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February, 2002 VIEWPORT |
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Is e-learning a flop in India? Virtual communities are an important component of new pedagogical strategies based on information infrastructures that can dramatically improve learning outcomes. By Pramod Khera
No doubt the Web- and Internet-based collaborative tools have significantly enhanced the ability to train and educate a large number of people electronically. The Internet, with its ability to connect people and information around the world, is already having a significant impact on education at all levels. But people are still wary about its effectiveness and impact as a serious medium of learning. Both technologists and educationists agree that e-learning is possible, efficient and represents the future. But the way e-learning has evolved does not give students the confidence that it can replace classroom learning. Why is this so? Where are the gaps? And what needs to be done to bridge these gaps? The classical gap One needs to understand the evolution and growth of the Internet in order to do a gap analysis. E-learning today is facing the same dilemma and acceptance problems that other Net applications are encountering. The Net has grown at an incredible speed in the past decade mainly because of unreasonably high expectations created by Internet and dotcom enthusiasts and protagonists. In their eagerness, they created applications without really analysing and understanding the fundamentals of these applications. They did a good job of populating the Web with enormous content and faulty applications. As a result, customers experienced serious shortcomings, lacunae and inefficiencies in their (applications') delivery. The story of e-learning is no different. This is not to say that all e-learning efforts on the Web are of no significance. Institutions with sound backgrounds have made serious attempts to leverage the Net for imparting education. But they have been outnumbered by a majority who have attempted to pass off a conglomeration of elrctronic pages, chat rooms and bulletin boards as virtual classrooms. Luckily a reversal is now happening. Technologists are giving way to educationists to lead the e-learning revolution. And rightly so, for e-learning is all about designing content, laying down instructions and methodologies, creating support and facilitating environments for learning on the Web. Re-engineering education There are still issues in the e-learning arena that need to be sorted out. The biggest single design consideration for effective e-learning that remains to be worked out is a careful reading of cultures prevailing in different geographies, and recognition of severe limits on the ability of IT to cross socio-cultural boundaries. Virtual communities are an important component of new pedagogical strategies based on information infrastructures that can dramatically improve outcomes. Learning is a social and intellectual experience. Individual, isolated attempts to make sense out of complex data can easily fail unless the individual/ institution constructing shared knowledge encourages the learner. Moreover, students are unlikely to make major gains if other parts of their lives are not educationally fulfilling. Virtual communities can help bring about close cooperation and shared responsibility for learning among educational agents of society, social service agencies, mass media and schools. A majority of the capabilities discussed above are slowly becoming functional in classrooms. Universities like University of Phoenix have taken the lead in applying technology to education for learning and for collaboration. University administrators and corporate houses need to chart the 21st century vision of their institutions to build a knowledge-based economy through a journey that would include IT and collaborative learning and teaching. Pramod Khera, CEO, Aptech Ltd, with Dr. Meena Kumari, CTO, Aptech Ltd |
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A lot has
been written and talked about the Web as an information discovery and
retrieval tool and as a foundation for electronic commerce. Education was
one application touted as having great potential on the Web, especially
since education and learning are all about discovering, retrieving,
disseminating and imbibing knowledge.
