E-learning: A Revolution in The Way We Learn

The internet is a giant library of information. Whether it be for news, research, or entertainment, the internet has almost everything anyone would ever need. One of these things is education. E-learning is short for electronically learning. It means learning by means of electronic devices, such as the Internet. E-learning is a widely controversial topic. Those who argue for it will tell you it provides consistent worldwide training, increases learner convenience, as well as the use of different types of multimedia. A learner can learn at his own pace, focus on lessons he/she needs rather than the “one-size-fits-all” we see by instructors, and attend lectures miles away in real time (Clark, 2016). Those who argue against it will tell you the up-front cost is impractical as investments in information technology, staff, the courses themselves, as well as hardware and software are too high. In addition, the lack of peer-to-peer networking in e-learning arises another issue that includes the social networking we see in physical schooling today (Welsh, 2003).

A study was conducted at Konkuk University’s Seoul Campus of South Korea. With a population sample size of 6,953 students who participated in at least one e-learning course, 628 decided to participate in this questionnaire (Park, 2009). The results are shown below:

Figure 1: Results of an e-learning questionnaire answered by 628 South Korean University students

As shown above, a majority of students agree that e-learning is easy to use and e-learning has an overall positive effect on their academic careers.

But this also raises the question of: how subjective are these students in questionnaires? Studies vary heavily, where some find e-learning to be more effective while others find classroom instruction to be more effective. Results can highly vary according to the effectiveness of the teacher and the student’s preferred method of learning. Studies show that method of delivery has little impact to student performance, but rather it is the learning environment, how accessible the instructor is, feedback, etc, that really matter (Bell, 2013).

E-learning is a revolution in the way we learn. Today’s demographic of students consumes more content than ever, taking in information from multiple sources at an almost instantaneous speed (Downes, 2005).  Active learning is essential where students need to be actively engaged with the key roles of communication, participation, and consumption (Downes, 2005). Whether e-learning can accomplish this method in the same, if not better, way than today’s method of classroom teaching remains to be unraveled in the future.

References

Bell, B., & Federman, J. (2013). E-Learning in Postsecondary Education. The Future of Children, 23(1), 165-185.

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Downes, S. (2005, October 16). E-Learning 2.0. ELearn Magazine. Retrieved September 12, 2016.

Sung Youl Park. (2009). An Analysis of the Technology Acceptance Model in Understanding University Students’ Behavioral Intention to Use e-Learning. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 12(3), 150-162.

Welsh, E. T., Wanberg, C. R., Brown, K. G. and Simmering, M. J. (2003), E-learning: emerging uses, empirical results and future directions. International Journal of Training and Development, 7: 245–258. doi:10.1046/j.1360-3736.2003.00184.x