What are the differences in Online College and Traditional Colleges?

Online colleges and conventional ones have the very same objectives: to offer students with an education and award degrees. even though their purposes are identical, they have substantial differences. An important difference between online and traditional colleges will be the web-based curriculum. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, an online class is defined as "a formal education process in which the students and instructor aren't in the same location." This means that all exams, lectures and a lot of the reading in online classes are completed online. This will be the most significant change when transitioning from conventional classroom learning. Numerous students have overcome the challenge of online instruction and have adapted nicely to the method.

As in conventional courses, online ones are taught by instructors and consist of multiple classmates. However, your interaction with these people will most likely be through email, phone or live chat. Unless you happen to be in a certain course or program that calls for on-campus visits or clinical work such as nursing or occupational therapy you will never meet your instructors or classmates face to face. Traditional college classes require your physical presence as you listen and take notes throughout professors' lectures. Many  traditional college classes make attendance mandatory and your grade  will suffer should you miss class.

Exchanging info with your professors is quite different in online classes from how it is done in traditional classes. In order to make sure that material has been presented clearly, instructors online have to provide much more detailed feedback than do their counterparts at bricks and mortar campuses. According to the Sloan Consortium, you'll find extra kinds of feedback which can be important to online classes, for example interaction in discussions that goes beyond posting words for example "(good|great|excellent|very good) job," instead highlighting important ideas and making follow-up questions. Feedback also can be in form of audio clips and voice chats. The ideal online instructors work hard to give useful assistance and interaction with their students.

Online classes give much more flexibility than do traditional ones, making them a lot more practical |for a lot of students. Online classes let you attend college but also work, so you are able to fulfill all of your important obligations. This has been the answer to numerous people's quest to further their education while still meeting their family and work responsibilities.

In most instances, you are able to attend class when it is a good time for you personally and learn at your own pace. Not a lot of} traditional college students can say that about their schedules.

Devry Online vs University of Phoenix

I was discussing with a friend of mine from the US about online colleges, and he told me he had attended Devry online and University of Phoenix too. I asked which he thought was the best and why. He told me Devry was the better of the two.

Here is his reasons and explanation of why:

Devry was really well set up for the classes that you had to take. You are not left out on your own to have to figure out how to understand the software that they use for your classes either. They have really knowledgeable tech support open 24/7, and they can answer even the dumbest questions with patience. He said he asked them some really dumb questions just to see what they would tell him and how they would react. He was happy to say they reacted professionally and with great ease of explanation. It wasn't like they  were reading a script to tell you how to use the software. It was more like they had used it and had been taught all the ins and outs of the software.

Devry uses a forum system for posting to classes for part of your required work and it's easy to understand how to work it. They also have live lectures which can be downloaded if you are not able to attend at the time they are given. The instructors or professors are usually people who are still working in the fields you are training for, and their knowledge is first hand as well as what they have for written material. He really enjoyed his experience with Devry.

University of Phoenix: I really hate to say what he said about U of P. He hated the system there and was so unhappy with what he was being told in real life from employers about them that he quit taking classes just a small ways into his second class. He had attended a traditional college when he was younger, but now he has a job and is unable to attend classes like that with his schedule. Everything was great listening to their pitch about attending online college and attending his first class Orientation. That class went well because it was all new students and they would still work together with strangers. With his prior credits that they transferred it placed him in his junior year of a 4 year degree for his next class. He said the students in that class had been in class together for well over a year, and they excluded strange people. U of P uses a team system to do classes and if you are excluded you won't get points for participation. He would ask them for the part he could work on and they wouldn't even act like he was around. He talked to the advisor and was told oh it will get better. Hard to get better when you are failing because they won't include you is what he told me. The only thing they had that was really good according to him was their online library database.

University of Phoenix doesn't have a great reputation with a lot of employers either. One business owner said they had rather take someone off the street and train them because they had to retrain the ones from University of Phoenix any way.

Based on his talk with me I wouldn't want to attend University of Phoenix.