Could students learn more effectively from online courses and video conferencing? In my opinion, students would benefit from being able to take classes at home, it would allow them to feel more comfortable, learn at their own pace, and communicate concisely with teachers.

The benefit of a student being in their own home is quite clear cut. A person feels more comfortable in a place where they spend a majority if their time. I personally have taken an online course at home and being able to do work on my couch was much easier than sitting in a classroom. The comfort of being in my home where I had things the way I wanted them makes things feel easy. Learning when I was in a soft couch rather than a hard backed chair was quite different, but different in a good way. Again, from personal experience, taking a the work load seemed quite a bit more manageable when I was sitting at home. I was also able to get up at anytime to grab a snack of get a drink of water. These abilities made it a lot easier to learn.

Not all people learn at the same pace. Some people just tend to pick up information quicker and some people need to take their time to absorb knowledge. An online, in home, class would make the learning experience even more personal and would be tailored to the person learning. I personally learn quickly and don't need very much time to pick something up. The online class system was perfect for this as it let me complete the next assignment after I had completed the previous one, there was no set deadline for when I had to begin anything. Being able to work at my own pace and follow my own guidelines helped me in the optimal way. For slower learning students, there was a system where you could send a message to you online teacher and request a deadline extension if necessary. The teacher would also send messages to students long in advance of things so that students who needed to take their time could.

Being by oneself in a classroom with a teacher would be the best learning experience possible as one on one teacher is all about one person learning. There is no having to teach other students. While online classes are not entirely one on one, they do have smaller numbers of students enrolled in them. For my online class there was only 9 students in my "class". In a traditional classroom the number of students for that same class may be up to 30. In a class of 30 the teachers attention is divided over a much greater number of students and not every student can get the help that they need. With the online class, a teacher can give students a more personalized teaching experience and can also devote more time to students. With the teacher helping them more, it is most likely that the student will perform better in class. In my class of 9, I was struggling with a certain assignment and I was able to video chat my teacher for 2 hours and understand the material. That would not be possibly in a traditional classroom because a teachers attention would be dividing among multiple students who would need help.

In conclusion, students would greatly benefit from taking classes at home because it would allow for comfortable learning (as a student would be more comfortable at home), custom pace setting (due to looser deadlines), and personal teaching (because class size would be smaller).