Читать книгу Online Learning For Dummies - Susan Manning - Страница 15

Online courses and opportunities to learn have been steadily growing in popularity for the past decade. Here are just a few reasons online learning is popular:

 You can work around your schedule. Who isn’t triple-scheduled these days with demands of work, family, and community? Few of us have large blocks of time available for classes, but we may have an hour here or there. In an online course, you can log in and work whenever it fits into your schedule. You may find that studying for an hour first thing in the morning or over your lunch break is just what you need to get you back into the academic groove.

 You can save time and money by not having to commute to school. Even if your local college is five miles from your home, the process of packing up your gear, getting to the school, finding parking, and walking to the classroom takes 30 minutes. Save the gas money and time, and study from home!

 In some cases, courses are accelerated and you complete the degree or program sooner. A mixed blessing, many online programs have accelerated a traditional semester-long course into 8 weeks. Though you may take only one course at a time (or two, over the course of a 16-week semester), these courses move fast! The good news is that these kinds of programs typically run year-round and advance students through degrees and certificate programs faster than they would otherwise. (Flip to Chapter 4 for more information on accelerated classes.)

 Some of the pettiness and bias between students in traditional classes gets left behind in the online world. No one knows whether you are shy, speak with a lisp, or sport multiple tattoos when you’re an online student. What others care about are your ideas and how you communicate these ideas about the course material. Many students find this situation liberating.