E-learning is a comprehensive solution designed to assist teachers in meeting with their day to day classroom challenges and enhancing students’ academic performance with simple, practical and meaningful use of technology. It provides teachers with instant access to multimedia content and instructional materials mapped exactly to the specific curriculum guidelines for use in class and also enables teachers to instantly assess and evaluate the learning achieved by their students in class with innovative use of technology. It helps teachers to ensure that every child in the class is learning, given the wide diversity of learning styles in the classroom. It is also highly efficient in maintaining students’ interest and engagement in learning inside the classroom and simplifies the problems of teaching abstract curriculum concepts that are difficult for students to visualize or relate to through the provision of three-dimensional, interactive multi-media module.
E-learning has resulted in a paradigm shift in education systems. E-learning is defined as Internet-enabled learning that involves the convergence of the Internet and learning. The rapid development of Internet has facilitated its growth.
E-learning should not be just a machine based method for teaching and will be only effective in engaging all the participants when it has a human touch. The learning can be on any level, elementary school, college, or corporate. E-learning is gaining popularity because of the obvious advantages it offers -
●It minimizes travel
●Open for working people
●Career oriented training easily available
●There is no time constraint
●Little infrastructure needed
●Provides innovative and interactive learning
E- Class is powered by a vast repository of ‘instructor led’ digital presentation materials such as animations/video clips, etc. which are mapped to curriculum guidelines adopted by the school. The content modules are made available to the teacher’s right inside the classroom as and when they need them as per their own are specified time tables. A powerful application engine enables teachers to search/ select/ view/ prepare lesson plans and use the content modules in class.
E-learning requires investment of time and effort in developing new skills, new approaches, and new resources: perhaps time and effort that would otherwise be spent on research. However, you can save time and effort in the long term. For example, you may create banks of flexible resources that can be reused, you may design learning activities that can be redeployed, or you may produce computer assisted assessment (CAA) that will allow you to cope with increasing student numbers with no increase in marking time.
E-learning thus offers practical ways of dealing with some of these challenges and can help shift our role from that of teacher to a guide and facilitator of students' learning.
