E-learning: Still an unrealized potential in many developing and backward nations

Recently, Dimension Data successfully set up two e-learning centres, at Kwapata High School and Nyonithwele High School, for the benefit of high school learners and teachers in Dambuza in South Africa. The main aim was to help students gain access to premium technology applications to support the school curriculum and to demonstrate the power of Information and Communication Technologies to cater to as many learners as possible. On the launch, Zandile Mbele, Transformation Executive, Dimension Data, said: “Dimension Data is not just about business, it's also about using our technology to enable education to empower young people to go out and fulfil their potential, bringing their skills and experience back to their communities and inspiring others to do the same.” Dimension data has been working on such programs since 2006 in Africa where it has the largest presence.

It should be a note-worthy point to have this success story replicated by governments of developing nations to empower their citizens through increased government-corporate tie-ups to develop elearning materials. The two main hurdles are however, slow internet penetration in many countries and newness to computer technology. Africa, some parts of Asia and Latin America are some of the nations needing immediate attention to improve their nation-wide learning initiatives.

At the Education Technology Debate, sponsored by Infodev and UNESCO in 2010, it was found that more than 60% of students who qualify for university or tertiary education in developing countries can't attend due to limited physical infrastructure. The best solution is to make best use of low cost ICT technologies and implement elearning to expand the boundaries of education (ICT4E).

It is no doubt that elearning will be at the helm of all educational methodologies, but governments should steer their educational policies to implement it and serve one of the most basic necessity (like education) to the majority of their citizens. After all, education is power and power to improve lives and living conditions in a growing economy.

New stuff to look for in elearning...

The face of e-learning is changing more rapidly and research by ASTD and other e-learning groups suggest that the latest trends in e-learning include:

• More user engagement in elearning than ever before than the boring one-sided approach
• Integrating user-based content like Wikis, Blogs, etc
• Integrating social media into the existing e-learning system, making it very user-centric and interactive
• Mlearning and the surge in the number of Mobile applications that focus on elearning

Lets wait and watch where these trendsetters reach...

E-learning Vs Traditional Classroom User Experience

E-learning snippets -

It is the age old question - Why e-learning is unable to match traditional classroom experience?

There is no doubt that humans like the touch-n-feel factor (courtesy: their five senses) and that is the way it was intended from the beginning of the world. E-learning gives the user a more virtual (kinda Artificial Intelligence Feel) compared to the humanistic classroom approach. Traditional classrooms gives you more room to interact and collaborate with your peers more effectively than an interactive online classroom. However, traditional classrooms has a lot of down-sides in this totally technologically driven fast-paced world. The lack of anytime-anywhere collaboration is impossible in a traditional classroom environment, whereas E-learning wins hands-down due to its multiple interactive mediums unlike traditional classrooms.

Has MLearning come of age?

What’s common between Apple’s IPad, Samsung's Galaxy, HTC's Flyer, Motorola's Xoom, Dell's Streak and Blackberry's Playbook? Well, all are tablets of their brands respectively and this list is not exhaustive. It is estimated that about 70% of the world’s population have mobile phones and that equates to about 5 billion mobile connection subscriptions of a world with a 6.8 billion population. To know more about these ridiculous mobile stats, check out this interesting video.

Now that we’re seeing such a great penetration of mobile subscriptions to the remotest of areas in the world, it is certainly an optimistic view to consider that MLearning has a lot of scope, but indeed with hoards of challenges. When we talk about challenges, it used to vary between screen size to bandwidth speeds, compatibility of proprietary formats in several mobile devices to establishing e-learning standards for mobile learning and a lot more. But considering the emergence of smart phones and the fact that Google’s Android is dominating the mobile OS market (expected to have a 45% share by 2015, according to an IDC report), compatibility issues doesn’t matter any longer. Moreover, screen sizes of tablets and smart phones have increased aesthetically without making the devices look bulkier. Talking about bandwidth, internet speeds have greatly increased – thanks to 3G and 4G. So what do all these convey? Is MLearning coming of age? Sure, and definitely with LTE and WiMAX battling it out to prove who’s best.

What remains is to see how learning institutions and companies improve and employ mobile learning to make it an effective substitute to classroom training. Some universities have already started using smart phones and web-enabled devices to teach and deliver learning sessions. Product-based companies are empowering their field sales professionals to use mobile learning while visiting clients for service calls. Mobile devices like IPADs and other tabs have become so popular for their interactive interfaces that make even the most boring e-book look interesting. It is found that K-12s are adopting tablets and e-readers more effectively than universities. The biggest advantage of going mobile is saving money for these large learning institutions for a number of reasons. However, since mobile learning is a new research area and is just getting over its beta stage, it is important to first analyse why it is to be used and how should it be used. The recently concluded APAC Mobile Learning Conference just reiterated that fact. The conference attendees included educators, mobile operators, CEOs’, HR and IT Heads of companies, as well as corporate and senior government officials from over 10 countries. According to them – “The purpose of the conference was to share and exchange information about promising future opportunities of leveraging on mobile technology and devices in delivering learning and training”.

Is Long Tail Learning the future of E-learning?

E-learning has come a long way since alternative means to move away from traditional learning were much sought after. Today, a majority of the youth population lives in the virtual world and are busy managing wikis, blogs, social networking presence in sites like Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Virtual life has indeed taken an  imperative position - thanks to iPhones, iPADs, 4Gs and what not! There cannot be a better opportunity than now for universities, K-12s, organizations and multinationals to implement best e-learning practices that integrate social networking and learning. Although the phenomenon is already felt, much progress is yet to be seen in this area of learning, now commonly called Long Tail Learning. 

Don't worry about Long Tail. It is statistics and we all know, statistics is more than measures of central tendency! Don't even take the risk of studying probability distributions. Simply understand that Long Tail Learning is to take your world of learning from traditional classroom environs to a Web 2.0 or a Semantic Web, also aliased as Web 3.0 collaborative environment where you not just learn, but engage in a host of other collaborative tools to augment your learning effectively. Indeed Long Tail Learning is a great boost to Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Here's an interesting video by MIT iCampus on how this phenomenon can be applied to e-learning.



Personally, I believe Long Tail Learning is the future of e-learning because learners will have the opportunity to learn, share and teach at the same time and justify the basis of collaborative learning. Learning will become many-sided unlike the one-sided approach you find in classrooms and other static e-learning engines. However, the inherent challenge of designing such a complex collaborative platform  is far from easy, although a few learning dotcoms have already implemented it. Employing best learning practices and standards will not suffice. It is important to constantly review and test collaborative learning where you have restricted control on the participants about the information they share with others in the learning environment. This kind of learning is only  beginning to take shape, but will take a while before it turns out to be a successful phenomenon.