The Flexibility that Comes With Online Distance Education is its Best Feature

Online education options provide people with busy schedules the flexibility to pursue education without sacrificing other important aspects of their lives. Online education options are truly allowing a wider range of people to follow their dreams and live their best lives, all thanks to the flexibility of lifestyle that they provide.

Our digital world moves quickly, and old methods of doing things, such as the model of education we have been using, no longer fit many people’s schedules. Having the time to travel to a place of education and sit in physical classrooms at specified periods of time with other learners simply isn’t an option for many people who otherwise would want to improve their lives with education. Thankfully, if you want to pursue an online doctorate in education, for instance, you can find an online service that will offer you a flexible study schedule that you can make work around your other life commitments.

By offering people who want to study and improve their lives flexible options for education, these online programs are becoming useful pathways towards career advancement for many people with busy lives. This article will touch on some ways that the flexibility of online education options is their best feature.

Get educated and continue working

Life is expensive; it’s basically pay to win, which is a huge reason that many people leave education behind as they grow older. Not only does education cost money, but the time you need to put into traveling and studying is time that you aren’t spending working and earning the money you need to live. Online education programs do away with this dichotomy.

By having flexible learning programs that allow learning, study and assignments to be done whenever is convenient for the students, people with busy or inflexible work schedules are able to participate.

Learning that’s accessible for parents

Another thing that has historically driven many people away from tertiary education is the reality of being a parent or caregiver. When you need to devote so much time to ensuring that someone else is properly cared for, it often isn’t feasible to also pursue traditional learning routes. But the flexibility of online education programs means this is no longer an impediment!

By being able to study from home, parents and carers are able to remain fully attentive to their charges and still engage with online course materials when time permits. Instead of needing to sacrifice either their professional or personal needs to satisfy the other, online education programs allow parents and caregivers to fulfil obligations to both.

Unbound by geography

A criticism of traditional tertiary education programs is often how uprooting they can be, people will turn their entire lives upside down and move to another part of the country or to another part of the world entirely just for a chance to study. Online programs allow people who don’t have the funds or otherwise aren’t able to do this to still engage with tertiary education and continue improving themselves.

There are still some barriers to entry, you do need good internet and a device that will allow you to access the online program. But this flexibility is a huge step in democratising and allowing more people in remote and rural areas to engage with education programs.

Study at your own pace

With traditional tertiary education programs, while there is time to study material as you like, you are often unable to revisit concepts and take too much time with things as the semester moves forward, and it is expected that you keep pace with a constant stream of new material. For some students, that simply isn’t an effective way to learn.

Online education programs offer a far more flexible option. Students are able to set their own pace and take their time. Or, conversely, students can also push through the material faster and get the course material done much faster.

Online programs are simply cheaper

This might not always be true, but in the vast majority of cases, online education programs are simply cheaper than the physical alternatives. As well as the course itself being cheaper, there are all sorts of collateral savings such as travel and accommodation costs that will add up and allow students to live richer lives, or to work less and study more.

By being economically flexible, online education options not only allow students to live different lives than those participating in physical education, but they also open up the possibility of tertiary education for many who otherwise would not be able to afford it.

Learn while you learn?

This might seem like an odd point, but successfully navigating online education necessitates a certain level of tech literacy. This means that while you are pursuing your education, you are also building a skillset of digital literacy. Almost all jobs in our modern digitised world require or benefit from a good dose of digital literacy, so by choosing an online education option, you are setting yourself up for success in more ways than one.

Conclusion

Online distance education has many benefits, but a lot of them can be boiled down to the sheer flexibility it offers. Especially when compared to more traditional options for tertiary education, online education programs put the power in the hands of the students by letting them make choices about when and how they study.

For people with busy lives and schedules, exploring the flexible options that online education programs offer is a great way to dive back into education.