Are online education courses the key to unlocking a students potential?

I have chosen the topic of online education courses and how they may help or hinder students.

“Online education is more than a new delivery mode. It is a new learning domain which enables us as educators and as learners to engage in learning interactions more easily, more often and perhaps more effectively, but also to develop qualitatively new and different forms of educational interactions.” (Tollman 207)

Online education classes enable students to learn under their own pretense, without a specific one to three hour daily time frame for class. It is not even necessary for a student enrolled in an online course to get out of bed to ‘attend class’. The professor may be living and teaching on one continent, while the students are living and learning on the other six continents.
Online courses and degrees are becoming more common and advertisements can be found just about anywhere. A full-time mother and part-time retail worker may take online courses that lead to a degree in nursing. This type of scenario is becoming more common due to the lack of time and energy that many adults are facing.

Many students in the 21^st century have difficulty concentrating in class and on assignments, because they pause to check their twitter, facebook or email. Are online courses the key to unlocking these students’ potentials? Though these students fail to self-regulate, which may lead to the work never being done, online courses may be able to help change this problem (Williams 71). By including assignments such as daily blog tasks and even open-book exams, students may actually want to learn and will effectively garner more information and learning than they would in a normal class setting. Online courses often include open-book exams, which lead to students actually opening the textbook, reading and learning—rather than the ever-popular methods of looking over the shoulder or using a cell phone. Incorporating Skype, blog tasks, facebook and forum discussions help keep the student on task, as this is what they are used to doing while on a computer—it is more natural and may actually help students concentrate on the task as hand.

Can online education develop into a system that allows all students to build off of what they know to be the teaching styles and learning features they value most in a classroom setting?

Tollman, Julie I., Angela D. Benson. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science. Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 207-223. Web. 14 Jan. 2011.

Williams, Peter E., Chan M. Hellman. Differences in Self-Regulation for Online Learning between First- and Second-Generation College Students. Research in Higher Education, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Feb., 2004), pp. 71-82. Web. 16 Jan 2011.