Free Online Education To Break Away Academic Conventions

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We are living in an era, which possesses all kind of conveniences, in terms of time, technology and even education. Previously the educational course, which seemed to be impossible to achieve due to the lack of time, money and due to the adequacy of personal and professional responsibilities, today, with the graduation of time and technology, that academic degree can be attained easily. Thanks to the radically evolved online learning, today a four years long programme does take only 2 years.

The E-learning As The Replacement Of Traditional Education

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There was a time when a classroom was defined by the presence of blackboard, chalk, benches, and a cohort of students, listening to the professor's lectures. But the picture in recent time has completely been veered. A study by The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) shows that, 32 percent undergraduate students prefer to pursue their study while maintaining their full time job. All a modern age student seeks is an accessible, flexible, innovative and job-oriented education programme.

Here lies the secret, why the majority of undergraduate learners are inclined towards the ventures of online education. The e-learning programmes not only welcome students into a world of education without boundaries, but they also bestow an abundance of aspects that make students seek online graduation degrees.

• Online education programmes minimize the complications and limitations of time & place.
• For those, who already started to go ahead with their professional careers, online graduation courses make the resources and technologies affordable and approachable.
• This breakthrough in education allows people from all over the world to acquire not only a degree but also excellence.

However, some contradictory opinions are there to challenge the online learning models, stating that, there will remain a need for traditional college education as it provides students with a plenty of important benefits like students-teacher interaction.

The Impact Of MOOCs

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Since their advent in 2011, MOOCs have been creating an immense impact on academic world, becoming a genre of their own. The absence of tuition fees, flexible courses and a without boundary study system have increased the number of students per course. Today MOOCs are hosted by many eminent universities around the world , such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford and so on.

• HarvardX & edX

One of the prominent platforms, that have partnered with MOOCs, is edX and HarvardX is one of the 29 institutions, whose contents appear on edX. In spite of the its unsteady scale, edx's software, Open Response Assessment (ORA), provides about 2.5 million students with grades and contents. After being skilled and equipped about the ideas that usually come from students , ORA can provide with feedback to students' questions. Commenting on edX and ORA, Piotr Mitros, edX’s chief scientist, states, “ If you asked me, ‘Do you want a school experience where every single piece of text is graded by machine?’ I’d say, ‘That’s a straw-man. Nobody is proposing that.”

To Conclude

A letter, published in The Chronicle Of Higher Education, witnessed the view of the philosophy faculty of San Jose State University that described the MOOC as a “serious compromise of quality of education”. Their fear was that MOOC will soon replace flesh-and-blood teachers and the traditional classroom will go into extinction soon. This letter prominently conveys that MOOC renders a huge access and flexibility of online learning to the people from every genre.

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