Online Education

Online Education

Introduction

Although online education is presently available at most colleges and universities, it is still considered a new and growing phenomenon in postsecondary education. The arrival of technology has allowed all students the opportunity “to succeed but with this new success comes a responsibility to understand how to maximize the experience for the students”. With the increased growth and popularity of the Internet in higher education, there is a critical need to further investigate the study of learning styles and how they relate to online education among low-income and first-generation college students.

Discussion

In today's society, it is vital for all individuals to understand the critical importance of obtaining some type of postsecondary education. As educational paradigms shift from traditional to online learning, so does the growing need to provide educational opportunities for all citizens desiring to obtain a college degree. With the increasing support for and rising numbers of America's disadvantaged populations enrolling in postsecondary education, institutions are continuously being challenged to modify their processes in order to meet the growing needs of lowincome and first-generation adults. It is believed that colleges and universities should offer assistance programs to low-income and first-generation students in order to help them become more academically prepared. During the 1964 Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, TRiO programs were created to address the educational needs of America's disadvantaged population. Federally funded TRiO programs were formed in the hopes of providing economically disadvantaged individuals an equal opportunity to better their educational futures. The central issue in the literature of online education is pedagogy. The hows and whys of teaching online far outweigh the technical and technological questions of using a new medium in both quantity and fervor. In research and practice, online learning seems to have rejuvenated consideration of teaching in higher education. In fact, professors have found that designing and teaching online courses have sharpened their pedagogical skills. The growing capacity of course management systems and other technology provides a wealth of tools for online education. But good technology does not obscure bad teaching, as one author so aptly summarized: “many institutions are jumping on the technology bandwagon, their goal is to use the technology to transmit a tired and stale pedagogy over fiber optic cable—as if the fiber optic cable will somehow transform the pedagogy”. Because technology is what makes the phenomenon of online education possible, there has been a great deal of writing about technological issues. But the salient work for this study is not about technical aspects of hardware but the philosophical and practical implications of using a relatively new technology as the primary means of connecting teachers, learners and content. Three critical issues merit specific discussion: access, who can get to the technology; fluency, how well they can use it; and decision-making, how that technology is chosen and used for educational purposes. The main technological issue in online education is decision-making. Early judgments about how online programs were to be conceived and implemented were often hardware and software driven, heavily influenced ...