IT, ICT (information and communication technologies) and modern production. These spheres grandly drive mankind society. And the pace of these enhancements has a back impact on education. As it follows occupations and specialties are changing very quickly. Sometimes even the term of specialties is questioned itself. So in developed countries one person might change two or three spheres for a short period.
Digitalization also provided a better and easier access to the network to lots of people worldwide. Growth of technological resources granted huge variety of opportunities to them. For example, Smart City concept and solutions for urban environment or less global consequence – entertainment industry with its offers of subscription content access. But subscription is not the greatest good which digitalization gave us.
Online education came to our lives few years ago when influence of these two factors became as strong as possible. In this situation number of people who need new knowledge but have no time (and many other reasons) for offline education form a demand for online way of learning. By the same logic number of people and organizations who are ready to teach online turned out to be weighty.
Lots of people already tried it and even more became daily users of online education. Benefits are quite simple: you can do it where and when you want; you can choose themes and spheres of you lessons; you can choose preferable teachers and form of learning. But still, offline education (we will mean only higher education, not touching theme of middle education) is kind of must to majority of people. In its turn benefits and fortes of traditional way of learning are well known. So it looks like we will witness rival between these two.
Anyway both of them have their weaknesses. And many leading experts say that nowadays education sphere is in a great need of overcoming this controversy. Educational centers should find a way of integration them to each other. They should complement each other covering disadvantages and weaknesses of each other.
We can observe realization of this idea on the example of principal Russian university – HSE. Students of HSE on different programs could face integration of online education. For example you have your main discipline. But in modern situation specialists need knowledge which is not taking in count by learning plan. In this case, university give them access to appropriate online course, which covers this gap. Without this solution students would wait for needed classes for years.
So as it seems that the role of online education should be increased. It is truly positive trend, which can launch progress of our society with a brand new power.