Friday, July 24, 2015

The Future of eLearning

In present technological scenario and rapidly changing social environment eLearning is replacing the traditional classrooms. In developed world countries like United States, France etc, students are trained through online classes and the trend is becoming popular in Asia too especially India. Cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, and New Delhi etc are vast hub of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). Thousand of faculty members, subject matter experts (SMEs) and instructional designers, course instructors are engaged day and night delivering online classes at various levels.



Many companies are booming up here in India for providing eClasses; places like Mumbai and Bangalore are becoming prominent centers for providing eTutorials. It’s truly booming but the big question is what the future of eLearning is?  Everyone, educators, parents, and students have the same question in mind. To check it out its imperative to look the trends concerned with learning, which are already taking control in our world?   

Knowledge is expanding at incredible rate, thanks to the World Wide Web where information is available with the click of a mouse and without putting much effort. Today the growth of knowledge industry is so much big that a high school graduate knows more than Big Daddy learnt in his lifetime and this turned out possible because of Internet. Websites like Wikipedia, Yahoo, and MSN are already providing the good quality information through Internet free. Encarta of MSN is good resource and a viable one. Top Search Engine Giant GOOGLE has many products to share knowledge, e.g. Blogger, Scholar and Google Apps etc. Also Google offers many customize services to educational institutions free of cost. 

In the world of online learning two companies are really doing magic; www.lynda.com and www.khanacademy.org. Both these websites offers online academic tutorials to school and college students and makes top of my referral list. 

Wikipedia has big brain of RMS a Physicist, a knowledge reservoir himself, MSN has Bill Gates. Recently LinkedIn has purchased Lynda.Com. These are sure signs of growth both social and financial. 

Providing classrooms through e-way requires much effort and more resources than traditional classroom training. However, once ready, you can broadcast lectures to unlimited numbers of audience without putting any significant additional cost. This is where collaboration works. For example, www.khanacademy.com develops course content and delivers lectures via YouTube.com. The company has many big partners with it, the likes of Google and Microsoft etc.

From business prospective, dipping your feet in elearning business is easy but sailing through the storm requires you to sail against the winds. One needs to be master in different areas of business, handling human resources and most importantly in collaborative technologies. However, there come many apps and tools to let you establish online learning venture, like Google Apps, Amazon, Moodle Project, YouTube, SlideShare, etc.

The interest of learners is slowly drifting from classroom learning towards online tutorials. For disciplined learners online learning is always the way. However, many prefer to both, and in some cases I found students interested in learning things face to face from teachers and clearing doubts from internet. Generally, students want to find a course material (audio/visual) over the internet and next they go to teachers for discussions.

E-learning is flexible, you can learn from anywhere, home, lunch breaks, tea time or on the go. Internet is reaching to everyone and people want to learn. Several years back in an organization. Smart gadgets, mobile phones, tablets and laptops are available for everyone. To make pace with the industry, sustain in a job or to find new one, people need to learn. More and more working professionals would be interested in learning eWay because of flexibility the eLearning offers.

Considering above facts it seems imperative that eLearning would co-exist with other learning technologies and the future of eLearning is vivid.  

This article was written several years back on the same website, however, republished tonight with little edits.

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