Firstly, online math courses, are much more convenient as they save you on time and gas to attend traditional lectures. This is a huge advantage considering the huge traffic jams and fuel wastage experienced in some towns and cities. Learning can be done at convenient times and for required time lengths.
Since the learning materials are pre-recorded on video, the student can revisit the video to a certain point as many times as needed so as to grasp a difficult math concept. This is not possible with a traditional math lecture.
Taking math courses, from home has a distinct advantage of learning in a controlled and quiet comfortable environment, where the student is more likely to concentrate better. Math requires absolute concentration. Furthermore there are no missed lectures due to in ability to attend a class or lateness to lectures as learning materials are readily available online.
For the student, he is able to skip going through materials and topics that he already understands well. Thus he is able to devote more time to topics that need more of his attention, boosting overall performance.
To the lecturers, it frees up their time from having to stand in front of a class for a predetermined period of time, and they instead focus on assisting those students with specific math problems. The tutor is able to have more students and be in a position to offer personalized assistance to students. It is thus cheaper to the college to administer math courses online as they comparatively need less number of tutors. Furthermore, the tutor is able to deliver a better learning content since the effort to do so is invested only once at the time of preparing the materials. The tutor is also able to revise his learning materials from his experience with the commonly asked questions by the students and incorporate this in his videos and thus provide a much better learning material.
Areas of concern for learning math courses online
Online math courses, like other online courses require discipline. This is because it is very tempting for a student to procrastinate studying, cut on study time and underestimate the time needed to study for the math courses. This is especially so since math is a technical course and requires practice to grasp the concepts and be confident enough to face exams. Again, there could be distractions when learning is done away from the controlled class environment. Peer pressure, social interactions could eat into study time and compromise the results obtained. All these are things that can be easily addressed.
In summation, math courses online, is the way to go for new college math students due to the unmistakable advantages and virtually no real downside to the same.