The Overwhelming Overall Advantage of E-Learning at Home

By David Partyka

"You'll be late for school!" you shout to your son. The next thing you see is a whirlwind, in which your son scarfs down a waffle, throws on a jacket and poof, he's gone. He's on his way to an expensive-to-operate bus that will transport him to a school and classroom where in many districts, it is unclear how efficiently he will learn. So you hire a tutor, who must drive to your house to fill in your son's knowledge gaps. However, you don't really know this tutor very well, and he or she will potentially be spending lots of time with your child, who by the way, recently caught a cold at school. What is wrong with this picture in 2013 is that it is wasteful and inefficient on a multitude of levels. In my opinion, e-learning at home must play a more significant role in the future, because the advantages are just too many and far outweigh the cons.

For example, schoolbuses are very fuel inefficient and take circuitous routes around neighborhoods to pick up all the children on their routes, further decreasing their efficiency. With the price of gas as high as it is, and the fact that many buses (powered by diesel fuel) are not low emission vehicles, you have both economic and environmental incentive to cut down on the use of buses. Once your child gets to school (aka breeding grounds for disease) it is unclear how much he or she will actually learn in the classroom, if for no other reason than a lack of personal attention. With over 20 students in many classrooms, it is just not possible for a teacher to give every child personal attention. From my experience tutoring children, this personal attention makes an enormous difference. Finally, as a parent, you may have concerns about bringing a tutor (who you may not have ever met) into your home. Many parents do.

How would e-learning at home alleviate these concerns? To begin with, the fuel and emissions saved by curtailing the use of buses would be a tremendous boon not only for the taxpayers, but for the environment. With respect to personal attention, there are many learning tools available freely on the internet that can help a child excel in a subject. For example, YouTube houses a plethora of training videos on how to solve virtually any category of problem one might encounter on a test, and you don't have to pay for this content. Free software, such as GeoGebra and Graph, can help students learn subjects, such as math, by helping them explore the subject on their own. In addition, the only virus your child may catch is a computer virus (I would imagine this would lower our society's medical bill)! Finally, online tutoring tends to be less expensive than in-person tutoring, and with free tools such as interactive whiteboards and Skype, the tutoring sessions can be almost as productive. Furthermore, you never have to bring a tutor into your home, which for some people, is a better option. And to those people who say that children won't be socially adept if they don't interact in person with other children, I would respond "No one is stopping your child from joining free clubs at your local library or signing up for local community sports and other activities."

I am not advocating the abandonment of the classroom and schools. However, with all the costs in time and money to a variety of people, I don't see how one could not consider e-learning at home to relieve some of these costs. After all, who doesn't like to save time and money?

Dr. David Partyka has now founded several educational services startups including PhDave LLC ( http://www.phdave.com ), Test Boost Incorporated and Virtual Tutor Center ( http://www.virtualtutorcenter.com ). He aims to keep founding companies until he runs out of ideas!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Partyka