The Social Aspects Of Traditional Colleges Are Experienced By Online Students

People taking online classes have plenty of challenges mustering the stamina to get through an academic year. Besides their courses, they have to maintain a working computer and related hardware, a place to study in comfort and make sure to get their courses and tests done in a timely and accurate manner.

Yet sometimes these virtual underclassmen also feel totally isolated because they are used to being surrounded by fellow classmates going through the same pressures they are.  Working for an on line college degree has all the same pressures as one on campus.

Actually, they are far from alone. What they don’t know is they are surrounded by fellow students and only have to reach out. One way online schools provide this is to ensure these students have easy contact with their teachers. Paradoxically, the teachers are reporting more contact with their online students than with their on-campus counterparts.

There is a common bit of misinformation circulating that e-learners work in a virtual vacuum. That’s hardly the case. If anything, the volume of e-mail messages between online teachers and their students have been measured to be as many as 5-6 per day. In addition, the students spend a considerable share of time on group message boards and chat rooms with their classmates.

As one can surmise, online students text their professors a lot. In turn, the teachers say they give these students more feedback than the students who spend their time standing in front of their professor’s door during the instructor’s office hours.

This emphasis on electronic communication has made many students be more productive than the on campus contemporaries. There is anecdotal evidence of heavy debate between several classmates - with the debaters actually both located in the same building; sometimes even in the same room.

The teachers are also getting some new and unusual benefits.  A Montana university has a professor who claims the online classes she headed over the past eight years had students in a dormitory on her campus and as far away as Egypt in the same class at the same time.

If that isn’t enough, an increasing number of on campus students have realized the online classes use the same books, lectures, notes and teachers as their physical classes. Also, as such online services as Facebook and other social networks have become endemic, more students are actually starting to prefer electronic education. This style of education conforms more to their modern lifestyle, particularly the working student who must schedule around a job and possibly even family life.

Professors are reaping some new, unique benefits, too. One, who meets with his students only online, doesn't live remotely anywhere near his campus at all. Returning to that college in Montana, another educator is still conducting his classes up there in the Badlands while doing research over 3,000 miles away in New York.

A third teacher made some headlines because he was teaching while being a solider deployed in Iraq. Due to the capabilities of online education platforms, all these teachers never missed a class. So, if students and teachers are finding and reporting these kinds of benefits, we should see this form of communications growing even more.

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