Flexible means being adaptable. That is it. It’s okay you can close the page.

But really what flexible learning means, what can be the outcome for education and online learning. How can you take advantage of that in your online learning journey? We will try to give an answer in this post with some examples related to coding and online learning of computer science.

Definition

First of all flexible learning is a term used to describe an adaptable, and adjustable way of learning or online curriculum or roadmap. Depending on what you are learning. It can be seen as a program where little changes do not widely affect the global program outcome. For example, let’s consider a company with man workers (let’s imagine developers 😉) with the exact same skills. In this case, if one developer has a problem or wants to have a holiday, another developer can replace him easily without actually breaking the global state of the company. We can consider this set as a flexible one because changes in the system do not extremely affect the global system.

Aspects of flexibility learning

Flexibility is also linked to possibilities. If when learning something new you have the possibility to choose between different subjects, maybe come back and change your mind, this can be considered as flexible learning. In high school, we have a semi-flexible program. We can choose our courses and follow along. But it is semi because it is difficult to roll back.

When comes to online learning, is one of the most adjustable areas of education. In this context, flexibility is related to a lot of things. Ranging from your time to the content of your course or even the instructors. In online courses, you can choose or change almost everything most of the time.

Time

When we look at the time flexibility of online learning you can consider it as the way that helps you organise your time as you want. Like deciding to study at midnight, instead of 8a.m -3p.m every day or maybe changing hours depending on your schedule. It has a huge advantage because most of the time you have the content on-demand and you can just choose the program that suits you best to learn. Your brain is less formatted to that and more relaxed. That is the main reason why people that are already working or busy with something else preferred online learning to present classes. because they can freely choose their time to learn.

Program

We can also look at the online learning flexibility in terms of the program. This one is actually rare because it is difficult to archive for programs makers. Creating content for every possibility so that the student can freely choose which content he wanted to study or change at any time is extremely time-consuming. Another reason is the global cohesion of the program. It is difficult to make a programme globally coherent including a huge amount of possibilities. For example when you are trying to learn artificial intelligence, most of the time you can choose between different specialisations and different sectors of application depending on your preferences. But unfortunately, online programs tend to give you a predefined path for everything so they can easily craft and create coherent content and that is the reason why many people preferred to stick to a simple non-flexible learning path.

Tools

More specific to computer science and coding, in online courses, it is difficult to show you every tool you can use to solve a problem. For example, on others to build a project in web development you can choose a specific programming language to start with (PHP, Nodejs, java, python, go, …). But in most dev BootCamp or online courses, you will find a complete course in just one language. because course makers don’t have enough time or experience to give you a wild view of everything and maybe let you freely choose your language or change depending on your experience with one tool or another.

Instructors

The flexibility can be remarked also on the instructor’s side. it is rarely easy to choose your instructor freely or change instructors if for example you don’t like the tone of the voice or you don’t understand well what the instructor is teaching you. That is because courses are often prerecorded and for every subject, you have one instructor. And is a huge problem because we are not all the same. Some people have great experiences with one instructor and others do not. And it will be very helpful to have a set of choices when it comes to your online teacher too.

Problem with flexible online learning + solution.

With those said, you can remark that online learning most of the time suffers from a lack of global flexibility and that can be a huge problem for the learner. That is one of the reasons why we have decided to create a highly flexible online course to match each user’s character and needs specifically. So you can enjoy a course at 100% and change everything that doesn’t fit with you, choose your tools, choose your instructors, and freely advance in your learning journey.

It is ulife school and we think it can be the future of education. You can find it here and we are actively improving it to make it better and better and pleasant for people taking courses on our platform.

And alert… Ulife school is completely free. You can subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when we craft new courses and contents