Putting the student in the driver's seat

Teachers can access their students' interaction, progress and competence.

There's been a lot of talk about many forces for change as we go into the new millennium: virtual classroom, telecourses, distance education, learning organization, increased competition for scarce resources, aging faculty, pressure for shared services and partnerships, program rationalization and so on.

And the latest topic of e-learning seems to surface in many of our conversations, sometimes as another flavour of the month. After all, it's still trendy to be part of the "e-everything" evolution.

Why all the fuss? For most of us, the classroom has come to symbolize learning and our learning experience. We've grown up with the "classrooms and school" model as an efficient concept designed to respond to the need for universal access to education.

However, there are emerging learning models and new practices that are clearly enabled by the Internet revolution and by the knowledge explosion that transforms the way we work and learn.

A recent survey done by the Conference Board of Canada found that significantly more employers (82 per cent) are planning to use the Internet for employee skill development. The top three reasons are: improved just-intime learning, cost-effectiveness and to give employees more choice in what they learn.

What about e-learning?

There have been many ways to describe the use of technology for learning but they all refer to the use of Internet technologies to deliver a broad range of topics, solutions and experience that improve our learning, knowledge and performance.

The most talked about e-learning touches on the bells and whistles, such as interactive audio and video streaming, lively PowerPoint presentations, hot links to related course information on the Web, animation and self-running screen-capture display programs.

Indeed, e-learning is a transformational process with a new thinking in how each individual learns and how our faculty would interact with their students. With e-learning, we learn in many ways - through access to well-designed consistent controlled and scalable information to our individual style, by using assessment and performance-enhanced tools and through experience.

E-learning can also be tracked on the back end. Therefore, teachers can assess their students' interaction, their progress and competence at whatever level of detail they choose.

Clearly, the fundamental basis of e-learning is accessibility, content and students' control. This results in a change of context for the delivery of instruction from a faculty-centered context to a student-centric.

In fact, the Web-based personalization feature has already contributed to the emerging Learner Relationship Management (LRM) concept.

With all the potential of e-learning, it's quite common then for the higher education administration to have the two frequently asked questions.

Lan Nguyen is the chief information officer at Centennial College in Toronto. She has particular interest in applying IT to international development. Lan can be reached at lnguyen@Lmail.cencol.on.ca.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Apr 2001
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