There are 3 big benefits of online learning that students don’t get from going to an in-person college. This is very important since many people think the main purpose of college is to prepare students for the real world. It’s to learn how to learn so they can continue to be educated employees and citizens.
The problem is that nowadays, learning how to learn in a classroom is outdated. Almost all of the future education students would learn after college is online. This makes students who go through college learning in a classroom ill-prepared for learning in the real world.
Here are the three biggest benefits of online learning for students:
1) Corporate Education Is Online
The first benefit of online learning is that in today’s corporate world, most of the education is taught online. This makes employees expected to be able to effectively learn online so they can keep up with the fast-paced changes in nearly every industry.
A study from IBM showed that just 4 years ago it took about 3 days to re-skill employees compared to it being about 36 days now. This likely can be attributed to the quickly growing complexity of today’s jobs.
This proved to learning leaders that it’s impossible to remove people from their job for that length of time to put them in a classroom learning environment. The only way forward is with online education.
This becomes a problem when recent graduates start working at these companies but are only accustomed to learning in an in-person classroom.
This creates many learning challenges for employees as they aren’t able to learn online with minimal oversight which leads to a lack of productivity. Many times this results in the employee being let go and them thinking the job was over their head when in reality they just were never prepared for this type of learning.
With the coronavirus forcing nearly all companies to transition to purely online training, they have since learned that online learning results in better outcomes at a much lesser cost. This means that even after this pandemic over, companies will continue to only train their employees online.
2) Recreational Education Is Online
Other than corporate education moving entirely online, the same can be said for recreational education which is all of the education that doesn’t relate to your career/job.
Recreational education is everything you want to learn about to be a functioning adult. It includes politics, history, math, taxes, art, car maintenance, etc.
Nowadays, you don’t enroll in evening college classes if you want to learn about politics or taxes. All of this recreational learning is done online on your own time.
You search up your questions on Google, YouTube, Reddit, or take open online courses. You find books on Amazon that you can read on your Kindle.
Platforms like Coursera, Udemy, or GreatCoursesPlus are used to learn entire subjects in depth. There is an endless supply of high-quality information online to learn any subject you might be interested in.
If you want to be a well-educated adult that is resourceful, then you will need to develop your online learning skills to be able to learn whatever it is you want whenever you need it.
Without these online learning skills you will quickly forget whatever it is you learning in college and not be able to learn throughout the rest of your life. That’s why this is one of the major benefits of online learning.
3) Learning Online Is More Self-Directed
In today’s world, someone simply can’t spend a few years learning and expect to be done with education for the rest of their life.
The new requirement for being an educated adult is a commitment to life long learning. You must be willing to continuously take the initiative to educate yourself to stay current in today’s world. Here is the new model for higher education.
Without this commitment, you will lose your career to technology and automation. You will even lose your place society as new standards are innovated for the way you live your life.
This is a problem for students go to college as many go in with the expectation that they will grind for 4 years and be done learning for the foreseeable future.
During this grind many students even develop a hatred towards learning as they associate education with the negative emotions they feel every time they have to wake up to go to class to learn about something they know they will never use.
Teachers have had to put in place punishments for students not showing up to class even if they do perfect on the tests. This is because for many students the only motivation they have to go to class is so the teachers don’t drop their grade or fail them.
This college learning environment conditions students to learn like robots where they must be told what to learn, how to learn it, and when to learn it. This sets students up for failure in a world of life long learning where self-direction and initiative are king. That’s why the ability to learn on your own is such a huge benefit of online learning.
Final Thoughts on the Benefits of Online Learning
If students want to be functioning adults in our modern economy, then they will need to recognize the benefits of online learning and start taking action.
If you’re planning on attending college, you might want to consider doing it solely online to set yourself up for success. You can also read The Lean Career online for free which shows you exactly what you need to do to learn online to start your career without college.
