E-Learning is short for electronic learning. Most often many people even educators still have some doubts on the possibilities of learning through electronic media. Over the years mankind is used to learning with the presence of a teacher. It is therefore very difficult to accept a paradigm shift in learning where the presence of a teacher in a physical classroom will no longer be necessary for learner to gain knowledge and acquire skill. Technology, in no doubt has affected lives in diverse ways and education is not left out.
Education and Technology
Education is thought before now to be transmission of knowledge to an unknowledgeable person; a two-way communication where there has to be a giver and receiver, and a process that is complete when there is transmission of information and there is a response. The use of technology in education has however changed styles, mode and methods used in education. The curriculum of schools is being re-written as course design is encouraging competitiveness and is fast changing. The learner do no longer need to see his teacher before he could learn from him neither is the teacher in some cases need to play his traditional roles of imparting knowledge before the learner could learn. There is a re-thinking in the field of education on the roles of teachers and the parts student will play in a technology driven society.
Global View on Learning
The teacher now need not be present in the same physical structure before he could instruct neither does he needs to even be in the same geography location with his student as the world now is a global village. The world is now networked and countries and people are interconnected such that a student residing in an Asian country and his teacher in Africa could make contact on a click of a computer mouse and to access course materials without difficulties. There is virtually nothing that is not on the World Wide Web (www), so the learner too could access information from other sources just as his teacher to complement his teacher's in order to enhance his learning. The teacher does no longer have exclusive preserve of "important" information and hence it is an error to refer to the teacher as a custodian of knowledge. The Internet media contain information about anything ever thought of on the surface of the earth and in different versions (video, text, graphics etc) and so the Internet is the most qualify to be called the custodian of knowledge.
Course Content Delivery
As mentioned earlier it is no longer very necessary for teacher to be present in a location for learning to take place and even he may not need to instruct but today his roles have changed in a virtual learning environment (VLE). The approaches in teaching and learning have given rise to many methodologies examples include where the teacher need to teach to impart knowledge via Internet media (Instructivism) utilising textual material, video etc or combination of these formats. He is referred to as an instructivist teacher but constructivist teacher on the other hand is where he does not need to teach but guide learner to construct knowledge by interacting with resources in his environment (constructivism) via the Internet media. A little difference however is recognized where the teacher, though still plays the role of a moderator as it is also applicable in constructivist, facilitate the learning activities of a group of learners in a virtual classroom without an attempt to "force" them into performance of tasks and activities. The freedom of learner to choose from different alternatives, decide what to learner, suggest time and course duration, participate in course design etc lend credence to e-learning as flexible alternative to learning.
The aforementioned pedagogical approaches (Instructivism, Constructivism and Socio-Constructivism) are popular in e-learning as course designs are fashioned to take after these fundamental concepts. The course management system (CSM) which is an application software in use in course content delivery continue to be based on any of the above pedagogical approaches or sometime a combination of any of them.
There is need to keep up as an individual, school, organization, institutions etc in the current knowledge trend
