Massive Open Online-courses

This article opens by introducing an website for online courses. Then we move on to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both online courses comparing to traditional courses . And at the end of this article we are going to discuss the online safety for children.

edX

Search for "edX" online. edX was founded Harvard University and MIT in 2012 and still be governed by universities and colleges. It is a platform with both non-profit and open source offering various kinds of courses.

We will use one of its language courses as an example. The basic spanish courses offered by University Politècnica of Valencia has a greatly systematize instructions on spanish learning. However, it is a complete audio-lingual method without any communication with the teachers.

Traditional Classrooms and Online Courses

To consider the advantages and disadvantages of online courses and traditional courses for children, we should be aware that although children are naturally appeal to technology, due to the immaturity of online courses, every approaches with online education must be proceed with caution. For example, In 2001, Prensky argue that digital technology has optimistic result in changing the structure of the brain while in 2011 Carr, on the contrary, argue that such change is detrimental.

For online courses, the greatest advantage is its accessibility. Traditional face-to-face instructions are limited by time and space while the online courses are not. By documenting the courses, students can get access to the courses whenever and wherever they like. On the other hand, however, the traditional classrooms are without parallel in its constrain power. For younger students who are lack of self-control traditional classrooms can offer the unconscious influence by its environment while the online courses can not.

While it might appear that taking online courses fixes into the trend of information era, this can not be taken for granted especially with regard to children.

Online safety

One of the biggest concern of online courses is the online safety, typically the online safety for children. For example, children might be exposed to violent video and might be the victims of cyber-bullying (Aisha Walker & Goodith White 2013) There are also concerns about potential of becoming victims of cyber-crime like privacy disclosure.