6 “Must Know” Reasons Why Online Courses Are Not For Your Child

With the exponential growth in online courses and curriculums, at every turn we are told why they are so much better than offline courses. 

However, today I thought that I should warn you about the pitfalls of online courses. 

As a creator of online courses myself, I should not be publicizing their drawbacks, but rather should to talking about the advantages. 

Yet, I feel that I will not be being entirely honest if I didn’t at least highlight all the possible disadvantages of online music courses, when compared to their offline counterparts. 

So let’s get started. 

Low Retention Rate

This is the first and the most important pitfall that I want to draw your attention to. 

Due to the nature of online courses, and the inability of a live teacher to be able to gain engagement and interaction, research indicates that online courses, when compared to their offline courses, result in a much lower retention rate. 

Extremely Low Completion Rate

Besides the low retention rate, research also indicates that only around 10% of students actually complete their online courses. 

While this doesn’t mean that 100% of all offline students do complete their courses, it still goes to show that the completion rates for fully online courses are comparatively very low. 

There are always exceptions to these numbers, as in anything, and such statistics are often reliant on many variables. 

Lack Of Help And Feedback

While this may not be the case with all online courses, many courses lack the necessary infrastructure and framework to allow for feedback and students are left in the lurch when they need help. 

Thus, again significantly adding to low retention and completion rates, we discussed earlier. 

Overwhelm

With offline programs, often the course material is introduced bit by bit. Hence students don’t feel overwhelmed. 

However, with online courses, students have access to the course in its entirety, even though they are  only advised to go through it systematically. 

Simply having access in this manner can often be very overwhelming and results in students not completing the course. 

Another reason there is overwhelm is also because online courses are so much cheaper, students tend to hoard courses and simply looking at the number of courses they have to complete overwhelms them and they end up not completing any. 

Inconsistency

Often students and parents tend to take the fact of ‘learn at your own pace’ too much to heart and ‘learn at your own pace’ ends up being learn inconsistently. 

This in turn results in very little progress being made through the course. 

Finally..

“Own Forever” Is A Huge Problem

I, myself am a big fan of online courses that I can own forever and don’t have to complete by a deadline. 

However, this can be the ‘achilles heal’ of online courses, and we tend to always put off starting the course and completing the course, simply because we know that time is not running out. 

Ok, so what do you think?

Do you agree with me? I would love to know what you have to add to this. 

If you have a child learning piano or any other instrument online, my post 5 Absolute “Must Do’s” To Succeed When Learning Piano Online, will be immensely useful, because I give pointers on how to create a framework to mitigate all the pitfalls that have been discussed above. 

And those suggestions can be used no matter what course your child is following online.