FlippED: An ED Original style wherein two bloggers come together to share their opposing or orthogonal perspectives on an interesting subject.


Online courses have become quite famous in the past year, owing to the pandemic and the growing trend of online learning. In this article, our bloggers, Shouvonik and Anjali argue whether online courses are worth the hype or not.

Online courses are a way to recuperate with what one has not ventured into. Often, online courses are a way of even learning new things.

– Blogger Shouvonik’s Opinion

The Flexibility

Online courses nowadays come with a feature known as “self-paced”. Self-paced courses allow you to have the flexibility of time so that you can comfortably balance your life along with your other work in order to effectively complete the education it provides. 

Another good thing about the online courses is their ability to gauge the time that it would take to complete the course. They are usually gauged at a “hours per week” level and are more or less accurate about the timing as per the content they set.

More Adaptability

Besides the flexibility of timings, there are various other aspects that boost the comfort of your education. With a syllabus that can be easily audited and updated, diligent students actually learn stuff with leaps and bounds and more often than not, the absolute latest course that is required to boost your knowledge along with your CV. 

Not every person can afford to go to MIT, but MIT has online courses with prices that are comparatively affordable for people worldwide, which in turn provides quality education to the masses by means of online education. 

These courses come with free auditing of courses, wherein you can go through the content of the course for free and learn it. This provides a boost to your skills but not your CV. For the certificate, people usually have to purchase the course and finish it in an ample amount of time.


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Online courses aren’t too great and don’t contribute heavily towards a person’s growth. 

– Blogger Anjali’s Opinion

Courses in any field of study should not be just to hog certificates and show them on the CV but should also be to learn and gain skills. However, it happens several times that online courses are offered by organizations just to help people get one more addition to their CV, without constructively teaching anything. 

I myself have pursued several courses in an attempt to gain skills. Some courses are definitely helpful. However, they are mostly lesser-known gems that aren’t some short-term courses in which certificates can be generated just by participation after payment of the fee.

These courses are few in numbers, and if I may, most online courses don’t come along with assessment tasks. Only material for study is provided without any means of ensuring the quality or the level of knowledge acquired by the student.

I am a staunch supporter of experience. Education is only the first half of the skill-set. The second and important part is experiences, which most online courses fail to provide.

Furthermore, the online courses may be a great way to add skills to one’s CV however, they are mostly recorded and not real-time in nature, which leaves no scope for the students to ask questions or any doubts that may arise.

In my view, not all online courses are poor in quality, however, most are. 

Whenever going forward with an online course, the student’s mindset should be inclined towards learning rather than adding another laurel to the resume.


Image Source: Google Images

Sources: Author’s Own Opinion

Find the Blogger: @innocentlysane

This post is tagged under: online, online courses, online education, coursea, coursera, EdX, Harvard online, MIT, online school, online teaching, online learning, certificate course


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