WHAT is E-learning?

When it comes to E-learning week, we ALL rejoice. To teachers, e-learning is a new way for students to learn, expecting us to go online and do some independent studying. Our take on e-learning, is a time off from studies and we are able to relax and have fun just as how it is the march holidays! Learning through online classes is the first thing that always comes to our mind when e-learning is mentioned, but there is actually much more to it! It also includes the media resources and the framework of the e-learning portal that allows us to better navigate through the whole library of resources. It also includes the links to various online resources or provides helplines for us when we need to find specific information. I found it particularly useful for my project works during the past semesters. Accessing the libraries and gathering all the journal articles were a total breeze as compared to the conventional way of Googling all of our information! Which was really "revelational" because i never knew that there could be an easier way to find information than Googling all of it!

In the past, the learning portals that I used tend to be very Web1.0, whereby everything was very boxed, simple and plain! it was extremely boring and really hard to navigate. It had a very plain layout, with at most a logo at the top righthand corner and simple words with underlines showing the links to the texts that we were supposed to read. No one paid attention to e-learning lessons, which thankfully only made up a small portion of our classes. During those days, we were using computers linked to really bulky monitor screens and we would all open up Internet explorer to access the e learning portal and then open up and play pinball instead. Oh come on, we all know we are guilty of it!

The image might be small but you get the idea of how old e-learning websites were like!
Whereas now, given how the web has evolved, we have a more pleasing layout of the e-learning portal, making it a lot easier to navigate through the portal. Also, more advanced portals make use of web plug-ins and flash applications to increase the attractiveness of the portal! It also allows us to better learn as we have more resources, especially images and videos to explain diagrams and processes.

and this is how a web2.0 e-learning portal has in store for us! this is my personal homepage in UBLearns. With such a layout and colours and 'tabs', it is definitely more appealing for the user! The last thing we will want to have is a website that is very cumbersome, shunning people away from education!
We are no stranger to this page. Checking for updates instead of having to manually click on every module, checking our grades, printing out materials for upcoming class, all these are the little wonders that tools of e-learning provides to us!

With the advancements of technology, we are now able to watch lectures online, interact with the learning resources and download required documents for our lectures. Gone are the days that we need to queue up outside the book shop to print books and books of notes! I feel that E learning has definitely benefitted us greatly! and i really am impressed how e-learning has evolved so much that it becomes integral in our researches, in our daily learning. Surely we don't exactly enjoy e-learning as nobody really likes classes, but at least it isn't as unimpressive that it shuns as away from using it. :)