E-learning: pros and cons

• Flexibility

Watching classes from the comfort of your home (in your pajamas) has been good for many. I believe this has reduced the loss of buses, subways and other types of public transportation, in addition to hundreds of traffic jams to attend educational institutions.

In the same way, I believe that study schedules have been made more flexible. Whether it is the time set aside to do an assignment or to hand it in, schedules seem to be less tight than before. In fact, as far as I have been able to find out, asynchronous classes have become more widespread. Busy with some other issue when it is class time? Take the class when you are free through some app or digital platform.

• Internet library

While in schools we didn't have many options to look up answers to questions asked in the classroom, now with virtual classes it's easy to paraphrase something in the great instant library, also known as the internet.

Not everyone has been able to take full advantage of this library, but those who have, have been able to get out of trouble in miraculous ways to totally unexpected questions.

However, I believe that the internet does not contain absolutely all the pre-determined answers that many expect, but it does provide very useful sources for developing materials or content related to what we are assigned. Is the internet man's new best friend?

• Different ways to be tested.

Unlike the monotonous essays, summaries, exams and presentations we used to have, e-learning has provided us with several new interesting options to be tested. Perhaps one of the most common nowadays is the Q&A in the different instant messaging apps such as Whatsapp, Telegram or Discord. The teacher states a controversial topic or situation and asks questions that students answer synchronously. And, let us say, the diversity of visible answers generates, in turn, more discussion about the referred issue among the participants.

CONS

• Poor or no internet connection

E-learning can be a refreshing modality for the education of millions of people around the world, but then there will be no such thing if there is only a poor internet service or no internet connection at all.

Despite much progress on this issue in recent years, there are still regions such as Latin America that have areas without proper internet service. And that is when social gaps start silently widening, resulting in a growing mass of people without many opportunities to make a decent future for themselves.

• Limited explanations.

Another unfavorable issue of e-learning seems to be the insufficient explanations that students receive. They, perhaps more acquainted with technology, have quickly become accustomed to most of the variants that virtual classes have brought with them, while their counterparts, the teachers, have had to deal, in most cases, with the situation of not knowing how to explain their classes appropriately in this new modality.

This context could be giving rise to a generalized dissatisfaction among teachers and students as they are participants in a process that hardly favors an educational process that is pertinent to the needs and duties of its protagonists.

• No cooperative learning.

In addition to what have been said, I have come to know that there are students who are discouraged by the unnaturalness of e-learning. They think that the lack of real social interaction negatively conditions their chances of learning.

For some, remote and individual learning is unsatisfactory in that it lacks much of the dynamism and emotional incentive that came from studying and succeeding academically with one or more classmates in face-to-face classes.

Let me know your thoughts on this topic in the comments section :)