Internet that started as a discovery to view and share some private files over an organization has now spread its wings to all over the world. Now we use the internet for practically everything. And it has resulted into great positive changes in
education. Here we are to review the changes and progress internet has had on education over the years.
Surely there has been a lot of changes internet has brought in the growth and evolution of education. We have come a long way from class lectures to sharing of online courses (MOOCs ), video lectures (for flipping classrooms), professors giving and students submitting projects online using social network tools like Edmodo and LMS like Schoology and Coursesites, which are being innovated at pace to match the trends. Practically everything about education has changed. More and more students choose to work and study over the internet for many geographical and other easy to use and view reasons. Let’s look at the statistics.
Though social media like any other thing has pros and cons but today, over 90 percent of the faculties are using social media in courses they’re teaching. This means almost 9/10th of the teachers and faculty now prefer social media and personal learning networks than our old methods. Also 32 percent of students in higher education are taking atleast one online course. This shows the teacher’ love for technology and online education, as well as student’s love for use of technology to support their learning. Also nowadays students are encouraged to post or comment on these social media sites, almost 20 percent of faculty to be precise assigns students to comment on these sites.
As the times have changed people’s preferences have also changed, where before they liked the usual written material and learning through class walls now only 1 out of 3 academic leaders consider online learning inferior to face to face instruction and 8 out of 10 faculty report using online video for class. Definitely I see the trends changing here.
Gradually many colleges and universities are offering online courses. Many universities in USA, such as University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, University of Georgia and Texas, New York University, Harvard University have started their own online courses and wish to extend their curriculum more and making their studies more online based. As the statistics show 93 percent of students search online than go to the libraries, which is very obvious as the database is easy to search and find, whereas libraries can take a lot of your effort. Wikipedia has become the most often used research resource. Also an interesting fact to notice is that more than 6 million students are taking atleast one online course, showing clearly that MOOCs are the current trend .
Not only the students but the teachers and faculties also use online sources. See what they have to say about use of technologies like internet.
85 percent of college admissions offices use social media, 61 percent practice social networking, 41 percent like blogging, 16 percent like podcasts, 48 percent video blogging, 36 percent message boards and 10 percent wikis.
So all in all by virtue of our statistics I would say Internet has made major changes in education from the normal class lectures to online courses, video modules and information database all across the globe with the ability of information on the go. Check out this beautiful infographic by SEO.com to know how has the internet changed education.
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