Explain the Advantages of Correspondence Education

Correspondence education, as its name suggests, is sending lessons to its students through the post. These lessons are prepared rather in the same way as a new curriculum; they pass through a number of drafts and pilots tests, before being printed in large numbers and offered to the public.

As soon as a student enrols in a course, a personal profile of his/her age, interests, and education is made. This information is to help the tutor get a good idea of what the students like even though they may not meet. Advice on how to study as correspondence student is sent with the first lesson. The student studies the material and sends the assignments on the lesson to his/her tutor for assessment. When the whole course lessons are completed, it is left to the student to make whatever arrangements are necessary for sitting any public examination for which he/she may be preparing.

Correspondence education has many advantages:

• It opens educational opportunities to those who, because of distance, physical incapacity, lack of financial resources, work commitments etc. cannot avail themselves of normal schooling.
• It allows a student to study while he/she is employed in some other job. For example, a teacher can learn while he/she earns and also serve the authorities without the problem of finding a replacement.
• If there are suitable facilities and supervision locally, it can be used to study almost any subject even practical ones.
• It can employ any kind of medium which can be sent through the post so that, although printed material and pictures are most common audio cassettes filmstrips, science kits, and other such materials are sometimes used.
• It is flexible in the techniques that can be used, since it can be supplemented, if necessary by radio broadcasts, telephone conversations and face to face meetings and can even he conducted in the pages of a newspaper.

The disadvantages lie largely in the high degree of motivation required by a student if he/she is to complete a study of course without the stimulus of other minds, discussion, competition and encouragement. Another problem is, although it is less costly than conventional education, it depends on tutors who are full-time teachers or university lecturers whose time for correspondence commitments is therefore limited. In correspondence education tutorial support is difficult unless the part-time tutors are willing to apply themselves conscientiously to the correspondence tutorial element. Lastly, if costs are cut down in the preparation of the course material, then the quality of teaching suffers.