Challenges of Online Education

It is true that adequate feedback assists both the instructor and students in improving the quality of e-learning, primary because online education instructors are required to be a facilitator, guide, mentor, and coach rather than an authoritative source of knowledge. The use of distance learning technologies for delivering courses in higher education has thus challenged faculty to reconsider their firmly rooted concepts of “instruction.” In other words, as many faculty members are just now emerging from an excessive dependence on the lecture method, new challenges to completely reassess how instruction will be conceptualized are arriving at the main gates of college and university campuses.

Another challenge for faculty members is to promote individual teaching strategies and to find ways for technology to enhance the student’s ability to read, write, reflect, and synthesize course materials; that is to say, instructors who are successful in mentoring student-teacher communications utilize a variety of techniques or materials to create a more positive online learning. The most daunting challenge for distance education faculty may be the extensive increase in time that faculty must commit to course preparation, grading and feedback, and interaction and rapport. Additionally, it should be noted that libraries (which become identified as sites for lifelong literacy and are committed to education, especially to lifelong learning) have expanded their functions. Such functions include the following: (1) helping individuals learn to write and to use communication technologies and helping them learn to read “visually”; and (2) providing alternative learning sites for specific populations.

Higher education today must combine its traditional roles of extending the boundaries of knowledge and passing on that knowledge to students with a commitment to make higher learning available to all through massively extended university outreach and the provision of opportunities for mass higher education through using media, educational technologies, libraries, and distance education. Further, higher education must be understood as a “globalizing process” because, derived from Cobb’s notion that an educated populace is a vital resource for national growth and development in a global economy, an important task of institutions of higher learning is to assist students in participating in the global economy.

It should be further emphasized that American higher education has changed with regard to educational goals and the means used to attain them. In addition to a diversified student population in terms of ethnicity, social status, and expectation, the proportion of nontraditional older students is increasing significantly. In this environment, higher education has a mission to provide adult learners with reeducation or retraining such that they are able to remain competitive in the workforce of the increasingly technologically sophisticated society. The mission of higher education is changing in its relationship with mature-age students.