It is well known that online education brings many things to the table, giving it a significant advantage over offline modes or traditional campus learning. Source<> http://www.edubilla.com/articles/education-trends/overview-of-online-education/

1. Overview of Online Education
It is well known that online education brings many
things to the table, giving it a significant advantage
over offline modes or traditional campus learning.
However, most of us still have to cross many
perception-related hurdles before we can be
completely comfortable with the idea of online
education.
Access and flexibility are major positives in favour of
the concept. Those who do not have the means to
travel across national or international borders to

2. acquire degrees from reputed institutions require
only a workable internet connection, even in remote
parts, to avail of some of the best learning
experiences. This gives the medium an advantage of
scale too. Taking into account where India stands
today and our goals for GDP growth, we need an
investment of more than $100 billion to create the
additional offline higher education capacity
necessary to train our future workforce. That target
is impossible for a country like India to afford. And in
that context, online education will play a very
important role in capacity building for the future of
India.
However, like for any new technology or concept,
online education faces many obstacles. In the space,
there are some key challenges that edtech
companies are up against: (a) online lacks the
gravitas of offline, walking into a campus or class
room; (b) it’s very anonymous – no one will know when
I join or when I drop out; (c) online education is
monotonous; (d) logging on to a platform that has an

3. array of aggregated lectures and courses that do not
for deep learning is its “out there”; (e) the notion that
if it’s online, it’s free; (f) how does a potential
customer get his employer and family to respect and
recognise online learning as the future, given its
ability to make him more productive without the need
of time being taken out for an offline study break?
One of the most important challenges to contend with
is the perception that online education is nothing
more than a content library. Thanks to the rise of
MOOCs (with a question mark on their impact), this is
where the merits of online education seem to end in
the eyes of most, doing a huge disservice to the
disruptions this phenomenon is capable of.
We have all been to a university/institution, and we
did not go there to visit only the library, but for a full
university experience. In most cases, the primary
problem facing online education has been thought to
be that of access or affordability. Experience cannot
be addressed simply through content; a holistic,

4. end-to-end approach has to be adopted. Following a
full stack approach of developing quality and
relevant content through the syncing of industry and
academia, encouraging more innovative pedagogical
models, and servicing each individual consumer in a
manner that ensures value creation, could help one
achieve a high completion rate of more than 90
percent, as opposed to the low rate seen by MOOCs
today (below 10 percent).
Forming a community is critical to the success of
online education. While we could build a rapidly
growing business by just providing content, we would
miss out on building a sustainable differentiation. Part
of building the community is to remove the anonymity
from online education. When you are taking an online
programme, it is unlikely that your friends and family
would know about it. Compare that to enrolling for an
offline programme, where everyone from your
friends to your distant relatives would be in the know.
Therefore, when it comes to online, it is very easy for
people to enroll and equally easy for them to drop

5. out. Ideas like taking anonymity out of online
education are small steps towards building a holistic
experience.
The perception of online education has to move
beyond that of a content library, and the focus needs
to shift towards building a great learning experience
and a strong community. And for that, there is a need
for a lot of innovation and out of the box ideas. Each
and every edtech provider needs to contribute
towards building a great experience, and thereby
building up the credibility of online education!