Online Professional Development Courses Helped Steer General Online Learning

The Covid-19 pandemic severely disrupted the global education system by forcing an almost immediate shift to the online environment. This left many schools and universities scrambling to present classes in an entirely new way. However, online learning was not a completely novel concept when the pandemic hit.

Indeed, there was already a whole industry consisting of online platforms specifically dedicated to helping adults improve their knowledge and skills – where they could learn anything from photography to CV writing without even having to enrol in a formal education institute. As these online avenues grew, many formal tertiary institutions began offering their own professional development short courses through to full degrees online. These courses generally worked in similar ways to correspondent courses, with set assignments and exam times for course completion, but with enrolees working mostly by themselves. Other courses offered more freedom, allowing students to complete lessons and assignments as and when they had the ability to do so.

By embracing, learning from, and adapting these established models, it has been possible for schools and other universities to steadily meet the larger online requirements of their general student populations. Different institutions have also learnt from the established online professional development courses and created lessons better suited to respective student age groups. So much so, that even subjects with practical components can now be easily managed and presented in the online space through, for example, online chemistry labs or online music instrument exams.

As the world becomes increasingly digitised, it is predicted that the traditional in-person learning approach will be forever altered. However, through the forced disruption and consequent embrace of established approaches, along with moulding and improving current offerings, the education sector, as a whole, appears better set for providing quality education within an online space in the future.