Online Education Featured Article

The Unknown life: First Online Student to Graduate.

Do we know where our decisions where we rely on technology lead us to. Imagine a school where you never used pen and paper and all of your teachers are sitting in your desk with a keyboard and mouse in front of them like a virtual screen for the rest of your academic lives. This fearful idea might just be the beginning of technology choosing how we live our lives, and believe it or not, technology will impact the lives of the students one way or another and might just replace the personal lives we live in with meaningless virtual lives that we would never live in.

Let`s say that there has been a case where online teaching has proven successful in someones academic life and such a person who has had their education solely online exists. Angie McHitachi is said to be the first student to receive an undergraduate degree with information technology with online education being her sole form of education and rumors have it that she has 10,000 friends in Facebook. However, who really is Angie McHitachi? Do we know what she looks like? Does she know who we are as a community?

Are her “10,000� friends in Facebook really her friends? Some questions in life might be safer unanswered.

However hearing Angie McHitachi in a public seminar at OFS, she spoke about how technology and online learning might just help her generation to a whole new level of education and how we as a community can benefit our lives. Angie has tried to persuade people and believed that technology might enhance our academic lives. However it would seem that during her speech she has become a bit difficult for most people to understand and does not seem sociable as some people felt uneasy about her public speech in OFS. Before answering the questions, we would need to evaluate the credibility of Angie McHitachi. Do we really need to rush into a decision and make a sudden change from face to face curriculum to an online curriculum while it is still developing? Are we bringing the new generation to a whole new academic life that the current generation are unaware of?

Will online education choose how we live our lives? There are just these choices that live bestows upon us and these choices we make might end up making the decisions and choosing how we live our life rather than us choosing the way we live in.

There is so much to say about Angie`s online life, but little to say about the reality. To consider the path of education she has chosen as her life is to take responsibility for the choices the newer generation make for their education. The main question is, would you allow online education to become your academic life?