This is still a new system, however, and there remain a lot of benefits and disadvantages. One advantage is that we can attend a lecture at any time. When you have a lecture which you have to listen to within a week, you can take it anytime, even at midnight. If you can't understand it the first time around, reviewing it is possible. There is no restriction on the number of students either. Such would be an impossibility offline, but the Internet makes this a real option.
In spite of its many merits, there are also many disadvantages. First, evaluating students' grades in an internet lecture setting is difficult. In other words, the biggest problem of internet lecture is assessing students. The exams can be done offline, but it's troublesome and due to physical limitations, the exams are usually taken online. In such situations, students who attend the same class may exchange their opinions, and sometimes their friends will help them on the exam. In offline situations, this is not a serious problem, but it is quite possible to cheat in an on-line examination. To prevent this, schools take a number of imperfect precautions. Schools generally prepare a wide variety of different questions to give to different students within the same courses, but there are many students to examine, so they can't avoid overlapping. Besides this, the degree of difficulty of various questions cannot be held to be consistent, which raises questions of fairness to the students.
In addition to the assessment dilemma, making sure students pay attention during lectures is a problem. There are students who won't listen completely or will turn off the computer while the lecture is displaying. Another current technical problem is that even when a student listens to a whole lecture, if the checking system has an error it can force the student to watch the lecture again. Finally, lectures must be continually updated through the process of uploading, to maintain a high standard of availability of the widest range of lecture topics for students.
In conclusion, the definition of an internet lecture involves the use of the Internet to give and listen to a lecture, and there are many strong points in favour of this approach. Drawbacks remain, however, and misuse could be detrimental for students. To overcome flaws, universities should make efforts to modify the system, and students should start to adapt their learning approach as well.
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