Teaching Spanish and ESL

Most people will agree that taking an online class is very convenient. Working adults now can continue their education without leaving their jobs. The classes count towards their majors just like any traditional class taken on campus would. As wonderful as this may sound, there are some pretty big issues that a student will face when starting their first online class.

The first issue, and the most difficult to overcome, is the fact that students don’t have instant access to the professor. In traditional classes you can always talk to the professor during class, after class or during office hours. Most online classes don’t have office hours. To contact the professor a student must e mail him and wait for an answer. This can be really frustrating for the type of student who needs constant support and direction. Any online instructor who has been teaching for a while will most likely answer their e mails in a timely fashion, but for many students this may not be good enough.

Another big issue for students new to online classes is the motivation factor. Many students need to feed off of the professor and the other student’s enthusiasm. Online instructors do post information on the subject matter and they also encourage student interaction through the discussion forums. This can be rewarding for some, but many others find it dry and impersonal. It is hard to express humor or any emotion at all online. An online instructor is limited in terms of communicating with each student one on one. In a traditional class the instructor will chat with students in real time about anything to do with the class. Relationships are forged this way and students feel ownership to the class. In the online environment e mails and messages take longer to compose. Instructors will be a lot briefer with their answers and comments. A lot of times they will even send a standard response to a question that has been asked before. Students who really value their face time with the professor and the other students in class can get easily bored or disinterested in the class.

The last major factor facing first time online students is time management. Since students don’t actually attend a class they don’t have the professor physically there to remind them about assignments due. Many students will save everything for the last minute. Of course this happens in traditional classes too, but more so in distance education. Most instructors will have the due dates for all assignments clearly posted. Regardless of this some students just don’t feel that sense of urgency when they don’t have to face the prospect of showing up to class empty handed. It is a lot easier for a student to e mail an excuse on why a due date was missed than to look a professor in the eye and tell the same story. So students who may struggle with time management in traditional classes will struggle even more with this in their online classes.

These issues are big and there are more that I haven’t listed. That being said, online classes are a great option for many students. Even students who fall prey to these pitfalls in online learning can learn strategies to be successful in this type of course.

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