Week Six

In the video clip—Options for Virtual Students, students in the video mentioned a lot of advantages of online learning. Online learning offered them more options. The communication with instructors is also very effective and helpful. Online teachers would always give you the step-to-step instruction. Virtual school students also find that the online environment can make them more focused on their learning content. There were no interruptions like cussing or complaining. Students can also have more flexibility. They can have their own schedule and if they are behind the course schedule, they can just make it up in weekends.

Parents and teachers also found online learning is a very helpful experience. Teachers were able to give children step-to-step instructions and they are more helpful to students and parents. Parents were very satisfied with their kids’ online experience. Online learning offered them more freedom and they also found that it was easy to enroll. Instructions are clear, with lots of resources, and the classes are well thought out and planned. Parents were also thankful about teachers’ personal connection about their children so that they could know what was happening to their kids and what were their progresses or problems.

If states were going to offer more courses online, more people would benefit from that. Because online learning could offer people more freedom, with more chances of online learning, people would have more opportunities to get the education. They could work daytime and take the online course at nights or in weekends. People don’t have to go the school and this would be a great save of their time and money, considering the time on the road and the gas cost. At the same time, states and schools will also get benefits from this. They don’t need to build more classrooms or buy more equipment for more students. They even don’t need that many teachers since teachers can just perform online and schools can even hire some part time teachers. This would also save a lot states and school’s budget.

There indeed would be some problems and limitations in online learning. The first one is the lack of social communication skill. If students take all of their courses online, they can not have the chance to get the face-to-face communication and they may not know how to communicate properly with people after they graduate and work. The solution is that they should spend some time to go out and communicate more with people, rather than sitting all day at home. Virtual schools could also arrange some activities and gather students from near surroundings and plan some activities for them to communicate. The second potential problem is the technology issue. Technology can not work all the time and there will be some technical problems when students are learning, such as the breaking down of computers, or the bad quality of their microphones. The solution is that schools should give students and parents the instructions on what are requirements of the technology they are going to use and they should also update their technology all the time. The last limitation is that not all the courses are suitable to be delivered online. Courses like sports, music, etc need the hands-on instructions and practices. For courses like this, I think there is a great need to have the face-to-face instruction. For some theories and readings, they could still put it online as a part of online learning.

In this video clip—Universal Design for Special Needs, the speaker mentioned some advantages of the universal design. With a universally designed textbook, or electronic textbook, information is scalable, accessible and modifiable for children's needs. Teachers can also further change the learning content basing on the universal design, and that will greatly engage students in a higher and a different level of learning. In the end this will be a very powerful transition and fundamentally change education.

With the universally designed textbook, students with disabilities could have all equal access to the learning materials. Teachers can also adjust the content to students’ different needs or special requirements. Students can also customize their reading materials or other learning content to fit their needs. For example, they can adjust the font of their reading materials, the volume, or even the color so that they have no problem to read and finish their assignments.

Universal design doesn’t mean that students will have the same materials or the same content. Actually in my view, I think universal design will greatly enhance the education and can much better meet individual students’ needs. The course materials students get will be in a higher level and students can even make more changes to their needs, so it will be more beneficial to have the universal design in education and more students will be reaping from that. With universal design, I can get the higher quality materials and I can also adjust the content to my personally needs. For example, in my reading, I can first pick up the interesting section I like and read it first; then I will cut it out and focus on the rest of the materials. So in this way, I can focus on my reading and finish it step by step. If possible, I can also adjust the color or the font of the page to my favorite so that I can pay more attention to it.