What Is An Online Course?*This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission (at no cost to you) if you make a purchase through a link. I greatly appreciate your support!*
What exactly is an online course, and what makes a good one?
What is an online course? An online course is a way to learn a new skill or gain some new knowledge from the comfort of your own home. They can either be paid or offered for free. Some are offered by educational institutions, while others are produced by experts in their field. The most important thing for an online course is for it to be engaging and to deliver a clear outcome.
source:https://www.onlinecoursehow.com/tips/what-is-an-online-course/
Online courses vary widely in quality. Some are obviously thrown together in an afternoon, or are super boring and don’t provide the education you expected. Others are on par with lessons you’d get at some of the world’s most prestigious universities, and some will even teach you to think you can’t find in any conventional educational institution!
Here’s what I think separates a great online course from a poor one:
Above all else, a course needs to have high-quality content and deliver what it promises. Without this, you might step away from an online course not feeling like you received the knowledge and skills you expected to. Or it might just come across as bland and boring without any real insights.
High-quality content makes learning something that you want to do, while low-quality content makes it a chore and makes it difficult to retain what you’re trying to learn.
The best online courses will have content that an expert in the field would recommend, whether it’s taught in an online format or person.
We aren’t limited to just textbooks and chalkboards anymore. With technology, there are so many great and engaging ways to present information to students. An online course should use things like videos, podcasts, interactive web pages, and even mobile apps to really engage students. That makes learning much more enjoyable than simply reading a long document.
Everyone learns a bit differently. Some people are very visually oriented, while others need to hear information for them to retain it. Integrating a variety of mediums will make sure every student has some way of learning in the course that works for them.
But don’t just add multimedia for its own sake. It needs to be done purposefully in a way that makes sense.
An online course needs to be finely tuned so that students are neither overwhelmed nor bored. Information should be broken down into lesson sizes that make sense. If there any projects in the course, enough time needs to be given to complete them to avoid making students anxious or stressed. Smaller assignments should have a reason behind them and not simply be assigned to keep students busy.
In a classroom setting, there’s a lot of interaction not only between students and their teacher but among their peers as well. That’s one thing that can be lacking in an online course if not properly planned for.
Online courses can make students feel isolated if not implemented correctly. It can be as simple as a message board with an off-topic section where students can chat. There should also be a way for students to ask for guidance if they have questions or run into any problems.
The best course in the world is no good if it’s difficult to navigate. Students shouldn’t need to contact tech support to figure out how to access their information. The layout should be easy to follow and clearly marked.
There shouldn’t be any doubt about what a student has to do next, and any resources or related information should be easily accessible.
There are tons of different kinds of online courses out there. For a broad overview of your options, check out my Ultimate Guide to Online Learning.
Here are just some of the online course options you might come across.
Colleges and universities provide some of their courses online. This lets students have the flexibility of earning credits toward a degree in their spare time while still working a full-time job. Or it might be a supplement to attending school full-time.
These courses meet the objectives and requirements of the school administration.
MOOC stands for a massive open online course, and it refers to a course made available over the Internet without charge for anyone to enroll in.
This kind of online course can be academic, created by university professors, and following what traditional university coursework would look like. Some schools have even posted entire semesters of lectures online for free access.
You might choose to take this kind of course to learn something like video editing or photography that you want to know, but don’t necessarily want to go back to school for, or perhaps if you’re keen to learn some fundamental knowledge in a specific area but can’t afford to go to college.
Many companies now use online training courses to get new hires up to speed instead of devoting staff resources to teaching them.
Companies will often outsource the production of these courses to a third-party company.
These courses can cover things like workplace safety, customer service, onboarding, sexual harassment training, and other items that employees need to learn before they begin work at a new company.
These websites are focused on providing a wide range of different online courses taught by a range of different teachers.
Some like Khan Academy offers free courses in a variety of educational topics like geometry, calculus, chemistry, world history, and more. It can even prepare you for tests like SATs.
Others like Coursera primarily connect you with online courses offered by educational institutions for a price.
Many e-learning sites even focus on a single subject. For example, w3schools.com provides free courses in a variety of web design and computer programmings topics like learning JavaScript, CSS, and other programming languages.
Others, like Udemy, are basically a marketplace for courses on everything and anything and are open for anyone to create a course on and sell it.
Some people offer their own online courses directly through their website or an online course platform like Teachable or Kajabi.
A famous YouTuber might have a paid course on their website teaching you how to make great YouTube videos.
A digital marketer could have an online course about creating successful Facebook advertisements.
Even Gordon Ramsay has his own masterclass where you can learn to cook from him online via video lessons.
This is a huge and growing area of online courses and people are teaching online courses on all sorts of niche subjects. Check out this article I wrote with more than 50 examples of people teaching different unusual topics like hula hooping and tattooing.
The Kavian Scientific Research Association (KSRA) is a non-profit research organization to provide research / educational services in December 2013. The members of the community had formed a virtual group on the Viber social network. The core of the Kavian Scientific Association was formed with these members as founders. These individuals, led by Professor Siavosh Kaviani, decided to launch a scientific / research association with an emphasis on education.
KSRA research association, as a non-profit research firm, is committed to providing research services in the field of knowledge. The main beneficiaries of this association are public or private knowledge-based companies, students, researchers, researchers, professors, universities, and industrial and semi-industrial centers around the world.
Our main services Based on Education for all Spectrum people in the world. We want to make an integration between researches and educations. We believe education is the main right of Human beings. So our services should be concentrated on inclusive education.
The KSRA team partners with local under-served communities around the world to improve the access to and quality of knowledge based on education, amplify and augment learning programs where they exist, and create new opportunities for e-learning where traditional education systems are lacking or non-existent.
Preface: Artificial Intelligence or AI for short is an interesting category. Once upon a time, we could only find traces of artificial intelligence in movies and science fiction stories, but today, thanks to …
What Is The Application Of Artificial Intelligence In Education? Read More »
Types of online (virtual) education There are now dozens of different types of virtual education management systems or LMS that are used by many companies and organizations for virtual education …
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hindi
Indonesian
Italian
Persian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish