There is no doubt that most studnents love e-learning (studying online) as they can grab the opportunity to surf the net on their laptops at the comfort of their homes. As a 15-year-old student, I’m not an exception too. For my school, there are two e-learning days in a year and we would always anticipate these two “school holidays”. Sad to say, the Swine Flu a.k.a H1N1 pandemic is getting really serious in Singapore and the number of confirmed cases have bypass the 100 mark, despite being a small country of only 4.8 million people. Currently, we are enjoying our June school holiday break and the next school term would officially starts on June 30 and most of us are definitely reluctant to go back to schools for lessons.
Yes finally, our wish has come true. According to several reliabel sources, it’s highly probable that the one month school holidays will be extended by one week and teachers would have to upload lessons in DOC or PPT formats on Studywiz, an e-learning portal during the one week period. Of course, many students would warmly welcome the extension as we can wake up as late as we wish to and the fun experience to study online.
Here’s how teachers teach using advanced technology and students study from these materials online. Before an e-learning day commences, teachers would record their lessons as podcasts and we students would have to download them from Studywiz and listen via iTunes. Alternatively, they can transform their beautiful voices into interesting powerpoint slides filled with colorful pictures and words using Apple Keynote. To test our understanding, they would post quizzes or even give us worksheets in Word document for us to complete and email back to them. It’s not a common sight to see many of my classmates “online” on MSN discussing the answers to the questions posted by the teachers.
I personally feel that e-Learning is really fun, exciting and unique experience that incorporate online forums, community and discussions. Online learning facilitates the interaction of learners and teachers in different locations, all over the world. However, on the other hand, I find it quite useless too. Yes, e-learning does provides several benefits such as convenience as students have the ability to access learning from their home instead of traveling to schools and attend lessons in a physical classroom. But the main issue is that we don’t really learn much from the materials teachers post online as compared to the traditional way of education for the past few centuries.
Why? Even though today’s technology are of a high quality whereby the Internet has become a necessity in our lives and students would have to dependent on it to research on school projects, but e-learning offers more drawbacks than the traditional way of learning. For example, One of the main concern parents worry is that students with low motivation or bad study habits may fall behind. While studying online, students may be distracted by social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, or even chatting with friends on MSN. What’s more is that without the routine structures of a traditional class, students may get lost or confused about course activities and deadlines.
During e-learning, I would always have to wake up early in the wee hours to finish up all my tasks for one obvious reason. Well, the school servers have such a low bandwidth that it cannot even accommodate 1,000+ students and teachers. The servers always crash during peak hours in the late morning and afternoon. It’s so slow that logging in to the e-learning portal would take you over 5 minutes and this is really frustrating! All the time wasted is equivalent to my travel time to school.
If students stumbled across any misconceptions or issues that he or she could not comprehend well and requires the teacher to explain in detail, then of course we would like to speak to the teacher face-to-face rather than using high technology communication tools such as email or IMs.
In my own opinion, e-learning isn’t completely useless. It does has some advantages which are way better than the traditional way of teaching and studying. However, I don’t think virtual schools will become the future of education even with the technology moving at a really fast rate. Yes, this post contradicts Zhou Tong’s article on “The Future of Education – Teachers to use Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to Teach“. As adults, I’m pretty sure most of you guys have never experience e-learning before when you were young. To me, it’s very fun but looking at a long term basis, it’s not going to be as beneficial.
Excellent points made Xavier! I'll forward your blog post to my colleagues at MOE. It's good to get feedback from the students themselves.
Interesting points. However, your article only discusses a single platform for eLearning: StudyWiz. There are many other types or eLearning going on. I just attended a conference in Salt Lake City Utah where I saw eLearning produced by some of the largest companies in the world– and the results were astounding! High quality animation and graphics and strong levels of learner engagement.
While I agree that classroom instruction is the most effective type of learning for most people, there are many who don't function well in that environment and do better as independent learners.
You make an excellent point, and it's great to hear this from an student's point of view. E-learning still has a long way to go to be actually useful. We're in the beginning stages of a new model, and this discussions help us achieve a better understanding of how to implement it effectively. My own experience is very similar to yours and as a teacher I'm working to improve material and interaction to make online learning a reality for my students! Cheers!
Well, it's because my school uses Studywiz and I'm not really familiar with other e-learning portals.
so true man
marist here. haha
I think the best use for e-Learning is for informal training/teaching. There is too much that could go wrong in a formal school setting if it were used 100% of the time, but for an additional curriculum, job training, or follow up to a class lesson e-Learning can be a big help, turning somewhat dry content into games, visual analogies or simulations. This is especially true if it's only used two days out of the year and mimics telecommuting jobs where people are expected to perform away from their desks. It's a good sample of a somewhat real-world situation, as it calls for some self discipline/honor system.
Nice article, it's good to see teachers are willing to learn new things & teach in different ways.
I would suggest that e-learning augments/aids teaching particularly in younger students rather than replacing physical class rooms. In my workplace we use all the tech tools to communicate with offices and clients around the world and software solutions to manage our work, as a preparation for working in the “modern” world with software solutions for almost every industry there are benefits in eLearning that we may not be aware of as we head towards an eBusiness world.
Xavier- This is a great analysis of eLearning in the classroom. Do you think the shortfalls of eLearning could be addressed if teachers had online tools to demonstrate concepts more like they do in the classroom? I'm thinking virtual meeting software like WebEx, LiveMeeting or Adobe Connect. Or maybe the addition of video conferencing with software like Cisco Telepresence. You mentioned that the resources teachers posted online were not very helpful. How would you improve those materials or totally change them to suite the online world?
If you want to follow the epic nail biting action which is e-learning day in Maris Stella High School, stay tuned to my twitter feed, where the latest and newest updates about E-learning are brought to you. #sarcasm
If you want to follow the epic nail biting action which is e-learning day in Maris Stella High School, stay tuned to my twitter feed, where the latest and newest updates about E-learning are brought to you. #sarcasm