Research on the advantages and disadvantages of postgraduates’ online courses and their quality improvement under the situation of epidemic prevention and control

Research on the advantages and disadvantages of postgraduates’ online courses and their quality improvement under the situation of epidemic prevention and control

ZHANG Jian-qiang

nner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, Baotou 04000, China

Abstract：As an emergency measure during the epidemic prevention and control period, postgraduates’ online course had almost completely replaced the traditional face-to-face teaching. Online course is effective in preventing and controlling the epidemic and reducing education costs, but they also bring a series of problems such as communication barriers between teachers and students and poor teaching quality. In this paper, combined with my own experience of online course, fully comparing online course and traditional face-to-face teaching, analyzes its advantages and disadvantages, puts forward targeted solutions, and makes bold assumptions about the prospect of online course, hoping to provide help for online course teaching.

Key words: Online course; Traditional face-to-face instruction; Comparison; Quality improvement; Prospects

1 Preface

Given the severity of the epidemic around the world, reducing personnel activities has become the most important measure for epidemic prevention and control. Relevant data show that China enrolled 916,500 。graduate students in 2019 [1], so it is preliminarily estimated that there are 2,749,500 graduate students in China. Further considering the autonomy of postgraduate teaching, online teaching is the most suitable teaching method for postgraduates. Compared with traditional teaching, online teaching has obvious advantages, but it also has prominent disadvantages, which need to be solved pertinently.

2 Online courses have obvious advantages

Online courses are conducive to epidemic prevention and control, flexible to organize, and it can effectively reducing teachers' burden, facilitating students' repeated study and reasonable time arrangement, effectively reducing teachers' and students' education costs and safety risks, avoiding resource waste, and contributing to school’s management improvement and education reform.

2.1 Conduciving to epidemic prevention and control

The nation totally have 2688 regular institutions of higher education, colleges and universities graduate students nearly three millions, scale of university places 11260 people [1], regardless of the teachers and other staffs, college students are only 30.26 million people, on the one hand, if postgraduates take the form of traditional face-to-face class, then learning activities at school will greatly increase the difficulty of epidemic prevention and control, which may cause inestimable loss. On the other hand, face-to-face teaching has greatly increased their mobility between the workplace, home and school, which is not conducive to epidemic prevention and control. However, online courses effectively avoid personnel mobility and have obvious advantages in epidemic prevention and control.

2.2 Flexible organization can reduce teachers' burden

Teachers and students can open online classes within half an hour at any time according to the situation, which is beyond the reach of traditional face-to-face teaching. In addition, in the traditional face-to-face teaching, if the number of students is too large and the space is limited, or if the class time of part-time and full-time students cannot be unified, the teacher has to repeat the class, which is very boring and cruel for our beloved teachers. Online classes don't exist these problems cause it can be solved by concentrating all students' online classes.

2.3 It is conducive to students' repeated study and time utilization

Almost all online courses have the function of viewing and playback, which is very beneficial to students' second learning. If you miss part of it, you probably won't understand it in the next class, for the relevant knowledge is often interlinked. Now, through replay, students can completely reproduce the scene, make up the knowledge, lay a solid foundation, and better grasp the learning content. For graduate students, autonomous and targeted learning is particularly important, and online courses can meet their needs. Being targeted is efficient, isn't it?

Students can spend the time saved from online courses to travel with their families, participate in other extracurricular activities or study in other subjects, which is of great benefit to the use of personal time.

2.4 Reduce the educational costs and safety risks of teachers and students, and avoid resource waste

In order to ensure the normal face-to-face teaching activities, our respected teachers and lovely students need to be in various forms of transportation to school. Online courses just need to stay at home and connect to the computer and the Internet. For one thing, we don't need to go to school and save the transportation expense. On the other hand, we don't need to spend dozens of minutes or even a few days round trip time, which can save a lot of time. It must also be pointed out that we have reduced going out and avoided unexpected risks such as traffic accidents in our life and study. We do not need the school to arrange full-time staff to prepare for accommodation and cleaning. Part-time students should feel more deeply.

2.5 It is conducive to the improvement of school management and education reform

The online course is a new thing, which has been in formal development for only two decades, but it has caused a huge impact on the traditional teaching methods. Some of the school's large courses can take the form of online courses, the school can also hire well-known scholars at home and abroad online courses to teach, improve the quality of teaching. It is conducive to the sharing of educational resources and the change of organizational structure of teachers in colleges and universities, expands the scope of education, makes up for the shortage of traditional education, and provides an opportunity for the transformation of management in colleges and universities [2].

3 The disadvantages of online courses are prominent

Online courses have some specific requirements on software and hardware, and the classroom form is relatively loose and inefficient, which is not conducive to the control of teachers. There are congenital deficiencies in guaranteeing the teaching quality, and the long-term desk work is not conducive to the health of teachers and students.

3.1 High requirements for hardware and software

Need stable and certain speed broadband network, and equipped with a computer. This can be a test for students who live in areas with poor reception and don't have a computer at home.

Multiple devices and multiple pieces of software may be required. There are still some defects in the functions of our online course software, such as DingDing , Tencent Video, which may not meet the teaching requirements. For the sake of attendance, communication and assignment, teachers often require WeChat, cloud classroom and other software to operate together with online course software, which requires teachers and students to use more equipment, such as one more mobile phone or another computer. The simultaneous use of multiple software also increases the demand for network, which puts forward higher requirements for both equipment and network.

It has higher requirements for teachers in teaching. Since face-to-face communication is not possible, teachers need to prepare PT and so on in advance to help students understand.

3.2 The quality of teaching cannot be guaranteed

Teachers are the organizers and managers of online courses, but teachers are often powerless in online courses. The interruption of video and audio frequency caused by equipment and network faults often affects the overall teaching effect. As a matter of fact, there are as few as 50 and as many as 200 students participating in online courses. In order to ensure the continuity of the video audio and video, teachers often cancel each other's videos, so that they cannot see each other

The quality of teaching has hidden dangers. Teachers and students cannot face each other, leading to do not know each other. Apart from the screen, teachers' supervision is beyond reach. If the audio-visual experience is not good, students can easily "fly themselves", and online courses become the teachers' "one-man show"[3].

Teachers mainly teach audio, lectures lack of pertinence, students do not want to listen, do not understand. "The teacher ask oneself answer easily hypnotic, always can't help desertion." Many students have the same feeling [4]. The communication between students and teachers and other students is reduced, which seriously affects their interest in learning.

Many teachers find it difficult to adapt to the form of online classes, unable to show confidence and poise like traditional classes. The sudden sound and the family live broadcast made the teacher at a loss of what to do and the rhythm of the lecture was interrupted. Students are often distracted and discipline in online classes is disrupted. If this happen more than once in a class, the effect of the whole class will be greatly reduced.

3.3 It is bad for one's health

Online courses are characterized by a full schedule. Generally speaking, staring at computers and mobile phones for a long time will do great harm to your eyes, and sitting for a long time will also do great harm to your whole body.

4 Online course Suggestions and online course quality improvement

The only way to improve the quality of online courses is to take a series of measures to standardize management and improve various loopholes such as software and teaching methods.

4.1 Establish online course operation system or standard

There are a lot of irregularities in online courses. The education department or school should establish a standard system or specific standard for online courses. Set up a set of systems, put forward a reasonable plan for local or school online courses’education, set up a set of system supports, and comprehensively improve the level of online course development. Make clear requirements on software and hardware, teachers' teaching, attendance checking, external environment of online courses, classroom interaction, assignment and submission of homework, standardize online course activities and improve the efficiency of online courses.

4.2 Develop and improve online course software

Colleges and universities should make use of their own advantages in science and technology, develop online course software reasonably, encourage the interoperability between school teaching software and online course software, and speed up technology research and development and financial support. Colleges and universities should make great efforts in software selection, conduct multi-party experiments and verifications, and take the initiative to connect with software suppliers to determine applicable software according to the characteristics of schools and courses.

Online course software suppliers should strengthen upgrading research and development work, fully cooperate with colleges and universities, widely collect customer opinions, and improve the practicability, comfort and stability of the software.

4.3 Teachers and students should optimize their own equipment

Students and teachers must improve the configuration of personal computers, mobile phones, improve the family network bandwidth, quality, to ensure that the network course smoothly good equipment and network is a necessary condition for high quality network course, which will do great to your study.

4.4 The external environment of teachers and students themselves

The environment of online courses should be quiet, without external interference, the network is stable and the network speed meets the requirements.

4.5 Change the way of online courses

Before the online class, students should preview in advance, summarize what they learned in the last class, and look back when necessary to make full preparations.

Teachers should try their best to meet each other by video, so that students and teachers can see each other, deepen the communication from the action, manner and so on, to avoid the phenomenon of "one-man show". Teachers should also ask more questions, organize more discussions, and increase interactive links, so that teachers and students can communicate smoothly. Teachers should make full preparations before giving lectures, make up for the shortage of teaching by means of PPT and hand-painted projection, improve the quality of online courses, and avoid generalities elephant as much as possible. Strengthen the assessment of students, and increase the classroom performance and other contents.

5 Prospect of online courses

Online course is an important part of the teaching method in modern education, which will occupy the share of the original traditional face-to-face teaching. With the development of network technology, the software development of online course will be greatly developed, and the service of online course will meet the needs of schools, teachers and students. The epidemic has provided a great opportunity for the development of online courses, which are now at their best level in history. It is certain that after the epidemic, the quality of online courses will develop rapidly, but after the disappearance of the epidemic, the proportion of online courses will drop off a cliff, and then maintain a steady development momentum.

6 The conclusion

Compared with traditional face-to-face teaching methods, online courses have advantages such as flexible organization, conducive to epidemic prevention and control, effectively reduction of teaching costs and practical risks, and conducive to the improvement of school management and education reform. However, there are obvious disadvantages in terms of hardware and software requirements, popularization of high-quality education and teaching quality. We need to eliminate or avoid the shortcomings of online courses in a targeted way, so that online courses can provide better help for human education. The improvement of online courses lies in the establishment and improvement of the system, the development of software and the change of teaching methods. Online courses will meet people's needs more and more and play an increasingly important role in modern education. Online courses will certainly play a very positive role in improving human quality, reducing educational costs and promoting educational reform

References:

[1]Intelligent Research Consulting, "2020-2026 China's Higher Education Industry Market Status Analysis and Investment Prospect Forecast Report"

[2] Martin, Lu Yanlin, Research on the Use status of Higher education online courses from the perspective of Shared Education (J) Chinese and Foreign entrepreneurs 2020(14):196.

[3] Wang Changlian, Online courses change to online games, and supervision cannot "sleepwalk". M. Democracy and Legal Times.2020-06-20(002).

[4] Liang Shuang, Full Month of Online Courses for all: Difficult for teachers or difficult for students? (J. Clean Governance, 2020(06):56-57.

Thank you

This is my first English paper, and I am very grateful to Teacher Zhang Bo of Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology for her guidance. It has been 15 years since I left school, and I have some difficulties in both English learning and paper writing. According to teacher Zhang Bo's requirements, I tried to write a paper about online course content in English, and I gained a lot. After finishing the thesis, I feel my vision has broadened a lot. I will study English well and ask the teacher for further guidance.

Thanks Guan Puyang, Jin Zhenjun and other students for their help, and I gained a lot.

张建强，内蒙古科技大学在职研究生在读，工作单位：内蒙古伊泰集团有限公司