Benefits

Drawbacks

Self-assessed engagement with content: books, online multimedia, etc?

Feeds off innate motivation and curiosity to learn at your own pace chasing your own lines of enquiry.

Undirected or ‘governed’ it can do two things: grind to a halt, or spin obsessively out of control, and in either case not lead to meeting any learning objectives – if there were any in the first place.

One-to-one feedback with a tutor: face to face or in correspondence/online

The traditional ‘Oxbridge’ tutorial where a ‘great mind’ and educator supervises and supports and hopefully motivates and directed the student ‘intimately’. Online a similar experience can be recreated, even bettered, complementing face-to-face and/or offering something different.

The two don’t get on so knowledge transfer is challenged, the student is demotivated and both give up on the relationship or resort to formal guidelines and behaviours that might be described bluntly as the ‘carrot and stick’. Online, as dependent as ever on human foibles, there is the added potential difficulty in relation to digital literacy, acceptance, familiarity or stonewalling.

Group-work and peer mentoring: face to face or online?

Likeminds and mutual empathy better able to respond to life’s rollercoaster. Exposure to diverse ideas and behaviours. Exploitation of the ‘connectedness’, search power and serendipty of Web 2.0

Overwhelming, learning to handle ‘exposure’ and privacy issues – some people feel as uncomfortable ‘being’ online as an agrophobic in a shopping mall. Distractions. False trails and digital ‘rabbit holes’. False belief that there is a short cut to learning if the answers are given to you.