The Online Classrooms Willingness To Change

            Virtual education is still in its early stages of development, constantly growing and changing as it reaches new people. For example, like all technologies there are going to be kinks that need to be fixed when they first start out, nothing is going to be perfect right off the bat. When virtual schools were first being created and introduced into society, important questions had to be tackled like, what the price should be, who should the targeted audience be, how should it be marketed. Just like with any other technology some parts of them succeed while other part of them failed. While the innovation stage of the online classroom maybe over, teachers still search for ways to make the virtual classroom similar to the lecture hall. For example, in The New York Times article The Trouble With Online Education, a virtual teacher stated, “With every class we teach, we need to learn who the people in front of us are. We need to know where they are intellectually, who they are as people and what we can do to help them grow.” One of the problems facing online classes is that they are too broad, having a sort of “one-size fits all” mentality, with the professor talking to the students through the Internet without any real response. Sometimes in an online class its as though the professor is engaging a monologue, while one of the best ways to learn is through dialogue. Furthermore, The New York Times article stated, “The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can.” It’s hard for a teacher to gauge a student’s mood, or too see how they are picking up the information through an online class. While a regular classroom teacher could easily pick up on the mood of their students by looking at facial expressions. But this is being fixed through discussion board posts and group projects that force students to engage in a dialogue through posting and emails. Also, virtual classroom are making more of an effort to use the Internet as a means to learn, forcing students to use different tools on the internet like Blogs, Podcasts, and even Youtube, to help them learn and provide the teachers with an idea on how the students are absorbing the information that they are being given. Based on the diffusion of innovation theory, one of the reasons the virtual classroom is still going strong is because it has learned to adapt by accepting criticism and changing based on popular views.