4 Important Pros and Cons Which Come with Studying Online

Compared to the more traditional face-to-face learning, studying online doesn’t have a very long lifespan. Back then, it was just considered a fad, a gimmick that people who couldn’t handle a real education went into in order to get a degree and feel better about themselves. But after the pandemic, the reputation of online learning did see an improvement, albeit a mixed one.

It really depended on the person-some people couldn’t adjust to the period of online learning and hated every second of it while others adjusted quickly and found to love the benefits that it offered. Even though the pandemic might be over, the opportunity it gave us to experiment with online learning did not and more and more people are considering going into it now that it’s seen as a valid way of learning and wish to study online.

In this article, we’ll be going into a bit more depth about learning online-specifically, we’ll be talking about the advantages and disadvantages that studying a masters online has to offer.

The Advantages

Here are some of the pros of studying an online degree for those interested in doing so:

No geographical boundaries

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of going online is the fact that geographical boundaries become a flaw of the past. Your opportunities are no longer tied to whether you can physically be on the campus grounds or not-you could study at a university in Australia, study in Canada, UK, USA, Germany, Switzerland and so on.

You don’t have to worry about the moving process or stress out about relocation, because you won’t have to deal with any of those issues. You can simply study at whichever university you desire from toe comfort of your own home.

Flexible hours

Speaking of comfort, another pro that the online learning life has to offer is the flexibility of the learning hours. No longer do you have to decide on a rigid schedule of subjects at a specific time which, depending on your standing in your university, could be completely beyond your control. Now you have total and ultimate freedom to study however and whenever you want.

You have an important chore to do in the morning? No worries, you can attend to your classes late at evening. Something suddenly popped up and you can’t complete your course for today? Not a problem, you can just take the day off today to attend to whatever it is you need to attend to and then overload on the next day. Not only is the freedom nice, but the ability to plan out your day and adapt to any changes that might pop up is a skill that many employers will appreciate.

Read more: 7 Things You Should Know About Online Colleges

Earn money while learning

What with all the freedom you have, it’s safe to assume that trying to hold down a job would be easier while doing an online degree instead of your typical face-to-face degree; and you’d be absolutely correct. With the flexibility and freedom that comes with an online degree, holding down a job while learning has never been easier-in fact, most people earning online degrees are already full-time workers who want to learn specialized skills in order to improve their edge and status on the job market.

Those intending to study computer science and IT are particularly lucky when it comes to working while also trying to get an online degree-most of your jobs involve sitting in front of a computer, which you already do for your online degree so the job is more or less an extension of your education.

Save costs

Probably the single most praised reason why someone would go online. Studying online is just cheaper in every regard-not only do the courses themselves come with lower tuition fees but you also get to save costs on fuel, parking tickets, books, child care and so on. On top of that, these courses allow you to save costs not only in the financial sense but also in the sense of time.

Since most of these online courses are self-paced, you could easily breeze through the program if you think you can handle it and graduate earlier than you expected. Overall, they’re a great alternative to those who want to spend as little resources as possible to acquire an education and to jump right into the job market.

With all of these pros you’re probably thinking “Damn, online learning sounds amazing, why hasn’t everyone transitioned to it by now?”. Slow down-online learning may have its pros, but for every benefit is a drawback. Let’s pull the curtains on this charade and take a look at the cons of online learning.

The Disadvantages

Here are some of the cons of studying online degrees so you can also keep them in mind:

Questionable quality

The rankings of physical face-to-face universities are already hard to gauge at best, imagine what trying to gauge a completely online program would be like. Online degrees in particular suffer from the problem of “diploma mills” and scam artists willing to hand out fake degrees to anyone in exchange for their hard-earned cash.

The only way to combat this is to earn your degree from a properly accredited institution, but even then, the rankings on those can be a bit wonky. You’re just going to have to accept the fact that you’re going to run into some programs that’ll be shady.

Lack of accountability

This, in my opinion, is why so many people struggled to adapt to online learning. When you grow up with an education system that constantly hounds you to do your homework and study for your exams and basically give a damn about your academic life, you start to subconsciously become independent on that force which pushes you to study.

But take that force away, and a surprising amount of people just don’t have the willpower to keep on going with their studies. This is mainly an issue for those who intend to study their bachelor’s online-studying for a masters degree is a rather hands-off experience anyways, so this doesn’t really apply to them.

Read more: Top 12 Destinations to Get FREE Onlie Degrees In Europe

Overwhelmed by the material

This is an extension of the last problem. With no one to push you to keep learning as well as the lack of interactions with professors or other students, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the material and the isolation.

That being said, there are some ways you could alleviate this-you could take a blended course which combines both online and face-to-face learning or, if some of your work colleagues are also taking the same course, you could form study groups together.

Missing out on campus life

Again, this one is more towards those intending to study a bachelors degree, as the master student already got a taste of campus life. You could miss out on a lot of things that campus life has to offer-cultural events, inter-college games, prom nights, graduation ceremonies.

This is all up to personal preference-personally, I’ve always found the whole ‘campus life’ thing to be overrated, with the only valuable thing gotten out of it is experience from extracurricular activities (experience you can get by just going into the work force as an online student).

And there you have it-the most relevant advantages and disadvantages when it comes to studying online. If you’d like to learn more about studying online, be sure to check out UniApp.