argumentative essay on online learning is the future of education

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Argumentative Essay: Online Learning and Educational Access

Conventional learning is evolving with the help of computers and online technology. New ways of learning are now available, and improved access is one of the most important benefits available. People all around the world are experiencing improved mobility as a result of the freedom and potential that online learning provides, and as academic institutions and learning organisations adopt online learning technologies and remote-access learning, formal academic education is becoming increasingly legitimate. This essay argues the contemporary benefits of online learning, and that these benefits significantly outweigh the issues, challenges and disadvantages of online learning.

Online learning is giving people new choices and newfound flexibility with their personal learning and development. Whereas before, formal academic qualifications could only be gained by participating in a full time course on site, the internet has allowed institutions to expand their reach and offer recognized courses on a contact-partial, or totally virtual, basis. Institutions can do so with relatively few extra resources, and for paid courses this constitutes excellent value, and the student benefits with greater educational access and greater flexibility to learn and get qualified even when there lots of other personal commitments to deal with.

Flexibility is certainly one of the most important benefits, but just as important is educational access. On top of the internet’s widespread presence in developed countries, the internet is becoming increasingly available in newly developed and developing countries. Even without considering the general informational exposure that the internet delivers, online academic courses and learning initiatives are becoming more aware of the needs of people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and this means that people from such backgrounds are in a much better position to learn and progress than they used to be.

The biggest argument that raises doubt over online learning is the quality of online courses in comparison to conventional courses. Are such online courses good enough for employers to take notice? The second biggest argument is the current reality that faces many people from disadvantaged backgrounds, despite the improvements made in this area in recent years – they do not have the level of basic access needed to benefit from online learning. In fact, there are numerous sources of evidence that claim disadvantaged students are not receiving anywhere near the sort of benefits that online learning institutions and promoters are trying to instigate. Currently there are many organisations, campaigns and initiatives that are working to expand access to higher education. With such high participation, it can be argued that it is only a matter of time before the benefits are truly realised, but what about the global online infrastructure?

There is another argument that is very difficult to dispel, and that is the response of different types of students to the online learning paradigm. Evidence shows that there are certain groups of students that benefit from college distance learning much more than other groups. In essence, students must be highly motivated and highly disciplined if they are to learn effectively in their own private environment.

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Online Education (Argumentative Essay Sample)

Table of Contents

Introduction to Online Education Essay:

Technological advancements and ease of access to the internet are changing our lives for the better. Everything that we do on a daily basis is evolving every day, online education is also exploding in popularity. The convenience of learning while relaxing at your home using your computer is like a dream come true for most students. However, some people still vote in favor of traditional learning as they believe it’s more effective. In this essay, I will present arguments in favor of online learning to make you a believer in tech supremacy.  

Why waste your whole weekend writing long & boring argumentative essays? Hire an essay writing expert from Essay Basics and get your plagiarism-free argumentative essay.   

700 Words Argumentative Essay About Online Learning

The 21st century has witnessed a revolution in various fields and sectors. There is no doubt that the technology sector has grown the most out of all. The recent pandemic and year-long home quarantine have forced everyone to look for a better alternative to the physical/traditional form of learning. In these couple of years, online learning has flourished the most out of all. Online education is gaining more popularity every day because it’s smart, convenient and many believe it’s more effective too. I am also one of those who think that online education is the future of learning. I believe that interned-based education will soon take over all forms of traditional education.

Online (virtual) mode of education is a more convenient and flexible way of acquiring higher education in many ways. Unlike the traditional approach, online educational programs can be attended by anyone anywhere in the world. You just need access to a reliable internet connection along with a phone, laptop, or desktop computer. For instance, online programs provide great convenience to students who live far away from their schools and campuses. Online platforms enable students to study in all the online courses without even moving from where they live. With modern educational applications, students can even appear in exams while sitting in their homes. 

In addition to all these benefits, online schools are way cheaper than traditional education. Under traditional university programs, the students are required to pay for textbooks, transportation, and other institutional facilities. Facilities, such as physical libraries, gyms, swimming pools, and having lunch outside add to the cost of physical education. Online education, more or less only charges for tuition fees along with a few obligatory charges. This enables both poor and rich students to have more or less equal learning opportunities.

Here are more benefits of online education:

Advantages of Online Learning vs Traditional Learning

Many believe that online learning will soon take over all traditional forms of education. Nowadays, almost everyone has access to the internet and tech gadgets are becoming smart and cheaper. With all of this happening it’s safe to say that my argument in favor of online education seems to be more realistic than ever.

It’s Much More Convenient

You can take online classes from the comfort of your home. This means that you don’t have to get up early, you don’t have to catch the bus, you don’t have to travel long distances. You don’t even have to put on formals to attend an online class.

Its Less Costly

Getting an education from home means you don’t have to pay for transport. You don’t need to put on formals or uniforms every day. You don’t even have to pay for textbooks or library services. In short, online education enables you to only pay for tuition along with a few obligatory expenses.

Its Less Time Consuming

Online education enables you to attend live lectures in minutes. Therefore, it only takes 3-5 minutes to begin learning. This means that instead of traveling miles to reach and return from your educational campuses you save 2-3 hours by attending online lectures. 

In conclusion, access to the best form of education has become a fundamental aspect of human life. Online learning is a feasible, cheaper, and convenient way through which individuals in need of higher education can attain their objectives. While a few drawbacks are linked to virtual learning, the quality of education offered is almost equivalent to that offered in traditional classrooms. I think that the benefits of online education surpass all other forms of education. Based on all the above-listed arguments I can now say that online learning is the most effective mode of getting a good education.

Short Argumentative Essay Against Online Education (Sample)

Disadvantages of Online Education: Online or internet-based learning is a relatively new mode of education. While face-to-face education has been around for centuries, online education is still developing every day. I believe that traditional schooling is much better than online education. In this essay, I will present arguments to prove why traditional learning is better.

Online learning fails to provide a healthy learning environment. Students attend virtual classes while feeling lazy and less focused. Many students are unable to understand the body language of their instructor through small screens.

On the other hand, traditional schooling is much more interactive. It enables teachers to interact with all the students while teaching. Teachers do this by making eye contact, paying attention to every student, and ultimately filling the room with positive learning energy. Students’ facial expressions also help the instructors understand what’s lacking and help them eliminate confusion in no time.

Here’s Why Traditional Education is Better than Online Education

It’s less interactive.

Through traditional learning, students can understand complex concepts through the instructor’s body language and face reading. Eye contact along with individual attention to every student thus enhances the learning experience by many folds.

It’s Unhealthy

Through online learning students just turn on their computers where ever they are and start attending online courses. They also don’t have to attend any sporting activities nor do they socialize with their friends. This negatively affects their physical health and their bodies don’t develop as they should.

In conclusion, I am not trying to criticize online learning by any means. I am of the view that the online education system is still developing and is not yet ready to satisfy student learning needs. More time is required to make the online system function as the traditional education system. Until that time traditional schooling was just better.

Argumentative Essay Topics (Titles) About Online Learning

• Online Classroom VS Physical Classroom – Is Online Education the Future?
• Online Education VS Physical Education – Which one is Better?
• Online Class vs Physical Class – What is the best form of learning?
• Classroom Based Education Versus Internet based Education – Argumentative Essays
• Online Classes VS Traditional Classes – Which One is More Effective?
• 7 Advantages of Online Learning vs Traditional Learning
• 6 Reasons Why Online Education is a Better Option Than Traditional Education
• Differences Between Online Learning and Traditional Learning – What’s Better?
• Debate About the Strengths and Weaknesses of Online Education
• Online Schooling and Distance Learning is the Future of Education – Debate

FAQ’s About Online Education VS Physical Education Essay

Q: is online learning effective or not an argument.

Answer: Yes, it is an argument. Primary and high school students are mostly required to write argumentative essays to improve mental reasoning. 

Q: Are online studies good or bad essays?

Answer: Many believe that online studies are the future of education. Online education is a convenient, less costly, and time-saving way of getting an education.

Q: Is online learning as good as face-to-face learning?

Answer: Many believe online education is taking over all other forms of learning. However, most people still believe that traditional education is more effective.

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• Published: 25 January 2021

Online education in the post-COVID era

• Barbara B. Lockee 1  

Nature Electronics volume  4 ,  pages 5–6 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The coronavirus pandemic has forced students and educators across all levels of education to rapidly adapt to online learning. The impact of this — and the developments required to make it work — could permanently change how education is delivered.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world to engage in the ubiquitous use of virtual learning. And while online and distance learning has been used before to maintain continuity in education, such as in the aftermath of earthquakes 1 , the scale of the current crisis is unprecedented. Speculation has now also begun about what the lasting effects of this will be and what education may look like in the post-COVID era. For some, an immediate retreat to the traditions of the physical classroom is required. But for others, the forced shift to online education is a moment of change and a time to reimagine how education could be delivered 2 .

Looking back

Online education has traditionally been viewed as an alternative pathway, one that is particularly well suited to adult learners seeking higher education opportunities. However, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has required educators and students across all levels of education to adapt quickly to virtual courses. (The term ‘emergency remote teaching’ was coined in the early stages of the pandemic to describe the temporary nature of this transition 3 .) In some cases, instruction shifted online, then returned to the physical classroom, and then shifted back online due to further surges in the rate of infection. In other cases, instruction was offered using a combination of remote delivery and face-to-face: that is, students can attend online or in person (referred to as the HyFlex model 4 ). In either case, instructors just had to figure out how to make it work, considering the affordances and constraints of the specific learning environment to create learning experiences that were feasible and effective.

The use of varied delivery modes does, in fact, have a long history in education. Mechanical (and then later electronic) teaching machines have provided individualized learning programmes since the 1950s and the work of B. F. Skinner 5 , who proposed using technology to walk individual learners through carefully designed sequences of instruction with immediate feedback indicating the accuracy of their response. Skinner’s notions formed the first formalized representations of programmed learning, or ‘designed’ learning experiences. Then, in the 1960s, Fred Keller developed a personalized system of instruction 6 , in which students first read assigned course materials on their own, followed by one-on-one assessment sessions with a tutor, gaining permission to move ahead only after demonstrating mastery of the instructional material. Occasional class meetings were held to discuss concepts, answer questions and provide opportunities for social interaction. A personalized system of instruction was designed on the premise that initial engagement with content could be done independently, then discussed and applied in the social context of a classroom.

These predecessors to contemporary online education leveraged key principles of instructional design — the systematic process of applying psychological principles of human learning to the creation of effective instructional solutions — to consider which methods (and their corresponding learning environments) would effectively engage students to attain the targeted learning outcomes. In other words, they considered what choices about the planning and implementation of the learning experience can lead to student success. Such early educational innovations laid the groundwork for contemporary virtual learning, which itself incorporates a variety of instructional approaches and combinations of delivery modes.

Online learning and the pandemic

Fast forward to 2020, and various further educational innovations have occurred to make the universal adoption of remote learning a possibility. One key challenge is access. Here, extensive problems remain, including the lack of Internet connectivity in some locations, especially rural ones, and the competing needs among family members for the use of home technology. However, creative solutions have emerged to provide students and families with the facilities and resources needed to engage in and successfully complete coursework 7 . For example, school buses have been used to provide mobile hotspots, and class packets have been sent by mail and instructional presentations aired on local public broadcasting stations. The year 2020 has also seen increased availability and adoption of electronic resources and activities that can now be integrated into online learning experiences. Synchronous online conferencing systems, such as Zoom and Google Meet, have allowed experts from anywhere in the world to join online classrooms 8 and have allowed presentations to be recorded for individual learners to watch at a time most convenient for them. Furthermore, the importance of hands-on, experiential learning has led to innovations such as virtual field trips and virtual labs 9 . A capacity to serve learners of all ages has thus now been effectively established, and the next generation of online education can move from an enterprise that largely serves adult learners and higher education to one that increasingly serves younger learners, in primary and secondary education and from ages 5 to 18.

The COVID-19 pandemic is also likely to have a lasting effect on lesson design. The constraints of the pandemic provided an opportunity for educators to consider new strategies to teach targeted concepts. Though rethinking of instructional approaches was forced and hurried, the experience has served as a rare chance to reconsider strategies that best facilitate learning within the affordances and constraints of the online context. In particular, greater variance in teaching and learning activities will continue to question the importance of ‘seat time’ as the standard on which educational credits are based 10 — lengthy Zoom sessions are seldom instructionally necessary and are not aligned with the psychological principles of how humans learn. Interaction is important for learning but forced interactions among students for the sake of interaction is neither motivating nor beneficial.

While the blurring of the lines between traditional and distance education has been noted for several decades 11 , the pandemic has quickly advanced the erasure of these boundaries. Less single mode, more multi-mode (and thus more educator choices) is becoming the norm due to enhanced infrastructure and developed skill sets that allow people to move across different delivery systems 12 . The well-established best practices of hybrid or blended teaching and learning 13 have served as a guide for new combinations of instructional delivery that have developed in response to the shift to virtual learning. The use of multiple delivery modes is likely to remain, and will be a feature employed with learners of all ages 14 , 15 . Future iterations of online education will no longer be bound to the traditions of single teaching modes, as educators can support pedagogical approaches from a menu of instructional delivery options, a mix that has been supported by previous generations of online educators 16 .

Also significant are the changes to how learning outcomes are determined in online settings. Many educators have altered the ways in which student achievement is measured, eliminating assignments and changing assessment strategies altogether 17 . Such alterations include determining learning through strategies that leverage the online delivery mode, such as interactive discussions, student-led teaching and the use of games to increase motivation and attention. Specific changes that are likely to continue include flexible or extended deadlines for assignment completion 18 , more student choice regarding measures of learning, and more authentic experiences that involve the meaningful application of newly learned skills and knowledge 19 , for example, team-based projects that involve multiple creative and social media tools in support of collaborative problem solving.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, technological and administrative systems for implementing online learning, and the infrastructure that supports its access and delivery, had to adapt quickly. While access remains a significant issue for many, extensive resources have been allocated and processes developed to connect learners with course activities and materials, to facilitate communication between instructors and students, and to manage the administration of online learning. Paths for greater access and opportunities to online education have now been forged, and there is a clear route for the next generation of adopters of online education.

Before the pandemic, the primary purpose of distance and online education was providing access to instruction for those otherwise unable to participate in a traditional, place-based academic programme. As its purpose has shifted to supporting continuity of instruction, its audience, as well as the wider learning ecosystem, has changed. It will be interesting to see which aspects of emergency remote teaching remain in the next generation of education, when the threat of COVID-19 is no longer a factor. But online education will undoubtedly find new audiences. And the flexibility and learning possibilities that have emerged from necessity are likely to shift the expectations of students and educators, diminishing further the line between classroom-based instruction and virtual learning.

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Lockee, B.B. Online education in the post-COVID era. Nat Electron 4 , 5–6 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-00534-0

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Is online learning the future of education?

In a recent survey, almost 80% of young people said they've taken an online course Image:  REUTERS/Eric Gaillard

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Jiyuan Yu

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Stay up to date:.

In the past, if you wanted to get a qualification, or even simply learn something new, you would sign up for a course at a bricks-and-mortar institution, pay any relevant fees, and then physically attend class. That was until the online learning revolution started.

Last year, the e-learning market was worth an enormous $166.5 billion. It’s been estimated that this will grow to $255 billion by 2017 . Its growing financial value is matched only by the swelling numbers of students choosing to follow an online course.

In the latest Global Shapers Survey of 25,000 young people from across the world, 77.84% of respondents reported having taken online courses in the past. So is online learning the future of education?

Let’s start first by looking at what exactly it is. Online education takes two major forms. The first: for-credit courses where students enrolled in tertiary education take online classes offered by home or other higher education learning institutions for credit. Some well-known cases include the MIT OpenCourseWare and the Harvard Online learning.

The second form of online education consists of professional training and certification preparation. Such online learning is usually targeted at professionals or students seeking training or preparing for certification exams. Popular courses include training in foreign languages, accounting and nursing.

In the Global Shapers Survey, close to half (47.79%) of respondents said they would be willing to pursue certification for certain skills, including online certification, once they have started their working careers. This again speaks to the large potential and market for online education.

The growth of online education has not been without challenges. Since its early inception in the 1960s, online education has been constantly criticized for its apparent lack of quality control, particularly the scarcity of high-quality teachers.

It’s also been said that online learning deprives students of some of the benefits of being in a classroom, such as teacher-student interaction, as well as other things such as a reliable internet connection and electricity supply.

Regardless of these concerns, online education has made great strides in recent years. For starters, more and more institutions of higher learning have introduced or reinforced their online education platforms, the main considerations being cost reduction for students and recruitment expansion in face of rising competition. As a result, online education has become an increasingly important part of tertiary education, with colleges and universities using world-famous faculty members and professional support teams to promote online courses.

To tackle the question of teaching quality, a number of providers have turned to user rating and internal evaluation. Star teacher, for instance, has become a popular teacher evaluation mechanism in China and South Korea, two of the largest e-learning markets.

Overall, such progress seems to have eased the doubt about the quality of teaching, and 40.56% of respondents in the Global Shapers Survey said online education is as strong as traditional learning in a classroom, with another 11.76% saying they didn’t know.

The maturity of education technology has also enabled online education to become more manageable and accessible than ever before. All a prospective student needs is a computer, an internet connection and some basic IT skills.

As for the loss of traditional classroom features, online education has been making up for this through its flexibility and low cost. Students have access to their “classroom” recordings whenever they want, allowing them to go over ideas and review lessons at their convenience. Some have also pointed out that far from being an inferior learning experience, the one-on-one lessons that are often part of online education have taken teacher-student interaction to a new level, where one student is getting all the attention and the interaction, and training can be so unique and valuable.

Furthermore, some argue that online education has significantly helped make education more accessible, thus achieving the aim of “education for all”, a theme that has become a global mandate since the 1990s. While a large number of countries have made significant progress in their provision of basic education to all citizens, there are still too many people – often living in remote areas – who can’t access education.

But with an increasing number of “netizens” in rural areas in many developing countries, online education could be used to reach the last group of citizens without proper access to education and hence fulfill Sustainable Development Goal 4 concerning quality education.

Undoubtedly, with the even wider spread of technology and deepening of the global mandate of education for all, online education’s potential to become complementary – or in some cases alternatives – to traditional education cannot be overlooked.

Instead of worrying whether or not online education can ever be as good as more traditional formats, perhaps we should instead focus on how we can use it to deliver quality education for people all over the world, particularly the poor and underserved.

This won’t be an easy task – online education is in dire need of regulation. Outstanding issues include the question of accreditation and quality control. This gets even more complicated when you consider the international dimensions. For years, cross-border credit or degree accreditation has been a major issue for various education systems. The flexibility of online learning will only make that harder.

The obstacles are real but not insurmountable. And the opportunity to make good on the promise of education for all is too big to miss.

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5 Reasons Why Online Learning is the Future of Education in 2024

Traditional education has changed radically within the last couple of years. Find out why online learning is a great choice for getting a quality education whenever and wherever you want.

• Online Learning
• Deciding Where to Study

The concept of traditional education has changed radically within the last couple of years. Being physically present in a classroom isn’t the only learning option anymore — not with the rise of the internet and new technologies, at least. Nowadays, you have access to a quality education whenever and wherever you want, as long as you can get online. We are now entering a new era — the revolution of online education.

There’s no need to discount the skepticism surrounding education through the internet. It’s hard to understand the notion of leaving behind the conventional classroom, especially if it's to face this vast space called The Internet. 

However, that’s not reason enough to shy away from this alternative, which has proven to be valid and useful for many students. According to the most recent survey from Babson Survey Research Group, over 30 percent of higher education students in the United States are taking at least one distance course. Online education is a sensible choice whether you’re a teenager or an adult. As a student, this can be a useful learning method for sharpening your skills in a difficult subject, or learning a new skill. 

Keep on reading to learn five more reasons why you should get involved in online education!

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1. It's flexible.

Online education enables the teacher and the student to set their own learning pace, and there’s the added flexibility of setting a schedule that fits everyone’s agenda. As a result, using an online educational platform allows for a better balance of work and studies, so there’s no need to give anything up. Studying online teaches you vital  time management skills , which makes finding a good work-study balance easier. Having a common agenda between the student and teacher can also prompt both parties to accept new responsibilities and have more autonomy. 

2. It offers a wide selection of programs.

In a space as vast and wide as the internet, there are infinite skills and subjects to teach and learn. A growing number of universities and higher education schools are offering online versions of their programs for various levels and disciplines. From music composition to quantum physics, there are options for every type of student. Studying your program online is also a great option for getting an official certificate, diploma, or degree without physically setting foot on a university campus. Nowadays, people get certificates that help them succeed in their professional careers; the excellent ones are especially the financial certifications with the best ROI ."

3. It’s accessible.

Online education enables you to study or teach from anywhere in the world. This means there’s no need to commute from one place to another, or follow a rigid schedule. On top of that, not only do you save time, but you also save money , which can be spent on other priorities. The virtual classroom is also available anywhere there’s an internet connection, and a good way to take advantage of this is to travel. For example, if you’re studying abroad and want to get a job, online education is a great choice. There’s no reason to give up on working or studying while exploring new and exotic places. 

4. It allows for a customized learning experience.

We’ve mentioned before how flexibility can help you to set your own study pace. But online education is also flexible for each student’s individual requirements and level of ability.

Online classes tend to be smaller than conventional class size. Most of the time, online learning platforms only allow one student at a time, and in almost all cases, this allows for greater interaction and more feedback between you and your tutor.

There’s often access to very diverse material such as videos, photos, and eBooks online as well, and tutors can also integrate other formats like forums or discussions to improve their lessons. And this extra content is available at any moment from anywhere, which will offer you a more dynamic and tailor-made education.

5. It’s more cost-effective than traditional education.

Unlike in-person education methods, online education tends to be more affordable. There’s also often a wide range of payment options that let you pay in installments or per class. This allows for better budget management. Many of you may also be subject to discounts or scholarships, so the price is rarely high. You can also save money from the commute and class materials, which are often available for free.

Not only that, but there are also plenty of scholarships available for online studies these days. In other words, the monetary investment is less, but the results can be better than other options.  

Final thoughts

These are only a few reasons to choose an online education, and why 90 percent of students today think that online learning is the same or better than the traditional classroom experience. Every student must assess their unique situation and decide according to their needs and goals, and while this alternative to traditional education is not for everyone, it's still a convenient option with virtually endless options for international students all over the world.

About the Author

Gemma Josep is the Content Manager for Classgap , an online platform whose purpose is to facilitate communication between teachers and students. She writes about the importance of online learning, education, and technology, and also works with Classgap to bring education closer and to create a perfect online environment to learn.

Keystone Team Author

The Keystone Team is comprised of experienced educators and advisors dedicated to providing valuable resources and advice to students all over the world.

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10 Reasons Why Teaching Online is the Future of Education

When most people think of education, they think about teachers at the front of classrooms full of students. However, when the Coronavirus pandemic radically changed the way we do most things (including learning), the future of education started to look different.

In the 2017-2018 school year, 21 percent of public schools and 13 percent of private schools offered at least one course online. 1 In the Fall of 2020, 75 percent of the nation's largest 50 school districts decided to start the school year completely online, while thousands more districts are using a hybrid model of some online and some in-person learning. 2 For teachers and students alike, online learning is a challenge, but one that is likely to stick around. Here are ten reasons teachers should be preparing for this new reality.

1. It offers a more customizable education experience.

2. it’s a cost-effective solution., 3. it increases enrollment slots..

• Availability of qualified teachers and administrators in the area
• Physical classroom space and available seats
• Distance that each student has to travel

With online learning, schools can open up class space to more students from more places, including those who don’t live in the area or who could not otherwise make it to a school in person. This provides more choice and opportunity for parents, especially those in areas with limited school resources. 4

4. Students and teachers are increasingly comfortable with technology.

5. broadband and digital device access is expanding..

A Pew Research Center poll in April 2020 revealed that 21 percent of parents with school-age children thought their children would not be able to complete schoolwork because they did not have access to a computer at home. 5 In August, a photo went viral, showing two school-age girls sitting behind a Taco Bell to complete their homework on the restaurant’s Wi-Fi network because they didn’t have access to the internet at home. 6

As this divide came to light, state, local, and federal governments started raising the prospect of making high-speed broadband more available to every family and every student. Broadband companies, non-profit organizations, local governments, and school districts have come together to try to solve the problem. This focus on the digital divide is likely to increase resources available for students and school districts, to create a better and more equitable online learning environment.

6. More tools are available to facilitate online learning.

7. it offers more opportunities for equity in education., 8. students can gain access to high-quality tutors to supplement lectures., 9. the pandemic may dramatically reshape the workforce and education., 10. schools are increasingly seeking teachers with online skills., prepare for your career in education..

Whether you’re planning a career as a policymaker or an educator, prepare for the future of education with your master’s degree or graduate certificate from the University of Kansas. With online programs in curriculum and teaching , educational leadership and policy studies , and special and inclusive education , we’re preparing the next generation of teachers for success. Learn more about our programs and get started today.

1. Retrieved October 19, 2020 from nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=79 2. Retrieved October 19, 2020 from mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/back-to-school-a-framework-for-remote-and-hybrid-learning-amid-covid-19 3. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from washingtonpost.com/local/education/public-school-budget-cuts-coronavirus/2020/05/27/ff0f07da-9d62-11ea-ad09-8da7ec214672_story.html 4. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from hechingerreport.org/the-gap-between-rich-and-poor-schools-grew-44-percent-over-a-decade/ 5. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from crpe.org/thelens/digital-divide-among-students-during-covid-19-who-has-access-who-doesnt 6. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from parents.com/news/photo-of-kids-using-taco-bell-wifi-is-a-startling-reminder-of-the-digital-divide/ 7. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from springwise.com/innovation-snapshot/education-schools-coronavirus 8. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from washingtonpost.com/education/2020/04/29/coronavirus-pandemic-shines-light-deep-digital-divide-us-amid-efforts-narrow-it/ 9. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from theguardian.com/education/2020/jul/23/schooling-children-coronavirus-tutors-zoom 10. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pages/despite-reopenings-many-employees-will-keep-working-remotely.aspx 11. Retrieved on October 19, 2020 from edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/04/20/virtual-teaching-skill-of-the-future-or.html

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With Online Learning, ‘Let’s Take a Breath and See What Worked and Didn’t Work’

The massive expansion of online higher education created a worldwide laboratory to finally assess its value and its future.

By Jon Marcus

This article is part of our Learning special report about how the pandemic has continued to change how we approach education.

Kameshwari Shankar watched for years as college and university courses were increasingly taught online instead of face to face, but without a definitive way of understanding which students benefited the most from them, or what if anything they learned.

As an associate professor of economics at City College in New York, Dr. Shankar knew that one of the most important requirements of scientific research was often missing from studies of the effectiveness of online higher education: a control group.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, forcing almost everyone on earth online and creating a randomized trial on a planetary scale with a control group so big, it was a researcher’s wildest dream.

“The pandemic and the lockdown — that’s a great natural experiment,” said Dr. Shankar. A study she co-authored called it “a gold mine of evidence.”

Now the results of this experiment are starting to come in. They suggest that online higher education may work better than prepandemic research suggested, and that it is evolving decisively toward a combination of in-person and online, or “blended,” classes.

“For two years we’ve had sort of a petri dish of experimenting with learning online,” said Anant Agarwal, chief platform officer of the online program management company 2U and former CEO of edX, the online provider created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and sold last year to 2U for $800 million. “Now people are sitting down and saying, ‘Let’s take a breath. Let’s see what worked and didn’t work.’ ”

About a third of higher education was entirely online before the pandemic, and the rest continued to be delivered face to face in brick-and-mortar classrooms, according to the research company Bay View Analytics. The huge spike that occurred during the peak of lockdowns propelled not only unprecedented innovation and investment in online higher education, but also a spree of research into whether and how well it works.

“Initially when we were doing that research it was always on the class or the course level and very rarely were you able to see how online education worked across programs and across institutions,” never mind across the world, said Michael Brown, assistant professor of higher education and student affairs at the Iowa State University School of Education.

Scholars have the same chance to study how kindergartners through 12th graders fared online, though the results will take longer to see than they will for older students, said Carla Johnson, a professor of science education at North Carolina State University and co-author of a study underwritten by the U.S. Department of Education that reviewed all of the pre-existing research about this.

That earlier research largely found that primary- and secondary-school students who learned online before Covid — largely in rural and online charter schools — did less well in math and reading than their counterparts in brick-and-mortar classrooms. Based on this, Dr. Johnson and her colleagues suggested better teacher training , more equitable access to technology and more support for students to help them work independently.

As for how K-12 students did when almost everyone moved online, however, she said, “you’re looking at three to five years in terms of being able to measure academic impact” as they progress into subsequent grades and take standardized tests.

“There are a lot of people who are really interested in that and there are a lot of people investigating it,” Dr. Johnson said.

Online Research Grew

At this year’s meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 236 papers were presented with the word “online” in their titles, compared to 158 the year before the pandemic — a nearly 50 percent increase. Felice Levine, the association’s executive director, likened these projects to the real-time, rapid-response studies of the impact of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

“This is action research on steroids!” a university administrator enthused anonymously in a survey, referring to a type of scholarship that examines an activity in progress.

Just as with studies of the effectiveness of online education for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, much of the prepandemic research into online higher education concluded that students in online programs did worse than students in in-person courses. On average, they had lower grades, higher dropout rates and poorer performance in subsequent classes. Outcomes were especially bad for men, Black students and students who had fared poorly in their earlier educations.

But many of these studies suffered from what scholars describe as self-selection bias, said Dr. Shankar — in this case, the fact that people who chose to take courses online also shared other inherent characteristics, skewing the results. Students who enrolled in online higher education programs before Covid tended to be older and studying part time, for instance, and often had jobs and families. “We would expect a part-time student with other obligations to perform less well,” Dr. Shankar said.

During the pandemic, the variety of students learning online “absolutely increased,” said Di Xu, an associate professor of higher education and public policy at the University of California, Irvine, who began doing research into online learning before Covid. That makes it easier to objectively determine “who seems to benefit and who struggles the most,” Professor Xu said.

Dr. Shankar and others have been combing through the massive amounts of newer information generated during the pandemic, when learning online was largely no longer a choice, eliminating self-selection bias. “We are optimistic that the post-pandemic data will show more favorable outcomes,” she said.

Already, in surveys conducted at City College, Dr. Shankar and her co-authors have found that online instruction appears particularly effective in large introductory classes with 100 or more students, since those students can use chats and virtual feedback to raise questions they aren’t able to ask in giant, impersonal lecture halls.

Students in small elective classes like it less, saying there is too little opportunity for face-to-face discussion.

Graduations Sped Up

Another study has found that providing required courses online helps students graduate more quickly , often because in-person versions of the courses are full or unavailable.

Students in general are also at least somewhat more interested in learning online now than they were before the pandemic. That’s the consensus of roughly 75 percent of university chief online officers in the Changing Landscape of Online Education, or CHLOE, survey by the nonprofit Quality Matters and the higher education consulting firm Eduventures. College and university students will all now be online for at least part of their educations, these administrators almost unanimously say.

Not everyone loved online learning during the pandemic — especially in the early stages, when it was at its most haphazard. Nearly three in 10 students in a Strada Education survey in the fall of 2020 said their ability to learn was much worse online than in person.

Even now, acceptance is lukewarm, emerging research shows.

Only about a third of Americans say they are “probably” or “definitely” confident about the quality of online courses , another Strada survey found. Forty-seven percent of students and 43 percent of faculty members give online education an A for meeting their educational needs, according to Bay View Analytics.

But 57 percent of students are more optimistic about classes that are entirely online than they were before Covid. Nearly 99 percent of the university chief online officers in the CHLOE survey expect an increase in online instruction , up from 70 percent who expected one before Covid .

As for faculty, even if only 43 percent give a top grade to online higher education, in Mr. Agarwal’s opinion, that’s a win. “Really what happened during the pandemic is people tried it for the first time and many of them liked it,” he said. That has resulted in “a much bigger leap than in the normal course of evolution.”

Another thing that’s taken a big leap is blended learning, combining such things as short videos and frequent, computer-graded tests with in-person classroom lectures and discussion. Though it’s been practiced for a while, there’s now widespread consensus that online higher education, at least for undergraduates, will largely take this form.

“What we have now is an unprecedented agreement about the direction of higher education, in terms of teaching mode, that we have never seen before,” said Jeff Seaman, director of Bay View Analytics, who has tracked this field since 2003.

Faculty Favored Hybrid Classes

By last year, more than half of all faculty said they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they wanted to combine online with face-to-face instruction , a Bay View Analytics survey found. A Harvard University task force found that 82 percent of faculty there were interested in adding digital tools they adopted while teaching remotely to their in-person classes.

That number likely includes many faculty who, before the pandemic, stuck to fully in-person teaching, Professor Brown, of Iowa State, said. “Then this terrible thing happened that forced people to try online education who would have probably resisted it for another decade. If there is a takeaway that’s clear now, it’s that the shift in teaching culture has opened folks up to technology more.”

Mr. Agarwal said the pandemic also exposed bad practices, such as online-only classes that consisted almost exclusively of very long lectures.

“The world has not gone back to zero, but has settled somewhere in the middle where we’re coming into a blended future,” he said.

More than four out of five institutions built up their technical teams during the pandemic to support online learning, and are offering more faculty training programs in it, the CHLOE survey found — an infrastructure that will likely stick around.

Some scholars caution that the unprecedented nature of the pandemic could complicate research as much as self-selection bias did before it started. Faculty and students had to juggle outside stress, for instance.

“You have all of these factors going on with the pandemic affecting everything from personal health to family members’ health to employment,” said Cassandra Hart, an associate professor of education policy at the University of California, Davis, who is studying the effect of the pandemic on higher education.

Added Professor Xu: “The shift to remote instruction because of the pandemic was accompanied by so many other things that changed at the same time. It’s really difficult to tease out the impact of instruction.”

Online higher education also took so many forms — from professors lecturing over Zoom to sophisticated multimedia courses developed by professional instructional designers — that it’s hard to generalize about.

“The variability is massive,” Mr. Seaman said. “I just see too many people lumping all of this stuff together, and you can’t do that.”

But Dr. Shankar said all of those varieties of online learning offer more, not less, opportunity for study. “That would be another gold mine of evidence,” she said: “not just online versus traditional, but also within online what works and what doesn’t.

One finding that has emerged from the pandemic could have the greatest effect of all on online higher education: Nearly half of employers said their opinion of the quality of online credentials has improved, according to a survey by the Northeastern University Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy. Still, since so many students who participated in it haven’t yet applied for jobs or even graduated, conclusively measuring the effectiveness of online learning will take time. The academic semester now underway, researchers say, is a first test of new methods and acceptance.

“It’s going to take years for us to really be able to see, out of the things coming out of the pandemic, what works well, what works well in some settings and what works well for some students and not for others,” Professor Hart said.

Jon Marcus has written about higher education for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, US News, and The Boston Globe, among others. He is a higher education editor at The Hechinger Report and has been North America correspondent for The Times (U.K.) Higher Education Magazine, and former editor in chief of Boston Magazine.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title that Kameshwari Shankar holds at City University of New York. It is associate professor, not assistant professor.

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ESSAY: 'IS ONLINE LEARNING THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION?'

Yes, online learning is the future of education! World over, the educational institutions have adopted a form of learning different from the traditional face-to-face learning, called Online Learning. Today, online learning is the newest and most popular form of distance education. Within the past decade it has had a major impact on Tertiary education and the trend is tremendously increasing. Online learning often referred to as "e-learning" is a form of education where students may not always be physically present at a school but will receive learning through the internet. According to the Sloan Consortium, online enrollments continue to grow at rates faster than for the broader student population, and institutes of higher education expect the rate of growth to continue increasing. Some of the key findings were: Over 1.9 million students were studying online in the fall of 2003; The majority of all schools (53.6%) agreed that online education is critical to their long-term strategy; A majority of academic leaders believed that online learning quality is already equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction. (The "no significant difference" phenomenon.) Some of the major benefits of online learning include: Convenience-The basic requirement for students to participate in an online learning is access to a computer, the Internet, and the motivation to succeed in a non-traditional classroom. Online learning provide an excellent

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What's the best state for you », how online learning is reshaping higher education.

As the pandemic eases, many institutions are realizing that properly planned online platforms will allow them to better serve all students, including nontraditional learners.

Online Learning Is Reshaping Higher Ed

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“The nice thing about online education is that it can actually escape geographical boundaries,” said Don Kilburn, the CEO of UMass Online.

Two years ago, as COVID-19 caused campuses to close, some institutions were able to shift their students to already robust online learning programs. But many other colleges and universities scrambled to build online education curricula from scratch. Students and faculty often found themselves logging onto Zoom or other platforms for the first time, with little knowledge of how to navigate a new world of virtual learning.

“When the pandemic hit, it was a provocation, as well as a demand for innovation,” said Caroline Levander, the vice president for global and digital strategy at Rice University in Houston, during a recent webinar on the future of online learning hosted by U.S. News & World Report.

While the changes were challenging for many, faculty members at Rice and elsewhere embraced the new opportunities that online learning offered. Levander shared an example of a Rice physics professor, Jason Hafner, who capitalized on the virtual environment to find compelling new ways to teach concepts to students.

“He had been innovating with online delivery in our non-credit offerings before the pandemic,” said Levander. But once COVID-19 spread, Hafner moved beyond the walls of his classroom and took advantage of Rice’s physical campus to enhance his teaching with video-recorded experiments conducted outside of normal class times. For example, in one lesson, he climbed atop a rock edifice in Rice’s engineering quad to drop two equally sized spheres – one made of aluminum and the other of steel – to demonstrate that they would fall with the same acceleration despite their different densities.

Now, many educators are reassessing how virtual learning can further enhance the student experience by offering greater flexibility than in-class options, particularly for hybrid and all-virtual instruction models. During the early days of the pandemic, “people stood up Zoom classrooms” and “they put a lot of video lectures up online,” said Jeff Borden, the chief academic officer for D2L, a company that creates online learning software. “That’s fine. That was important to get people through.” Now, however, Borden stressed, colleges and universities have the opportunity to move beyond these makeshift models. They can work to build more durable online learning platforms that meet the needs of a range of learners who must access coursework at different times and in different formats to suit their particular goals and lifestyles.

While a four-year college education can be thought of as a default for many, there are a lot of people for whom “that’s not the right path,” said Borden. In fact, some students may be looking simply to gain credentials or to upskill, rather than get traditional degrees. “There are tens of millions of other people in our society who have needs that are other than that, who have desires that are different than that,” Borden noted. Online learning now enables older students, working adults, people from nontraditional backgrounds and those who might be neurodiverse to access content more easily than ever before, Borden added.

The multitude of options also extends to graduate and professional schools, many of which have rolled out fully or partially online programs in recent years. In fact, applicants to Rice’s fully online master’s degree program are “much more diverse in every way than students who apply to the residential counterpart,” Levander said, because access is made easier and more compatible to students who may be juggling work and family obligations.

“The nice thing about online education is that it can actually escape geographical boundaries,” said Don Kilburn, the CEO of UMass Online, which has offerings across the five University of Massachusetts schools. Kilburn agreed with his fellow panelists that online learning models play a critical role in broadening access. He also emphasized the potential added benefit of lessening the financial burden on students, since online programs can often cost a fraction of in-person ones. “Part of accessibility is affordability,” he said. “I do think there are ways to actually deliver fully online programs that have a lower cost structure and may actually reduce the cost of education significantly.”

Part of serving the needs of those who choose to attend classes online means understanding why they do so and how their needs differ from those who choose traditional, in-person options, said Nancy Gonzales, the executive vice president and university provost at Arizona State University , whose online programs will reach approximately 84,000 students this year.

Many online students choose to take fewer courses at a time and may take semesters off to accommodate other aspects of their lives like taking care of children or work responsibilities – part of why the flexibility of online learning is so appealing, Gonzales said. “We’ve been trying to really try to understand what is the cadence of attendance and how do we meet the needs of students, because they are a very different population,” said Gonzales.

At the same time, for Gonzales, part of what makes an online education model successful is providing students with comparable support and services to what they might receive through in-person instruction. Such services might range from financial aid counseling to ensuring that students can interact with their peers on discussion boards, in order to ensure that interactions with classmates are not lost when attending class online.

But the promise of online education, the panelists agreed, is great. “I think we are just at the beginning of the digital transformation,” said Kilburn. “I can’t tell you when, but at some point you will see a revolution in education like you will in everything else.”

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The effects of online education on academic success: A meta-analysis study

Primary Education, Ministry of Turkish National Education, Mersin, Turkey

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of online education, which has been extensively used on student achievement since the beginning of the pandemic. In line with this purpose, a meta-analysis of the related studies focusing on the effect of online education on students’ academic achievement in several countries between the years 2010 and 2021 was carried out. Furthermore, this study will provide a source to assist future studies with comparing the effect of online education on academic achievement before and after the pandemic. This meta-analysis study consists of 27 studies in total. The meta-analysis involves the studies conducted in the USA, Taiwan, Turkey, China, Philippines, Ireland, and Georgia. The studies included in the meta-analysis are experimental studies, and the total sample size is 1772. In the study, the funnel plot, Duval and Tweedie’s Trip and Fill Analysis, Orwin’s Safe N Analysis, and Egger’s Regression Test were utilized to determine the publication bias, which has been found to be quite low. Besides, Hedge’s g statistic was employed to measure the effect size for the difference between the means performed in accordance with the random effects model. The results of the study show that the effect size of online education on academic achievement is on a medium level. The heterogeneity test results of the meta-analysis study display that the effect size does not differ in terms of class level, country, online education approaches, and lecture moderators.

Introduction

Information and communication technologies have become a powerful force in transforming the educational settings around the world. The pandemic has been an important factor in transferring traditional physical classrooms settings through adopting information and communication technologies and has also accelerated the transformation. The literature supports that learning environments connected to information and communication technologies highly satisfy students. Therefore, we need to keep interest in technology-based learning environments. Clearly, technology has had a huge impact on young people's online lives. This digital revolution can synergize the educational ambitions and interests of digitally addicted students. In essence, COVID-19 has provided us with an opportunity to embrace online learning as education systems have to keep up with the rapid emergence of new technologies.

Information and communication technologies that have an effect on all spheres of life are also actively included in the education field. With the recent developments, using technology in education has become inevitable due to personal and social reasons (Usta, 2011a ). Online education may be given as an example of using information and communication technologies as a consequence of the technological developments. Also, it is crystal clear that online learning is a popular way of obtaining instruction (Demiralay et al., 2016 ; Pillay et al., 2007 ), which is defined by Horton ( 2000 ) as a way of education that is performed through a web browser or an online application without requiring an extra software or a learning source. Furthermore, online learning is described as a way of utilizing the internet to obtain the related learning sources during the learning process, to interact with the content, the teacher, and other learners, as well as to get support throughout the learning process (Ally, 2004 ). Online learning has such benefits as learning independently at any time and place (Vrasidas & MsIsaac, 2000 ), granting facility (Poole, 2000 ), flexibility (Chizmar & Walbert, 1999 ), self-regulation skills (Usta, 2011b ), learning with collaboration, and opportunity to plan self-learning process.

Even though online education practices have not been comprehensive as it is now, internet and computers have been used in education as alternative learning tools in correlation with the advances in technology. The first distance education attempt in the world was initiated by the ‘Steno Courses’ announcement published in Boston newspaper in 1728. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, Sweden University started the “Correspondence Composition Courses” for women, and University Correspondence College was afterwards founded for the correspondence courses in 1843 (Arat & Bakan, 2011 ). Recently, distance education has been performed through computers, assisted by the facilities of the internet technologies, and soon, it has evolved into a mobile education practice that is emanating from progress in the speed of internet connection, and the development of mobile devices.

With the emergence of pandemic (Covid-19), face to face education has almost been put to a halt, and online education has gained significant importance. The Microsoft management team declared to have 750 users involved in the online education activities on the 10 th March, just before the pandemic; however, on March 24, they informed that the number of users increased significantly, reaching the number of 138,698 users (OECD, 2020 ). This event supports the view that it is better to commonly use online education rather than using it as a traditional alternative educational tool when students do not have the opportunity to have a face to face education (Geostat, 2019 ). The period of Covid-19 pandemic has emerged as a sudden state of having limited opportunities. Face to face education has stopped in this period for a long time. The global spread of Covid-19 affected more than 850 million students all around the world, and it caused the suspension of face to face education. Different countries have proposed several solutions in order to maintain the education process during the pandemic. Schools have had to change their curriculum, and many countries supported the online education practices soon after the pandemic. In other words, traditional education gave its way to online education practices. At least 96 countries have been motivated to access online libraries, TV broadcasts, instructions, sources, video lectures, and online channels (UNESCO, 2020 ). In such a painful period, educational institutions went through online education practices by the help of huge companies such as Microsoft, Google, Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, and Slack. Thus, online education has been discussed in the education agenda more intensively than ever before.

Although online education approaches were not used as comprehensively as it has been used recently, it was utilized as an alternative learning approach in education for a long time in parallel with the development of technology, internet and computers. The academic achievement of the students is often aimed to be promoted by employing online education approaches. In this regard, academicians in various countries have conducted many studies on the evaluation of online education approaches and published the related results. However, the accumulation of scientific data on online education approaches creates difficulties in keeping, organizing and synthesizing the findings. In this research area, studies are being conducted at an increasing rate making it difficult for scientists to be aware of all the research outside of their ​​expertise. Another problem encountered in the related study area is that online education studies are repetitive. Studies often utilize slightly different methods, measures, and/or examples to avoid duplication. This erroneous approach makes it difficult to distinguish between significant differences in the related results. In other words, if there are significant differences in the results of the studies, it may be difficult to express what variety explains the differences in these results. One obvious solution to these problems is to systematically review the results of various studies and uncover the sources. One method of performing such systematic syntheses is the application of meta-analysis which is a methodological and statistical approach to draw conclusions from the literature. At this point, how effective online education applications are in increasing the academic success is an important detail. Has online education, which is likely to be encountered frequently in the continuing pandemic period, been successful in the last ten years? If successful, how much was the impact? Did different variables have an impact on this effect? Academics across the globe have carried out studies on the evaluation of online education platforms and publishing the related results (Chiao et al., 2018 ). It is quite important to evaluate the results of the studies that have been published up until now, and that will be published in the future. Has the online education been successful? If it has been, how big is the impact? Do the different variables affect this impact? What should we consider in the next coming online education practices? These questions have all motivated us to carry out this study. We have conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis study that tries to provide a discussion platform on how to develop efficient online programs for educators and policy makers by reviewing the related studies on online education, presenting the effect size, and revealing the effect of diverse variables on the general impact.

There have been many critical discussions and comprehensive studies on the differences between online and face to face learning; however, the focus of this paper is different in the sense that it clarifies the magnitude of the effect of online education and teaching process, and it represents what factors should be controlled to help increase the effect size. Indeed, the purpose here is to provide conscious decisions in the implementation of the online education process.

The general impact of online education on the academic achievement will be discovered in the study. Therefore, this will provide an opportunity to get a general overview of the online education which has been practiced and discussed intensively in the pandemic period. Moreover, the general impact of online education on academic achievement will be analyzed, considering different variables. In other words, the current study will allow to totally evaluate the study results from the related literature, and to analyze the results considering several cultures, lectures, and class levels. Considering all the related points, this study seeks to answer the following research questions:

• What is the effect size of online education on academic achievement?
• How do the effect sizes of online education on academic achievement change according to the moderator variable of the country?
• How do the effect sizes of online education on academic achievement change according to the moderator variable of the class level?
• How do the effect sizes of online education on academic achievement change according to the moderator variable of the lecture?
• How do the effect sizes of online education on academic achievement change according to the moderator variable of the online education approaches?

This study aims at determining the effect size of online education, which has been highly used since the beginning of the pandemic, on students’ academic achievement in different courses by using a meta-analysis method. Meta-analysis is a synthesis method that enables gathering of several study results accurately and efficiently, and getting the total results in the end (Tsagris & Fragkos, 2018 ).

Selecting and coding the data (studies)

The required literature for the meta-analysis study was reviewed in July, 2020, and the follow-up review was conducted in September, 2020. The purpose of the follow-up review was to include the studies which were published in the conduction period of this study, and which met the related inclusion criteria. However, no study was encountered to be included in the follow-up review.

In order to access the studies in the meta-analysis, the databases of Web of Science, ERIC, and SCOPUS were reviewed by utilizing the keywords ‘online learning and online education’. Not every database has a search engine that grants access to the studies by writing the keywords, and this obstacle was considered to be an important problem to be overcome. Therefore, a platform that has a special design was utilized by the researcher. With this purpose, through the open access system of Cukurova University Library, detailed reviews were practiced using EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) that allow reviewing the whole collection of research through a sole searching box. Since the fundamental variables of this study are online education and online learning, the literature was systematically reviewed in the related databases (Web of Science, ERIC, and SCOPUS) by referring to the keywords. Within this scope, 225 articles were accessed, and the studies were included in the coding key list formed by the researcher. The name of the researchers, the year, the database (Web of Science, ERIC, and SCOPUS), the sample group and size, the lectures that the academic achievement was tested in, the country that the study was conducted in, and the class levels were all included in this coding key.

The following criteria were identified to include 225 research studies which were coded based on the theoretical basis of the meta-analysis study: (1) The studies should be published in the refereed journals between the years 2020 and 2021, (2) The studies should be experimental studies that try to determine the effect of online education and online learning on academic achievement, (3) The values of the stated variables or the required statistics to calculate these values should be stated in the results of the studies, and (4) The sample group of the study should be at a primary education level. These criteria were also used as the exclusion criteria in the sense that the studies that do not meet the required criteria were not included in the present study.

After the inclusion criteria were determined, a systematic review process was conducted, following the year criterion of the study by means of EBSCO. Within this scope, 290,365 studies that analyze the effect of online education and online learning on academic achievement were accordingly accessed. The database (Web of Science, ERIC, and SCOPUS) was also used as a filter by analyzing the inclusion criteria. Hence, the number of the studies that were analyzed was 58,616. Afterwards, the keyword ‘primary education’ was used as the filter and the number of studies included in the study decreased to 3152. Lastly, the literature was reviewed by using the keyword ‘academic achievement’ and 225 studies were accessed. All the information of 225 articles was included in the coding key.

It is necessary for the coders to review the related studies accurately and control the validity, safety, and accuracy of the studies (Stewart & Kamins, 2001 ). Within this scope, the studies that were determined based on the variables used in this study were first reviewed by three researchers from primary education field, then the accessed studies were combined and processed in the coding key by the researcher. All these studies that were processed in the coding key were analyzed in accordance with the inclusion criteria by all the researchers in the meetings, and it was decided that 27 studies met the inclusion criteria (Atici & Polat, 2010 ; Carreon, 2018 ; Ceylan & Elitok Kesici, 2017 ; Chae & Shin, 2016 ; Chiang et al. 2014 ; Ercan, 2014 ; Ercan et al., 2016 ; Gwo-Jen et al., 2018 ; Hayes & Stewart, 2016 ; Hwang et al., 2012 ; Kert et al., 2017 ; Lai & Chen, 2010 ; Lai et al., 2015 ; Meyers et al., 2015 ; Ravenel et al., 2014 ; Sung et al., 2016 ; Wang & Chen, 2013 ; Yu, 2019 ; Yu & Chen, 2014 ; Yu & Pan, 2014 ; Yu et al., 2010 ; Zhong et al., 2017 ). The data from the studies meeting the inclusion criteria were independently processed in the second coding key by three researchers, and consensus meetings were arranged for further discussion. After the meetings, researchers came to an agreement that the data were coded accurately and precisely. Having identified the effect sizes and heterogeneity of the study, moderator variables that will show the differences between the effect sizes were determined. The data related to the determined moderator variables were added to the coding key by three researchers, and a new consensus meeting was arranged. After the meeting, researchers came to an agreement that moderator variables were coded accurately and precisely.

Study group

27 studies are included in the meta-analysis. The total sample size of the studies that are included in the analysis is 1772. The characteristics of the studies included are given in Table ​ Table1 1 .

The characteristics of the studies included in the meta-analysis

Publication bias

Publication bias is the low capability of published studies on a research subject to represent all completed studies on the same subject (Card, 2011 ; Littell et al., 2008 ). Similarly, publication bias is the state of having a relationship between the probability of the publication of a study on a subject, and the effect size and significance that it produces. Within this scope, publication bias may occur when the researchers do not want to publish the study as a result of failing to obtain the expected results, or not being approved by the scientific journals, and consequently not being included in the study synthesis (Makowski et al., 2019 ). The high possibility of publication bias in a meta-analysis study negatively affects (Pecoraro, 2018 ) the accuracy of the combined effect size, causing the average effect size to be reported differently than it should be (Borenstein et al., 2009 ). For this reason, the possibility of publication bias in the included studies was tested before determining the effect sizes of the relationships between the stated variables. The possibility of publication bias of this meta-analysis study was analyzed by using the funnel plot, Orwin’s Safe N Analysis, Duval and Tweedie’s Trip and Fill Analysis, and Egger’s Regression Test.

Selecting the model

After determining the probability of publication bias of this meta-analysis study, the statistical model used to calculate the effect sizes was selected. The main approaches used in the effect size calculations according to the differentiation level of inter-study variance are fixed and random effects models (Pigott, 2012 ). Fixed effects model refers to the homogeneity of the characteristics of combined studies apart from the sample sizes, while random effects model refers to the parameter diversity between the studies (Cumming, 2012 ). While calculating the average effect size in the random effects model (Deeks et al., 2008 ) that is based on the assumption that effect predictions of different studies are only the result of a similar distribution, it is necessary to consider several situations such as the effect size apart from the sample error of combined studies, characteristics of the participants, duration, scope, and pattern of the study (Littell et al., 2008 ). While deciding the model in the meta-analysis study, the assumptions on the sample characteristics of the studies included in the analysis and the inferences that the researcher aims to make should be taken into consideration. The fact that the sample characteristics of the studies conducted in the field of social sciences are affected by various parameters shows that using random effects model is more appropriate in this sense. Besides, it is stated that the inferences made with the random effects model are beyond the studies included in the meta-analysis (Field, 2003 ; Field & Gillett, 2010 ). Therefore, using random effects model also contributes to the generalization of research data. The specified criteria for the statistical model selection show that according to the nature of the meta-analysis study, the model should be selected just before the analysis (Borenstein et al., 2007 ; Littell et al., 2008 ). Within this framework, it was decided to make use of the random effects model, considering that the students who are the samples of the studies included in the meta-analysis are from different countries and cultures, the sample characteristics of the studies differ, and the patterns and scopes of the studies vary as well.

Heterogeneity

Meta-analysis facilitates analyzing the research subject with different parameters by showing the level of diversity between the included studies. Within this frame, whether there is a heterogeneous distribution between the studies included in the study or not has been evaluated in the present study. The heterogeneity of the studies combined in this meta-analysis study has been determined through Q and I 2 tests. Q test evaluates the random distribution probability of the differences between the observed results (Deeks et al., 2008 ). Q value exceeding 2 value calculated according to the degree of freedom and significance, indicates the heterogeneity of the combined effect sizes (Card, 2011 ). I 2 test, which is the complementary of the Q test, shows the heterogeneity amount of the effect sizes (Cleophas & Zwinderman, 2017 ). I 2 value being higher than 75% is explained as high level of heterogeneity.

In case of encountering heterogeneity in the studies included in the meta-analysis, the reasons of heterogeneity can be analyzed by referring to the study characteristics. The study characteristics which may be related to the heterogeneity between the included studies can be interpreted through subgroup analysis or meta-regression analysis (Deeks et al., 2008 ). While determining the moderator variables, the sufficiency of the number of variables, the relationship between the moderators, and the condition to explain the differences between the results of the studies have all been considered in the present study. Within this scope, it was predicted in this meta-analysis study that the heterogeneity can be explained with the country, class level, and lecture moderator variables of the study in terms of the effect of online education, which has been highly used since the beginning of the pandemic, and it has an impact on the students’ academic achievement in different lectures. Some subgroups were evaluated and categorized together, considering that the number of effect sizes of the sub-dimensions of the specified variables is not sufficient to perform moderator analysis (e.g. the countries where the studies were conducted).

Interpreting the effect sizes

Effect size is a factor that shows how much the independent variable affects the dependent variable positively or negatively in each included study in the meta-analysis (Dinçer, 2014 ). While interpreting the effect sizes obtained from the meta-analysis, the classifications of Cohen et al. ( 2007 ) have been utilized. The case of differentiating the specified relationships of the situation of the country, class level, and school subject variables of the study has been identified through the Q test, degree of freedom, and p significance value Fig.  1 and ​ and2 2 .

The flow chart of the scanning and selection process of the studies

Funnel plot graphics representing the effect size of the effects of online education on academic success

Findings and results

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect size of online education on academic achievement. Before determining the effect sizes in the study, the probability of publication bias of this meta-analysis study was analyzed by using the funnel plot, Orwin’s Safe N Analysis, Duval and Tweedie’s Trip and Fill Analysis, and Egger’s Regression Test.

When the funnel plots are examined, it is seen that the studies included in the analysis are distributed symmetrically on both sides of the combined effect size axis, and they are generally collected in the middle and lower sections. The probability of publication bias is low according to the plots. However, since the results of the funnel scatter plots may cause subjective interpretations, they have been supported by additional analyses (Littell et al., 2008 ). Therefore, in order to provide an extra proof for the probability of publication bias, it has been analyzed through Orwin’s Safe N Analysis, Duval and Tweedie’s Trip and Fill Analysis, and Egger’s Regression Test (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Reliability tests results representing the probability of publication bias

* Represents the required number of papers for Hedges g co-efficiency to reach a rate out of 0.01 range

Table ​ Table2 2 consists of the results of the rates of publication bias probability before counting the effect size of online education on academic achievement. According to the table, Orwin Safe N analysis results show that it is not necessary to add new studies to the meta-analysis in order for Hedges g to reach a value outside the range of ± 0.01. The Duval and Tweedie test shows that excluding the studies that negatively affect the symmetry of the funnel scatter plots for each meta-analysis or adding their exact symmetrical equivalents does not significantly differentiate the calculated effect size. The insignificance of the Egger tests results reveals that there is no publication bias in the meta-analysis study. The results of the analysis indicate the high internal validity of the effect sizes and the adequacy of representing the studies conducted on the relevant subject.

In this study, it was aimed to determine the effect size of online education on academic achievement after testing the publication bias. In line with the first purpose of the study, the forest graph regarding the effect size of online education on academic achievement is shown in Fig.  3 , and the statistics regarding the effect size are given in Table ​ Table3 3 .

Forest graph related to the effect size of online education on academic success

The findings related to the effect size of online education on academic success

n: the Number of Studies included in Meta-Analysis; Hedges g: average effect size

p: significance level of the effect size; S error : standard error; EB low – EB up : lower and upper limits of the effect size

The square symbols in the forest graph in Fig.  3 represent the effect sizes, while the horizontal lines show the intervals in 95% confidence of the effect sizes, and the diamond symbol shows the overall effect size. When the forest graph is analyzed, it is seen that the lower and upper limits of the combined effect sizes are generally close to each other, and the study loads are similar. This similarity in terms of study loads indicates the similarity of the contribution of the combined studies to the overall effect size.

Figure  3 clearly represents that the study of Liu and others (Liu et al., 2018 ) has the lowest, and the study of Ercan and Bilen ( 2014 ) has the highest effect sizes. The forest graph shows that all the combined studies and the overall effect are positive. Furthermore, it is simply understood from the forest graph in Fig.  3 and the effect size statistics in Table ​ Table3 3 that the results of the meta-analysis study conducted with 27 studies and analyzing the effect of online education on academic achievement illustrate that this relationship is on average level (= 0.409).

After the analysis of the effect size in the study, whether the studies included in the analysis are distributed heterogeneously or not has also been analyzed. The heterogeneity of the combined studies was determined through the Q and I 2 tests. As a result of the heterogeneity test, Q statistical value was calculated as 29.576. With 26 degrees of freedom at 95% significance level in the chi-square table, the critical value is accepted as 38.885. The Q statistical value (29.576) counted in this study is lower than the critical value of 38.885. The I 2 value, which is the complementary of the Q statistics, is 12.100%. This value indicates that the accurate heterogeneity or the total variability that can be attributed to variability between the studies is 12%. Besides, p value is higher than (0.285) p = 0.05. All these values [Q (26) = 29.579, p = 0.285; I2 = 12.100] indicate that there is a homogeneous distribution between the effect sizes, and fixed effects model should be used to interpret these effect sizes. However, some researchers argue that even if the heterogeneity is low, it should be evaluated based on the random effects model (Borenstein et al., 2007 ). Therefore, this study gives information about both models. The heterogeneity of the combined studies has been attempted to be explained with the characteristics of the studies included in the analysis. In this context, the final purpose of the study is to determine the effect of the country, academic level, and year variables on the findings. Accordingly, the statistics regarding the comparison of the stated relations according to the countries where the studies were conducted are given in Table ​ Table4 4 .

The dispersion of the studies according to the countries and the heterogeneity test results

As seen in Table ​ Table4, 4 , the effect of online education on academic achievement does not differ significantly according to the countries where the studies were conducted in. Q test results indicate the heterogeneity of the relationships between the variables in terms of countries where the studies were conducted in. According to the table, the effect of online education on academic achievement was reported as the highest in other countries, and the lowest in the US. The statistics regarding the comparison of the stated relations according to the class levels are given in Table ​ Table5 5 .

The dispersion of the studies according to the class level and the heterogeneity test results

As seen in Table ​ Table5, 5 , the effect of online education on academic achievement does not differ according to the class level. However, the effect of online education on academic achievement is the highest in the 4 th class. The statistics regarding the comparison of the stated relations according to the class levels are given in Table ​ Table6 6 .

The dispersion of the studies according to the school subjects and the heterogeneity test results

As seen in Table ​ Table6, 6 , the effect of online education on academic achievement does not differ according to the school subjects included in the studies. However, the effect of online education on academic achievement is the highest in ICT subject.

The obtained effect size in the study was formed as a result of the findings attained from primary studies conducted in 7 different countries. In addition, these studies are the ones on different approaches to online education (online learning environments, social networks, blended learning, etc.). In this respect, the results may raise some questions about the validity and generalizability of the results of the study. However, the moderator analyzes, whether for the country variable or for the approaches covered by online education, did not create significant differences in terms of the effect sizes. If significant differences were to occur in terms of effect sizes, we could say that the comparisons we will make by comparing countries under the umbrella of online education would raise doubts in terms of generalizability. Moreover, no study has been found in the literature that is not based on a special approach or does not contain a specific technique conducted under the name of online education alone. For instance, one of the commonly used definitions is blended education which is defined as an educational model in which online education is combined with traditional education method (Colis & Moonen, 2001 ). Similarly, Rasmussen ( 2003 ) defines blended learning as “a distance education method that combines technology (high technology such as television, internet, or low technology such as voice e-mail, conferences) with traditional education and training.” Further, Kerres and Witt (2003) define blended learning as “combining face-to-face learning with technology-assisted learning.” As it is clearly observed, online education, which has a wider scope, includes many approaches.

As seen in Table ​ Table7, 7 , the effect of online education on academic achievement does not differ according to online education approaches included in the studies. However, the effect of online education on academic achievement is the highest in Web Based Problem Solving Approach.

The dispersion of the studies according to the online education approaches and the heterogeneity test results

Conclusions and discussion

Considering the developments during the pandemics, it is thought that the diversity in online education applications as an interdisciplinary pragmatist field will increase, and the learning content and processes will be enriched with the integration of new technologies into online education processes. Another prediction is that more flexible and accessible learning opportunities will be created in online education processes, and in this way, lifelong learning processes will be strengthened. As a result, it is predicted that in the near future, online education and even digital learning with a newer name will turn into the main ground of education instead of being an alternative or having a support function in face-to-face learning. The lessons learned from the early period online learning experience, which was passed with rapid adaptation due to the Covid19 epidemic, will serve to develop this method all over the world, and in the near future, online learning will become the main learning structure through increasing its functionality with the contribution of new technologies and systems. If we look at it from this point of view, there is a necessity to strengthen online education.

In this study, the effect of online learning on academic achievement is at a moderate level. To increase this effect, the implementation of online learning requires support from teachers to prepare learning materials, to design learning appropriately, and to utilize various digital-based media such as websites, software technology and various other tools to support the effectiveness of online learning (Rolisca & Achadiyah, 2014 ). According to research conducted by Rahayu et al. ( 2017 ), it has been proven that the use of various types of software increases the effectiveness and quality of online learning. Implementation of online learning can affect students' ability to adapt to technological developments in that it makes students use various learning resources on the internet to access various types of information, and enables them to get used to performing inquiry learning and active learning (Hart et al., 2019 ; Prestiadi et al., 2019 ). In addition, there may be many reasons for the low level of effect in this study. The moderator variables examined in this study could be a guide in increasing the level of practical effect. However, the effect size did not differ significantly for all moderator variables. Different moderator analyzes can be evaluated in order to increase the level of impact of online education on academic success. If confounding variables that significantly change the effect level are detected, it can be spoken more precisely in order to increase this level. In addition to the technical and financial problems, the level of impact will increase if a few other difficulties are eliminated such as students, lack of interaction with the instructor, response time, and lack of traditional classroom socialization.

In addition, COVID-19 pandemic related social distancing has posed extreme difficulties for all stakeholders to get online as they have to work in time constraints and resource constraints. Adopting the online learning environment is not just a technical issue, it is a pedagogical and instructive challenge as well. Therefore, extensive preparation of teaching materials, curriculum, and assessment is vital in online education. Technology is the delivery tool and requires close cross-collaboration between teaching, content and technology teams (CoSN, 2020 ).

Online education applications have been used for many years. However, it has come to the fore more during the pandemic process. This result of necessity has brought with it the discussion of using online education instead of traditional education methods in the future. However, with this research, it has been revealed that online education applications are moderately effective. The use of online education instead of face-to-face education applications can only be possible with an increase in the level of success. This may have been possible with the experience and knowledge gained during the pandemic process. Therefore, the meta-analysis of experimental studies conducted in the coming years will guide us. In this context, experimental studies using online education applications should be analyzed well. It would be useful to identify variables that can change the level of impacts with different moderators. Moderator analyzes are valuable in meta-analysis studies (for example, the role of moderators in Karl Pearson's typhoid vaccine studies). In this context, each analysis study sheds light on future studies. In meta-analyses to be made about online education, it would be beneficial to go beyond the moderators determined in this study. Thus, the contribution of similar studies to the field will increase more.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of online education on academic achievement. In line with this purpose, the studies that analyze the effect of online education approaches on academic achievement have been included in the meta-analysis. The total sample size of the studies included in the meta-analysis is 1772. While the studies included in the meta-analysis were conducted in the US, Taiwan, Turkey, China, Philippines, Ireland, and Georgia, the studies carried out in Europe could not be reached. The reason may be attributed to that there may be more use of quantitative research methods from a positivist perspective in the countries with an American academic tradition. As a result of the study, it was found out that the effect size of online education on academic achievement (g = 0.409) was moderate. In the studies included in the present research, we found that online education approaches were more effective than traditional ones. However, contrary to the present study, the analysis of comparisons between online and traditional education in some studies shows that face-to-face traditional learning is still considered effective compared to online learning (Ahmad et al., 2016 ; Hamdani & Priatna, 2020 ; Wei & Chou, 2020 ). Online education has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of online learning compared to face-to-face learning in the classroom is the flexibility of learning time in online learning, the learning time does not include a single program, and it can be shaped according to circumstances (Lai et al., 2019 ). The next advantage is the ease of collecting assignments for students, as these can be done without having to talk to the teacher. Despite this, online education has several weaknesses, such as students having difficulty in understanding the material, teachers' inability to control students, and students’ still having difficulty interacting with teachers in case of internet network cuts (Swan, 2007 ). According to Astuti et al ( 2019 ), face-to-face education method is still considered better by students than e-learning because it is easier to understand the material and easier to interact with teachers. The results of the study illustrated that the effect size (g = 0.409) of online education on academic achievement is of medium level. Therefore, the results of the moderator analysis showed that the effect of online education on academic achievement does not differ in terms of country, lecture, class level, and online education approaches variables. After analyzing the literature, several meta-analyses on online education were published (Bernard et al., 2004 ; Machtmes & Asher, 2000 ; Zhao et al., 2005 ). Typically, these meta-analyzes also include the studies of older generation technologies such as audio, video, or satellite transmission. One of the most comprehensive studies on online education was conducted by Bernard et al. ( 2004 ). In this study, 699 independent effect sizes of 232 studies published from 1985 to 2001 were analyzed, and face-to-face education was compared to online education, with respect to success criteria and attitudes of various learners from young children to adults. In this meta-analysis, an overall effect size close to zero was found for the students' achievement (g +  = 0.01).

In another meta-analysis study carried out by Zhao et al. ( 2005 ), 98 effect sizes were examined, including 51 studies on online education conducted between 1996 and 2002. According to the study of Bernard et al. ( 2004 ), this meta-analysis focuses on the activities done in online education lectures. As a result of the research, an overall effect size close to zero was found for online education utilizing more than one generation technology for students at different levels. However, the salient point of the meta-analysis study of Zhao et al. is that it takes the average of different types of results used in a study to calculate an overall effect size. This practice is problematic because the factors that develop one type of learner outcome (e.g. learner rehabilitation), particularly course characteristics and practices, may be quite different from those that develop another type of outcome (e.g. learner's achievement), and it may even cause damage to the latter outcome. While mixing the studies with different types of results, this implementation may obscure the relationship between practices and learning.

Some meta-analytical studies have focused on the effectiveness of the new generation distance learning courses accessed through the internet for specific student populations. For instance, Sitzmann and others (Sitzmann et al., 2006 ) reviewed 96 studies published from 1996 to 2005, comparing web-based education of job-related knowledge or skills with face-to-face one. The researchers found that web-based education in general was slightly more effective than face-to-face education, but it is insufficient in terms of applicability ("knowing how to apply"). In addition, Sitzmann et al. ( 2006 ) revealed that Internet-based education has a positive effect on theoretical knowledge in quasi-experimental studies; however, it positively affects face-to-face education in experimental studies performed by random assignment. This moderator analysis emphasizes the need to pay attention to the factors of designs of the studies included in the meta-analysis. The designs of the studies included in this meta-analysis study were ignored. This can be presented as a suggestion to the new studies that will be conducted.

Another meta-analysis study was conducted by Cavanaugh et al. ( 2004 ), in which they focused on online education. In this study on internet-based distance education programs for students under 12 years of age, the researchers combined 116 results from 14 studies published between 1999 and 2004 to calculate an overall effect that was not statistically different from zero. The moderator analysis carried out in this study showed that there was no significant factor affecting the students' success. This meta-analysis used multiple results of the same study, ignoring the fact that different results of the same student would not be independent from each other.

In conclusion, some meta-analytical studies analyzed the consequences of online education for a wide range of students (Bernard et al., 2004 ; Zhao et al., 2005 ), and the effect sizes were generally low in these studies. Furthermore, none of the large-scale meta-analyzes considered the moderators, database quality standards or class levels in the selection of the studies, while some of them just referred to the country and lecture moderators. Advances in internet-based learning tools, the pandemic process, and increasing popularity in different learning contexts have required a precise meta-analysis of students' learning outcomes through online learning. Previous meta-analysis studies were typically based on the studies, involving narrow range of confounding variables. In the present study, common but significant moderators such as class level and lectures during the pandemic process were discussed. For instance, the problems have been experienced especially in terms of eligibility of class levels in online education platforms during the pandemic process. It was found that there is a need to study and make suggestions on whether online education can meet the needs of teachers and students.

Besides, the main forms of online education in the past were to watch the open lectures of famous universities and educational videos of institutions. In addition, online education is mainly a classroom-based teaching implemented by teachers in their own schools during the pandemic period, which is an extension of the original school education. This meta-analysis study will stand as a source to compare the effect size of the online education forms of the past decade with what is done today, and what will be done in the future.

Lastly, the heterogeneity test results of the meta-analysis study display that the effect size does not differ in terms of class level, country, online education approaches, and lecture moderators.

Publisher's note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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It seems everything is moving online these days. Even our education is transferring onto the internet. Many people might squabble about the disadvantages of this phenomena, but today, I want to discuss the advantages of getting an education online. This is a pertinent topic, as the future of education is moving more and more towards shifting physical educational institutions online. There are reasons for this: many times you can learn whatever you want, it is more comfortable in a variety of ways, online courses often look good on resumes, the pacing of learning is managed by the learner, and the cost of virtual education is often lower than traditional education.

Flexibility and Accessibility of Online Education

The freedom to choose your educational path is an enduring quality of online education. For more creative people, or people who want to focus on a single activity, this can be a dream come true. According to elearning Industry, “You can pick the program of your dreams in traditional education, too, but that would involve traveling away from home, living in a completely unknown city, and struggling in an extremely competitive learning environment. With online education, you can take any program or course present in traditional four-year universities” (Norman, Stephanie). So, the ease of access to the courses and majors you are striving to study are widely available online. This increases opportunities to gain the education we desire instead of making needless compromises.

Comfort and Convenience: The Comfort Factor in Online Learning

Like the last point, comfort takes center stage for many students. Countless students choose online education in order to avoid wasting time travelling and on many other activities in order to attend physical education institutions. According to the Open Education Database, “Commercials that feature online students studying in their pajamas only skims the surface of one of the benefits of online education: no physical class sessions. Students listen to lectures and complete assignments sent to them electronically, with no need to fight traffic, leave work early for class, or miss important family time. Rather than miss important class sessions (due to weather conditions), students in online courses can always “attend” by participating in discussion boards or chat sessions, turning in their work on time, and watching lectures or reading materials” (“10 Advantages of Taking Online Classes”). In other words, by being an online student, you circumnavigate many of the issues that regular students endure on a daily basis.

Two Advantages of Online Education

In addition, many employers are happy to see online courses on resumes. Many recruiters see the taking of online courses as a sign of taking initiative. As stated by Pongo Resume, “Employers respect a degree earned online as much as a degree earned from attending a brick-and-mortar school. They understand that with the technological advances we have today, more and more employees are getting their education and training online. Because hiring managers value continuing education and professional development, having the relevant courses and programs in the education section of your resume will demonstrate that you are resourceful and have taken the initiative to stay ahead of the curve and improve professionally” (“The Advantages of Online Learning for You and Your Career”). Therefore, not only is online education seen as equal to regular education by employers, but it is also viewed as being competent in the latest technologies and trends.

Back to the students, one of the great advantages of online education is that learners can study at their own pace. According to eLearning Industry, “This type of system does not require attending live sessions; you can access the materials at any time that works for you. If you have to work or take care of your home and children during the day, you can study at night. That’s an advantage the traditional educational system cannot beat” (Norman, Stephanie). Besides, when studying online, people can also get some outside help without such a great pressure of deadlines. You can take all the time you need to browse through the best paper writing service review to find guidance and improve studies. In addition, people who want to take a longer time to receive a degree can do so without any pressure.

Cost Efficiency: An Attractive Aspect of Online Education

Finally, the cost of getting an online education is cheaper on average than receiving a traditional education. According to the Open Education Database, “Though not all online degrees offer less expensive net tuition prices than traditional colleges, associated expenses almost always cost less. For example, there are no commuting costs, and sometimes required course materials, such as textbooks, are available online at no cost. In addition, many colleges and universities accept credits earned via free massive open online courses (MOOCs), the most recent advance in online education” (“10 Advantages of Taking Online Classes”). Thus, there are a variety of reasons why an online education costs less.

Receiving an online education is becoming more and more popular due to a multitude of advantages it has over traditional instruction. These advantages include, to name a few: students can learn whatever they want, it is more comfortable, online courses often look great on resumes, the pacing of learning is managed by the pupil, and the cost is often lower than traditional education. With these reasons, it is hard to not see why this form of education is on the rise.

• Convenience is Key: One of the biggest perks of taking classes online is the convenience it offers. Whether you’re a busy professional or a student with a hectic schedule, you can fit your coursework into your routine.
• Increased Interaction: Contrary to popular belief, online learning can provide more opportunities for interaction with your classmates and instructors. With tools like discussion forums, video conferencing, and collaborative projects, you can build connections and engage in meaningful discussions.
• Expanded Learning Opportunities: Online classes can provide unique learning opportunities, such as self-paced coursework, access to multimedia resources, and the ability to connect with experts from around the world. These opportunities can enhance your educational experience and help you achieve your goals.
• Flexibility for Your Lifestyle: Online learning also provides flexibility that traditional classroom settings can’t match. You have the freedom to study when and where you want, allowing you to balance your personal and academic commitments.
• Affordable and Accessible: With online classes, you can save money on expenses such as commuting, textbooks, and housing. Additionally, you have access to a wider range of courses and programs that may not be available in your local area.
• Feelings of Isolation: One potential downside of online learning is that it may create a sense of isolation. Without the physical presence of classmates and instructors, it can be difficult to establish a sense of community and connection.
• Self-Discipline is a Must: Online learning also requires a significant amount of self-discipline. Without the structure and routine of a traditional classroom setting, it can be easy to become distracted or fall behind in your coursework.
• Instructor Training is Key: To ensure that online classes are effective and engaging, instructors must receive specialized training in online teaching methods. Without this training, it can be challenging to create a dynamic and interactive learning environment.
• Technical Difficulties: Online classes are also prone to technical issues, such as connectivity problems or software glitches. These issues can disrupt the learning process and cause frustration for both students and instructors.
• Increased Screen Time: Another potential drawback of online learning is the increased amount of screen time it requires. Spending too much time in front of a computer or other device can lead to eye strain, headaches, and other health issues.

Online education or e-learning has become a pivotal tool in shaping the future of education. With the advent of technology, distance learning has revolutionized the way knowledge is delivered, making it a compelling alternative to traditional educational systems. This influential composition aims to underline the undeniable advantages of virtual education.

One notable benefit of internet-based education is the extensive range of courses available at your fingertips. In contrast to traditional learning institutions where some specializations may not be offered, e-learning platforms provide an array of diverse courses. This means that learners, regardless of their field of interest, can find courses that suit their needs, enhancing their understanding and expertise in specific areas.

Additionally, online learning platforms often provide interactive sessions, webinars, and seminars , enabling students to communicate directly with their instructors. This access to experts in the field can drastically enrich the learning experience, making the information more relevant and easier to understand. This direct interaction, a feature often missing in traditional classroom settings, makes virtual learning a highly effective educational method.

Online learning has also proven to be a cost-effective option for many students. With resources like e-books and open-source software, internet-based education can significantly reduce the financial burden on students. Unlike traditional education, where textbooks and materials can be costly, digital resources are often much cheaper, and in many cases, freely accessible.

In addition to the benefits for students, online education provides opportunities for teachers to enhance their teaching methods. Through the use of digital tools, educators can create engaging lectures and activities, allowing them to convey complex ideas more effectively. Furthermore, e-learning platforms provide tools for tracking student progress, enabling teachers to provide personalized feedback and guidance.

To conclude, the benefits of online education are manifold. From the flexibility it offers to the wide variety of courses available, internet-based education is paving the way for a new era of learning . As we progress further into the digital age, it is likely that online learning will continue to grow and evolve, playing a significant role in shaping the future of education.

In order to effectively communicate the benefits of e-learning in a convincing essay , it’s important to provide concrete examples and demonstrations . Providing pointers on how to choose a program, manage time effectively, and utilize digital resources can add significant value to the piece and engage readers.

What are the main advantages of online education? Online education offers numerous benefits such as flexibility, a wide variety of course options, cost-effectiveness, and access to expert instruction and resources. It allows learners to manage their own pace of learning and reduces costs related to commuting and physical materials.

How can students maximize the benefits of online learning? Students can maximize the benefits of online learning by managing their time effectively, actively participating in online discussions and webinars, utilizing available digital resources, and maintaining open communication with their instructors.

Is an online degree as respected as a traditional degree? Yes, many employers respect online degrees as much as traditional ones. They understand that online learning requires self-discipline and initiative. In many fields, online learning is seen as being up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends.

* Note : To ensure the quality and originality of your writing, use an AI writer checker tool to review your persuasive essay before submission.

Works Cited

Norman, Stephanie. “5 Advantages Of Online Learning: Education Without Leaving Home.” eLearning Industry, 3 Aug. 2017, elearningindustry.com/5-advantages-of-online-learning-education-without-leaving-home.

“10 Advantages of Taking Online Classes.” OEDB.org, Copyright © 2006-2019 OEDb – Accredited Online, Specialty, and Campus-Based Colleges, 10 Aug. 2018, oedb.org/ilibrarian/10-advantages-to-taking-online-classes/.

“The Advantages of Online Learning for You and Your Career.” Pongo, www.pongoresume.com/articles/513/the-advantages-of-online-learning-for-you-and-your-career.cfm.

What are the main advantages of online education?

Online education offers numerous benefits such as flexibility, a wide variety of course options, cost-effectiveness, and access to expert instruction and resources. It allows learners to manage their own pace of learning and reduces costs related to commuting and physical materials.

How can students maximize the benefits of online learning?

Students can maximize the benefits of online learning by managing their time effectively, actively participating in online discussions and webinars, utilizing available digital resources, and maintaining open communication with their instructors.

Is an online degree as respected as a traditional degree?

Yes, many employers respect online degrees as much as traditional ones. They understand that online learning requires self-discipline and initiative. In many fields, online learning is seen as being up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends.

Follow us on Reddit for more insights and updates.

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Essay on Is Online Learning the Future of Education

Online learning is one of the fastest-growing modes of education and people are widely accepting it. It has become one of the most popular means of education and nowadays and it is also quite easy and convenient to have an online class instead of offline. Get here some essays on this topic to have a more clear view about it.

Short and Long Essays on Is Online Learning the Future of Education in English

Essay on Is Online Learning the Future of Education for students of class 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and class 12 in English in 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 500 words. Also find short Is Online Learning the Future of Education essay 10 lines.

Is Online Learning the Future of Education Essay 10 Lines (100 – 150 Words)

1) Online learning is widely accepted by all teachers and students.

2) The advantages of online learning are proved fruitful for both teachers and learners.

3) People find online learning effective and easy.

4) With online learning, education is not restricted to time and place.

5) Online learning allows you to select courses of your choice.

6) Online learning is a new and comfortable mode of gaining an education.

7) In online learning, you can shape the process of learning according to your comfort.

8) Online learning helps you to generate skills like self-discipline.

9) You can save on travel costs by learning online.

10) During the pandemic, online learning showed that it can be the future of education.

Essay 1 (250 Words) – Is Online Learning the Future of Education?

Introduction

The E-learning program is one of the fastest-growing learning platforms. These are available online and every year a large number of students take part in it. The fast-growing online network is definitely going to be the future of education in many ways.

How Online Learning is the Future of Education

It has been not very long when smart classes were introduced and they were marked successful. Promoting the same culture another smart class that has been introduced is an online platform. All of us use the internet and learning through it can really take education to another level. It is one of the best platforms and e-learning is one of the latest mediums of education.

It is getting popular day by day and is also one of the easy and convenient mediums. All of us want the best on the money we spend. When we get quality education on our doorsteps, then why one will prefer an offline course.

Study materials are easily available online and one can easily access any course of their choice. There are many institutions that have started online classes and students find it more convenient. They save their traveling time and can easily focus on their studies.

E-learning is getting more popular than classroom services. They provide everything like lectures, other activities, solving the question and answers, discussion on a topic, etc. This is helpful not only for students but also for parents. They don’t have to take their child everywhere because classes are available at home. And I can say that online learning is going to be the future of education.

Essay 2 (400 Words) – Importance of Online Learning

Students go to school and college for their studies. But what about those who want to learn when they are at the office. It is quite not possible to leave a job, so the internet is one of the best media to resolve their issue. Nowadays there are many online learning portals available and they can be availed from any corner of the world.

Importance of Online Learning

There are many benefits of online learning and they are good for everyone;

Easy Access to Experts : If you live in a city where there is no good coaching for a particular subject, then it can bother you. Online learning is something that gives an opportunity to connect with experts through your phone and computer from any part of the world.

Saves your Travelling Charges : Sometimes it costs a lot to attend offline classes and also consumes a lot of time. So, we can say that online classes are helpful in both ways. They consume less money as well as time.

They are Flexible : You can schedule your class at your convenience. Sometimes it’s hectic for people to attend classes, but online classes can be scheduled as per your need and availability. One can also miss his offline class if he doesn’t attend the class, whereas online classes get recorded and you can also save it for the future. It is quite a good deal and really encourages people to develop this platform as a learning booth.

Wide Range of Programmes: Sometimes we cannot get a particular course offline which is easily available online. There are a variety of courses and they can easily be accessed. Nowadays different coaching and schools are proving online study material and other learning modules. So, it is easy to learn anything you need.

Less Crowd : In an offline class generally there are more students whereas most of the online classes are given alone. Depending on the course, teachers are available for each student on their time and this also helps them to interact directly with the teacher. Solo classes are also good because a teacher can easily focus on a child.

Internet is one of the latest mediums of education and we have seen the live demo in the COVID-19 lockdown. All the classes were available online and this also encouraged people to bring education on an online platform. The only thing a student needs is an internet connection and a phone or a laptop.

Essay 3 (500 – 600 Words) – What is Online Learning and How it is Helpful

Learning is a never-ending process of life, either you are a child or a grown-up man, having a learning attitude will always help you. Every day we learn something and if you are a student then it is quite more. Children go to school for education but what about others. Online learning is for everyone.

What is Online Learning

There are different forms of learning like online, offline, distance learning, E-learning, etc. A traditional classroom is something called offline mode of education; whereas a kind of education that can be obtained online through the internet is an online medium of education.

There are some universities that started providing online classes for students who were unable to attend class due to some reason. This concept was appreciated and introduced at the school level as well in other forms of education.

A mode of education in which students are educated online with the help of their phones and laptops is an online mode of learning.

Nowadays there are different courses available online and anyone can easily take admission in them. It does not matter where you are, you can take admission in any course from any part of the world. In this mode of education, teachers connect online and you can easily discuss your problems and solve questions with them.

How Online Learning is Helpful

It is especially beneficial for those who want to save their time from traveling. It also provides flexibility, because teachers and students can have their own time as per their convenience. It is quite easier than an offline one because students can easily record their classes and listen to them as many times as they want.

Sometimes due to other family responsibilities, many of us unable to complete their studies, so online learning is the best option for them. Either you are working or a school student you can have online classes. In the corona pandemic, schools and colleges were closed for more than 6 months, but students were properly provided classes online.

What are the Best Features of Online Classes

Online learning is something related to e-learning (Electronic Learning), a medium of studies which is delivered through an electronic media. During online classes a student can learn many things like;

• They can learn various tools which are really helpful for all of us. It helps us to explore and learn new features of different tools.
• You can change the language, fonts, design, etc as per your own convenience and learn easily.
• Teachers and students are more closely connected as compared to an offline class because there are few students at the same time.
• Teachers are available to help you, whenever you want.

How Education will Become Online?

Remote teaching got more popular during the corona pandemic. Many top-graded portals are already available online whereas many developed in-between. They are cheap as well as good, so people like them and it is a new style of learning and most of the children like it.

Whatever mode of education you provide, your child should feel connected and it is mostly found in online learning. This sector is totally new and is liked by people all around the world. It is gaining popularity which also shows that it is going to become one of the most popular modes of learning.

Learning is all about acquiring knowledge and it does not matter what is your medium. But the internet is known as an ocean and it contains more knowledge than a book. So, the online medium is better than an offline one.

FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions

Ans . The process of learning by using electronic resources and the internet is called online learning.

Ans . Online learning was first started in 1982.

Ans . Sir Isaac Pitman is regarded as the Father of Online Education.

Ans . Online learning is disadvantageous because it inhibits social interaction among students.

Ans . Yes, it helps in saving money wasted in traveling to school, making school buildings, and buying classroom accessories.

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Persuasive Essay Writing

Persuasive Essay About Online Education

Make Your Point: Tips and Examples for Writing a Persuasive Essay About Online Education

Published on: Jan 13, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 29, 2024

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Are you looking for tips to help you write a persuasive essay about online education? 

You may feel overwhelmed as there are countless angles and arguments out there. What do you focus on, and how best can you make your point? 

Don’t worry – we got you covered. This blog post presents some useful tips that should help get your creative juices flowing! 

Plus, we provide examples of successful essays written by students who convinced their teachers they were worth the extra mark. 

So sit back, relax and learn how to write an effective essay confidently!

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Examples of Persuasive Essays About Online Education 

Students worldwide increasingly turn to online education to learn, earn degrees and certificates, and further their careers. 

But how do you craft an effective persuasive essay that speaks to this issue? 

Persuasive essays on topics like online education can be tricky since they require strongly framing your argument concisely yet compellingly. 

To help make things easier, we’ve gathered examples of well-crafted persuasive essays about online education. 

These examples are complete with all components — so you can get inspired and start writing your own!

Persuasive essay about online education during the pandemic

Short Persuasive essay about online education

Persuasive essay about an online class is better than face to face

Impact of online classes on students' essay

Persuasive essay about online education is the new normal

Persuasive essay about online courses

Examples of Persuasive Essay on Pros and Cons of Online Education

To get inspired, read through our examples of good persuasive essays on the advantages and disadvantages of online education! 

You never know; one idea might jumpstart your entire paper.  

Benefits of online education essay

Persuasive essay about online education advantages

Persuasive essay about online education disadvantages

Essay on pros and cons of online classes

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

For more inspiration, check out some more persuasive essay examples here!

Five Steps to Crafting an A+ Persuasive Essay 

As a student, you know the feeling. You’ve been given a persuasive essay assignment and don't know where to start. 

What do you do? Don’t worry; we’ve got your back! 

Here are five tips for writing an impressive persuasive essay that will earn you the grade you deserve. Let’s get started!

1. Choose Your Topic Wisely

Choosing a topic that interests you and your audience can make all the difference in writing an effective persuasive essay. 

If you are passionate about your topic and it matters to you, it will likely matter to your audience. 

2. Do Your Research

Once you have chosen a topic, it’s time to dig deeply into the research available on the subject matter. 

From scholarly journals to newspaper articles, dive into the available information and uncover facts supporting your point of view. 

Be sure to cite your sources properly so that other readers can find them too! 

Check out this amazing video!

3. Create an Outline

Before diving headfirst into writing your essay, take some time to map out a clear outline of what points you plan to cover.

Making an outline is especially important when crafting persuasive essays as it will help guide readers smoothly.

4. Write With Passion

Remember that this isn’t just another paper. You are trying to persuade someone with words! 

Choose your language carefully; be strong yet respectful of opposing opinions. Make sure each sentence flows logically into the next.  Use descriptive language that paints vivid pictures in readers’ minds. 

Finally, don’t forget that passion should be evident throughout every word of your paper! 

5. Edit & Proofread

Once your first draft is complete, take some time away from it before coming back with fresh eyes for editing.

Check for typos and mistakes while ensuring each sentence reads clearly and logically follows from the last one. 

Learn to craft a perfect persuasive essay by reading our extensive guide on persuasive essays.

15 Persuasive Speech Topics About Online Classes

Here is a list of 15 engaging persuasive essay topics to inspire you. Let's have a look!

• Why online classes are the most effective form of learning during a pandemic 
• The advantages and disadvantages of having online classes 
• How technology has made online education accessible to everyone 
• The cost-effectiveness of taking online classes compared to traditional college courses 
• Are online classes changing the way people think about education? 
• Is online learning as effective as in-person classes?  
• The importance of taking online classes to improve job opportunities 
• How online classes can benefit those who are unable to attend a physical classroom 
• What steps can be taken to make the transition from traditional to online classes easier? 
• What are the best practices for creating an effective online learning environment? 
• How to make sure students remain engaged in the online course material 
• The benefits of taking online classes for working professionals 
• Is online learning a better fit for certain types of learners? 
• Leveraging online classes to gain innovative skills and knowledge 
• Why are online classes the future of education?

Check our extensive list of top persuasive essay topics for more inspiration!

In the end, a persuasive essay is all about making your point convincingly. With the right evidence, logical reasoning, and engaging tone, you can make an argument for any topic you choose. 

If you’re still struggling to put your thoughts together or need help getting started, don’t worry. Trust our professional essay writer with your next essay.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What techniques can i use to write a persuasive essay about online education.

To write a persuasive essay, you should gather evidence and facts that support your points of view. Additionally, you can employ rhetorical techniques, presenting an ironclad argument and appealing to emotion or logic.

What elements should I include in my persuasive essay about online education?

Your persuasive essay should include a clear thesis statement that states your opinion and supporting evidence that backs up your argument. 

You should also provide a counterargument to address potential objections from readers and discuss how you would refute them.

What is the thesis statement about online learning?

The thesis statement for an argumentative essay about online learning should state your position on the issue, explain why you believe it is valid, and provide evidence to back up your stance.

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