5 years ago, my secondary school did a switch from the old and dusty blackboards and chalks to the dustless whiteboards and its counterpart-markers. It was an amazing change, till the power of e-learning came about.
4 years ago, I would never expect myself to ask my parents for a laptop for school-related purposes of learning.
3 years ago, I would never expect myself to tote a laptop around school for project purposes.
2 years ago, I would never expect the teachers in school to require us to utilize our laptops for assignment purposes.
1 years ago, I would never imagine my lecturer asking us, students,to bring our laptops to school for exam purposes.
There are many benefits of e-learning and I will be talking more about its effects being felt by students like myself.
Learning is made convenient, where we start to witness the disappearance of huge and heavy textbooks. We now worry less about the accessibily and availability of learning materials as materials are made available online. With this comes cost advantages. We now purchase lesser textbooks, if even, as more teachers adopt the e-learning approach, where information is made available over the Internet. This greatly boosts incidences of learning.
Also, e-learning enables communication with our lecturers outside school hours and even transcends geographical locations. The use of e-learning facilitates quick feedback from our lecturers too and makes learning a breeze. If I had a question in mind, I can always e-mail my lecturer who will provide me with an answer as soon as he or she can, a day at most, enabling me to clear my doubts when I am unable to be physically in school to consult them.
Take for example our very own UBLearns. It is the University at Buffalo's online learning platform for its students, where lecturers and students are able to interact over the net. There, lecturers can be seen uploading study materials, discussion questions and so on. There was even a module where the questions for the midterm paper was uploaded onto UBLearns and all we had to do was to copy and paste the questions and e-mail our answers in a word document. This not only helps to save the trees but also saves time for both lecturer and student as handwritten work did not have to be done.
UBLearns also enabled online modules to be available to us. An example is the online module NTR109, where we were responsible for downloads the learning materials and studying them ourselves. Then, we wre required to sit for the exam in the Singapore campus here. UBLearns also faciliated communication between the NTR109 lecturer over at the United States campus and myself and made learning feasible.
One device that I use also makes e-learning possible and even more "on the go" for me - my Blackberry phone. I am able to use the Internet for learning purposes wherever I am and I find that it helps me in my studying process a great deal. For example, I can easily look up information I am unsure about anytime, anywhere here and I can also read up on relevant materials on the way to school before the lesson starts.
E-learning is one of the newer forms of learning in this day and age and will only be effective if one's attitude toward learning is in place. No amount of sophisticated learning method will be beneficial if one does not set his or her mind to learning. All in all, we should always keep up the spirit of learning and seek to embrace different ways of learning.
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