Online School vs. In-Person Learning

Due to the pandemic, schools have moved teachers and students online. Depending on where your school is, you may have already had experience with e-Learning in some courses, making the switch easier. However, for others that haven’t had any experience, they’ve had to adapt without any choice. I don’t believe that online school is any worse than in-person school, it’s just a different way of learning. Here are my thoughts on both methods. 

In-Person Learning 

In-person learning is how everyone learned before Covid-19, when each class has a classroom, one teacher, and some students. Compared to e-Learning, learning in-person can be a lot more hands-on, interactive, and fun. For example, in science-related subjects, teachers are able to demonstrate lessons and students can do in-person labs. In addition, learning in-person means that it’s a lot easier to communicate with friends and peers. However, there are some cons to in-person learning. Introverts may be too shy to talk to teachers about problems or ask questions, and classmates can be loud when you’re trying to work. Also, sometimes when a lesson takes too long, the work that teachers assign must be done at home which can be hard to finish for the students who have a lot of extracurriculars. Lastly, learning this way makes it easier to adapt to new classes every semester, because notetaking, homework submissions, and in-class rules remain the same. For example, in e-Learning, teachers use different materials on the internet leading to (sometimes) drastic changes in teaching styles each semester, which may take a bit of getting used to.

e-Learning

e-Learning is what everyone switched to; however, before the pandemic, I had some classes that used the Hub (the website our school board uses) for assigning projects, homework, and teaching material. e-Learning is great for introverts and I feel it’s more self-paced, meaning if you get ahead, the material is there. It’s also easier to be more organized on the internet–no more carrying around multiple binders–as you can simply just create another folder on google drive. Although e-Learning may be easier for classes such as English, some classes are hard to operate online, such as physical education, health and nutrition, chemistry, where you need to do things hands-on. Similar to in-person, there are also distractions, especially the internet. Honestly, I feel like how well you do when e-Learning heavily relies on how you and your teachers use the internet.

Conclusion

Comparing the two, I would say that there is a huge difference between them, but whichever one is better depends on the type of person you are and the subject you’re studying. Some people do better in-person, others may do better with e-Learning. Personally, I prefer e-Learning, especially if all teachers could have a high level of organization on their websites. However, some teachers are still getting used to it. Also, my marks were still better when I went to school in-person, but that might be because of what subjects I was taking.