Online Instruction and Offline Classroom Teaching: A Study on Parallel Education Systems

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought online education under the spotlight. Universities have resorted to online education practices, including online instruction and learning, to achieve outcomes that are essentially comparable with offline classroom teaching. In this paper, an analysis was conducted to identify the impact of parallel online education on instructors and students, and relevant aspects were discussed. This study was aimed at obtaining a deeper understanding of the nature of online education so as to facilitate its long-term growth. This paper suggests that instructors should consider the particularity of online education when completing their pre-class, in-class and after-class instructional design, with a special focus on enhancing the learning outcomes of students.