The Impact of Online Teaching on College Students (Essay Sample)

The Impact of Online Teaching on College Students
In the following sections, a discussion of the impact of online teaching on college students will be made by focusing on student interactions, student satisfaction and skills development.
1 Student interaction
Criticisms are usually made that the process of learning and refined cognitive development that college students get to have in their physical interactions with one another and also with their instructors are not clearly present in the world of online teaching. Because of this, it is argued that online teaching can never fulfill all the basic ingredients of the process of learning and that since it does not involve a great deal of interaction, students are not attaining the necessary cognitive and social skills in the process. So that students would interact with one another online, there is a need to come up with a better design. Furthermore, the online teaching process needs to be properly structured so as to generate interactions at different levels and the teachers could serve as leaders and their role should not be confined to the minimal task of guiding students (Garrison and Cleveland-Innes, 2005). Others contend that online teaching is more interactive if the teacher properly fulfills the role of the facilitator. A focus should be made on generating and facilitating interactions online more than simply delivering the content of a subject matter (Wallace, 2003).
2 Student satisfaction
Studies show that in order to maximize the satisfaction of students in online learning, a great deal of attention must be given to the online format, presentation and designing of the course. The more attention is given to the interactive onlinelearning format, the better students are able to participate in the process of learning. This is seen on the results from the following table. Table 1 focuses on the satisfaction of students on an online course (Swan, 2001).
The table shows that in terms of satisfaction with the course, 49% of the students are very satisfied. This shows that the basic aims and objectives of the course are delivered. Furthermore, 39 % of students are satisfied, and the not very satisfied students are 8 % while the not satisfied ones are of 4 %. In terms of perceived learning, 47 % of the students showed that they were able to learn more than expected. At the other end, it is only 1 % of students that said they did not learn anything else. This shows that students were able to grasp the basic lessons. In terms of perceived interaction with instructor, 31 % reported a great deal while it is 2 % that said none. As such, this shows that the students were able to interact with the instructor. Regarding perceived interaction with classmates, 20 % showed that the interaction was a great deal while 56 % identified it as sufficient. Lastly, in terms of personal activity in the course, 20 % indicated much higher interactions and at the other extreme, 20 % indicated less interaction and this means that such a form of teaching did not excel when it comes to activities that are given to students.
3 Skills Development
Since online teaching presents a more interactive learning framework, some studies suggest that it results in the development of more profound skills that are exhibited in both the intellectual and social levels. Based on this, it is alleged that online learning results in the process of interaction which brings students closer and also establishes a bridge between students and teachers. There should also be a complementary relationship between online learning and the conventional form of learning that is founded on a face to face