Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Amazing Videos

Future of e-learning

Classrooms are boring. Today students feel school is not challenging or interactive enough. It has been said that there are two reasons why we learn; some leaning is essentially forced on us while the other is what we sit back and enjoy. E-Learning has brought back the joy in learning through its innovative and interactive content and delivery.

The old correspondence courses were the first Distance Learning courses but with the advent of Internet in the eighties, e-Learning became new mantra for delivering higher education courses over really long distances.

The Internet opened new possibilities and now any type of learning content, be it for school, graduate or masters level, employee training, research activity or any other type of academic offering is called e-Learning.

e-Leaning has already established its credentials and its popularity can be gauged from the fact that delivery is not restricted to just plain text but has crossed boundaries to video creating virtual class rooms via video conferencing. The introduction of a variety of technologies has made it possible to convert it from impersonal to highly interactive medium of pedagogy (the art and science of teaching).



The Future




According to Market Data Retrieval (MDR) in USA two thirds of colleges and universities offer long distance learning courses and the number of institutions offering accredited degrees have increased to 55% New varieties of e-Learning have emerged with help and push from emerging technologies. Besides distance learning now there is distributed learning. This term describes the educational experiences of individuals and groups that are distributed over geographies and cultures using variety of media delivery methods. This has moved education beyond the classroom to more interactive information by joining learning and experience together. This is developing into learning communities with their own focus on various branches, cultures and sub-cultures. It is a mind boggling explosion of information that is now available with lot of imagination and little effort. With collaborative tools e-learning is moving into virtual classes and virtual communities where the old methods of practice and test have melted into new interactive teaching-learning methodologies.

Tuition on line has taken a new meaning where a varied help is now available both free and paid for on demand on any subject instantly. This has relieved pressure both on the teacher and the students.

Future learning is now focusing on learning beyond the classroom and curriculum. Companies need to upgrade employees by offering re-training programmes. These are both costly and time consuming. By designing these programmes and content via e-Learning methods both time and money are saved. The innovative method is also self promoting as it increases the curiosity level of individuals for self promotion and career enhancements.

In the technical field too doctors and other professionals are getting a fair chance for keeping abreast of developments and discoveries and even participation in these activities through interactive delivery processes.

Looking further, this being the global market era, the consumer is being made aware of immense openings, opportunities and bargains through this method. Medical tourism is one recent example of e-Learning where serious information and fun have been mixed for delivery of marketing content.

Friday, October 17, 2008

E-Learning 2.0

What is E-Learning 2.0 ?

E-Learning 2.0 was coined by Stephen Downes, a Canadian researcher, and it is derived from the general e-learning trends in combination with Web 2.0. The nature of the Internet, and more importantly, the people using the Internet, has changed. These changes are extensive covering entire industries.

New trends

A trend that has captured the interest of numerous pundits is the changing temperament of Internet users themselves. Sometimes called "digital natives" or "n-gen," these new users approach work, learning and play differently.

They take in information quickly, in images and video as well as text, from numerous sources concurrently. They function at "twitch speed," and expect instant reaction and feedback. They favor random "on-demand" contact to media, expect to be in continuous communication with their associates (who may be nearby or around the world), and they are as likely to craft their own media (or download someone else's) as to buy a book or a CD.

Web 2.0

What was happening was that the Web had shifted from being a medium, in which information was broadcast and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was produced, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along. Web 2.0 also has meant a change in the way applications are constructed. The web has become an omnipresent computing platform that facilitates the delivery of software as a service. In the next few years, it will be progressively rarer to buy software for installation on a local computer. Instead most software will be delivered as a service through the web, and the same software will often provide components that can be used effortlessly in other applications. A good example of this is the many mash-ups of Google Maps, which permit users to view real estate listings, and other data points on a map.

Opportunities

E-Learning 2.0 opens new opportunities to learning. The learning community must be at the forefront of this trend. It must become adept in these tools and make sure it understands how they can be utilized as part of formal and informal learning. Eventually, the creative use of the read/write web and learning the related learning skills will be the most important factor in becoming leaders in E-Learning 2.0. As a preliminary point, workplace learning professionals need to get familiar with the tools and begin the skill building procedure. In other terms, time must be spent in learning how to learn. Continuous adopting of tools and practices that help personal and group learning is the key. Then, it can be utilized as part of an overall e-learning solution in the organization.

Conclusion

As the numbers suggest, E-Learning 2.0 is a bigger leap in learning than the shift from E-Learning 1.0 to E-Learning 1.3. E-Learning 2.0 is based on web tools that merge ease of content creation, delivery, and integrated teamwork. Anyone can create content as part of their day-to-day work. In spirit, the idea of E-Learning 2.0 is that sharing and learning becomes a natural action that is directed and driven by the worker/learner. Learning has become a combination of access to content, which often obtained from the work of peers, as well as contact with peers through online social networking. Indeed, many people cite the social or network effect as having the maximum opportunity for impact on learning.