5 Surprising Advantages to Online Seminary Education
….as the daddy of a girl who took second semester Spanish online, and who has suffered through innumerable online training assignments at work without anyone who took them learning anything, there is something to being in the room with others learning, debating, and the like. You’ve got to be careful with this stuff, really.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I agree that one should be cautious about online learning. It’s really the quality of the program that is key, and having a chat component can help with the debate/discussion aspect. My kids and I have done many online programs, and some were abysmal, even in basic elements like audio/video. But others were very well put together, taking student motivation into account, and offering feedback from teachers and other students.
When we homeschooled our two sons, in late 90’s, they each took several correspondence courses. Our older son took courses in Biblical Greek and Hebrew from Moody Bible. Moody Bible was the only correspondence school at the time which would allow a 14 year old to take their college courses. He transferred his credits to BJU when he went there. Our other son took high school level German courses from Texas Tech University also through correspondence. He tested out of the first 3 semesters of college German at BJU. In hindsight, I am sure that he could of handled college level German classes.
For the last two years, I took music theory classes from St. Petersburg College online. These were the music theory classes that music majors take during their first two years. I learned much and I was pleased with the classlesl. However, I also took ear training classes online at the same time. I had problems learning without a teacher to help me learn the rhythms plus the teacher marked all my work 100% and it definitely wasn’t 100% work.
From these experiences and after having taught at BJU for 8 years, I believe that online learning works well for some students in some courses. At BJU, I always had students that lack motivation to learn and I think they would have done even worse than in my classes, as I was encouraging them to do their work.
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