Can Online Learning Ever Beat The Real Thing Analysis

Can Online Learning Ever Beat the Real Thing?

An article, titled ‘Can Online Learning Ever Beat the Real Thing?’, was posted on bigthink.com and written by Simon Oxenham. This article provided some arguments opposing people’s assumptions about traditional way of teaching being a better option than online learning. This article mainly tells you some arguments from Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor with a lot of experience on this topic, and also the author’s experience in online learning. This article also discussed the advantages and the way online learning became an effective learning method based on Barbara’s observation as a lecturer. However, some of the claims were not practical in real life and were not provided with
“Oakley explores how skillfully recorded films can engage students by using techniques of visual trickery to enable a teacher to become a part of the material being taught in an immersive audio-visual experience.” Some of the techniques to develop such visual trickery are by using CGI and animations. But, how affordable and applicable they really are? CGI costs a lot of money. In 2013 alone, every one of the most expensive movies either heavily featured CGI special effects or was entirely computer animation.(Misix,2014,para. 2). The reasons are that CGI requires a lot of manpower, and also expensive computer hardware(Misix,2014,para. 4&5). Science is vast, and expanding. To teach science by implementing those techniques is a lot of work and not really practical. If it were produced by a big company, then it’s possible, but they will be putting high prices on the learning materials the produce. Learning platforms such as Zenius or Quipper, are already costs you some dollars, while only providing you simple learning videos with no visual trickery involved. Also, the materials delivered in video-based learning are usually short and won’t be as complete as
“....by using a green screen and immersing herself in the learning experience, students may experience reduced cognitive load from not having to divide their attention among two or more things at once.” I have to agree on this one because there are many papers and articles supporting this claims. Reduced cognitive load indicates a better understanding in learning things. By using visual-only material or audio-only material, this will heavily increase the cognitive load on your brain. But, combining those two, you could get an increased performance in learning indicating a reduction in cognitive load(Brunken, Steinbacher, Plass & Leutner,2002). However, eventhough that paragraph and the following paragraph claiming about one practice method being better than another are based on the fact, this article does not provide the supporting evidence on the claims, or even putting the reference citation or source of the claims. This could lead the article into becoming not reliable as a source of