Thursday, December 11, 2008

E-LEARNING MORE USER FRIENDLY THAN CLASSROOM TEACHING

Washington
DNA

E-learning is more user-friendly than classroom teaching and is equally a shared endeavour.

Caroline Haythornthwaite, Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois (U-I), feels that the value of e-learning has been underrated at the college level.

"Compared to the more traditional educational paradigm... where knowledge is delivered from professor to student, e-learning turns teaching and learning into a shared endeavour," she said.

E-learning is defined as technology-based learning. Lectures, homework, quizzes and exams are delivered almost entirely online. In some instances, no in-person interaction takes place over the length of the course.

A global economy hungry for customised, portable and on-demand educational platforms coupled with the Internet boom, makes e-learning increasingly gain popularity as an innovative and viable pedagogical tool.

This is a boon for subjects that require multimedia, collaboration tools (wikis, blogs and course-management systems, for example), and other bandwidth-hungry applications prevalent today.

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