Comparison of traditional and online education in Bhutan

Online teaching has been attracting attention at present, because educational institutions must provide distance learning opportunities for students while they are closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic In Bhutan, all schools and educational institutes have been closed since 18 March 2020 Instead of traditional class, the Ministry of Education in Bhutan has taken the initiative to educate students through learning television and Internet-based online education Thus, the Royal University of Bhutan (RUB) and its ten constituent colleges started online education with two tools, the Zoom online meeting service and the BigBlueButton web conference system In this paper, we compare traditional education and online education with Zoom and BigBlueButton, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each respective education First, the advantage of traditional education is that it is easy to communicate with each other because of the face-to-face interaction Also, tutors can always observe students' situations, so students concentrate on a class On the other hand, one of the disadvantages is that venues are restricted, so all students must gather in a classroom Such a situation is prohibited in the case of an infectious disease such as COVID-19 Focusing on online education, its advantage is that students can take a class wherever they want if the Internet is available At present, all students of the ten constituent colleges under RUB are staying in their hometown However, they take a class there according to a timetable designed by their respective colleges Another advantage is that the online class can be recorded as video or audio, so students are able to review a class with video or audio On the other hand, one of the disadvantages is that the Zoom meeting has security problems Namely, it is easy to hack into the Zoom meeting Also, a web camera is unavailable on BigBlueButton, because of a low network speed in Bhutan Another reason for unavailability of a web camera on BigBlueButton is that the Moodle server is overloaded, because BigBlueButton has been integrated with Moodle as a plugin © 2020 Academic Conferences Limited All rights reserved