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.