The Benefits and Drawbacks of e-Learning
     by Kevin Kruse. Originally published at www.e-learningguru.com/

The vast movement towards e-learning is clearly motivated by the many benefits it offers. However much e-learning is praised and innovated, computers will never completely eliminate human instructors and other forms of educational delivery. What is important is to know exactly what e-learning advantages exist and when these outweigh the limitations of the medium.
Features Unique to e-Learning
Like no other training form, e-learning promises to provide a single experience that accommodates the three distinct learning styles of auditory learners, visual learners, and kinesthetic learners. Other unique opportunities created by the advent and development of e-learning are more efficient training of a globally dispersed audience; and reduced publishing and distribution costs as Web-based training becomes a standard.
E-learning also offers individualized instruction, which print media cannot provide, and instructor-led courses allow clumsily and at great cost. In conjunction with assessing needs, e-learning can target specific needs. And by using learning style tests, e-learning can locate and target individual learning preferences.
Additionally, synchronous e-learning is self-paced. Advanced learners are allowed to speed through or bypass instruction that is redundant while novices slow their own progress through content, eliminating frustration with themselves, their fellow learners, and the course.
In these ways, e-learning is inclusive of a maximum number of participants with a maximum range of learning styles, preferences, and needs.
Collaborative Learning
All collaborative learning theory contends that human interaction is a vital ingredient to learning. Consideration of this is particularly crucial when designing e-learning, realizing the potential for the medium to isolate learners. With well-delivered synchronous distance education, and technology like message boards, chats, e-mail, and tele-conferencing, this potential drawback is reduced. However, e-learning detractors still argue that the magical classroom bond between teacher and student, and among the students themselves, can not be replicated through communications technology.
Advantages of e-Learning to the Trainer or Organization
Some of the most outstanding advantages to the trainer or organization are:

• Reduced overall cost is the single most influential factor in adopting e-learning. The elimination of costs associated with instructor's salaries, meeting room rentals, and student travel, lodging, and meals are directly quantifiable. The reduction of time spent away from the job by employees may be the most positive offshoot.
• Learning times reduced, an average of 40 to 60 percent, as found by Brandon Hall (Web-based Training Cookbook, 1997, p. 108).
• Increased retention and application to the job averages an increase of 25 percent over traditional methods, according to an independent study by J.D. Fletcher (Multimedia Review, Spring 1991, pp.33-42).
• Consistent delivery of content is possible with asynchronous, self-paced e-learning.
• Expert knowledge is communicated, but more importantly captured, with good e-learning and knowledge management systems.
• Proof of completion and certification, essential elements of training initiatives, can be automated.

Advantages to the Learner

Along with the increased retention, reduced learning time, and other aforementioned benefits to students, particular advantages of e-learning include:

• On-demand availability enables students to complete training conveniently at off-hours or from home.
• Self-pacing for slow or quick learners reduces stress and increases satisfaction.
• Interactivity engages users, pushing them rather than pulling them through training.
• Confidence that refresher or quick reference materials are available reduces burden of responsibility of mastery.

Disadvantages to the Trainer or Organization

e-learning is not, however, the be all and end all to every training need. It does have limitations, among them:

• Up-front investment required of an e-learning solution is larger due to development costs. Budgets and cash flows will need to be negotiated.
• Technology issues that play a factor include whether the existing technology infrastructure can accomplish the training goals, whether additional tech expenditures can be justified, and whether compatibility of all software and hardware can be achieved.
• Inappropriate content for e-learning may exist according to some experts, though are limited in number. Even the acquisition of skills that involve complex physical/motor or emotional components (for example, juggling or mediation) can be augmented with e-learning.
• Cultural acceptance is an issue in organizations where student demographics and psychographics may predispose them against using computers at all, let alone for e-learning.

Disadvantages to the Learner

The ways in which e-learning may not excel over other training include:

• Technology issues of the learners are most commonly technophobia and unavailability of required technologies.
• Portability of training has become a strength of e-learning with the proliferation of network linking points, notebook computers, PDAs, and mobile phones, but still does not rival that of printed workbooks or reference material.
• Reduced social and cultural interaction can be a drawback. The impersonality, suppression of communication mechanisms such as body language, and elimination of peer-to-peer learning that are part of this potential disadvantage are lessening with advances in communications technologies.

Do the Benefits Outweigh the Drawbacks?

The pro's and con's of e-learning vary depending on program goals, target audience and organizational infrastructure and culture. But it is unarguable that e-learning is rapidly growing as form of training delivery and most are finding that the clear benefits to e-learning will guarantee it a role in their overall learning strategy.

The word 'e-Learning'

In October 1999, during a CBT Systems seminar in Los Angeles, a strange new word was used for the first time in a professional environment – ‘e-Learning’. Associated with such expressions as 'online learning' or 'virtual learning', this word was meant to qualify "a way to learn based on the use of new technologies allowing access to online, interactive and sometimes personalized training through the Internet or other electronic media (intranet, extranet, interactive TV, CD-Rom, etc.), so as to develop competencies while the process of learning is independent from time and place2".

So the word itself is not that old. But what about the elements of e-Learning?

The development of the e-Learning revolution arose from a number of other 'educational revolutions'. Four such revolutions cited by Billings and Moursund (1988) are:

1. the invention of reading & writing;
2. the emergence of the profession of teacher/scholar;
3. the development of moveable type (print technology);
4. the development of electronic technology.

So the basic ideas, methodologies and didactical grounds are not new!

Let's take a closer look of the main experts and milestones who were playing an important role in the history of e-Learning.

Early learning aid

 

A Roman piece from a place near Trier. It dated from 200 A.C. and shows a school where the teacher is sitting in the middle and two students are sitting around him, reading a parchment role. At the right a student is arriving with his tablet on which he could write. This technique (writing slate) was used within European schools till around 1950.

Dr. Marcel Mirande is mentioning in his book 'De onstuitbare opkomst van de leermachine' (The Unstoppable rise of the Learning machine) that the writing slate actually looks like, and maybe is, the equivalent of the modern laptop. He also states that the meaning and importantance of the writing slates was very clear. It has to be used to develop writing skills. Nowadays we are still developing a clear and balanced view on the new learning aids like laptops.

Sir Isaac Pitman - 1840

First modern distance course

Modern distance education has been around at least since Isaac Pitman taught shorthand in Great Britain via correspondence in the 1840s (shorthand is an abbreviated, symbolic writing method that improves speed of writing or brevity as compared to a normal method of writing a language).

Pitman was a qualified teacher and taught at a private school he founded in Wotton-under-Edge.

He decided to start a distance course and was sending assignments to his students by mail and they completed the 'homework' and sent it back to him.

Pressey Testing Machine

Mechanic testing machine

In the early 1920s Sidney Pressey, an educational psychology professor at Ohio State University, developed a machine to provide drill and practice items to students in his introductory courses. Pressey (1926) stated, " the procedure in mastery of drill and informational material were in many instances simple and definite enough to permit handling of much routine teaching by mechanical means."

The teaching machine that Pressey developed resembled a typewriter with a window that showed a question with four answers. The user pressed the key that corresponded with the correct answer. When the user pressed a key, the machine recorded the answer on a counter to the back of the machine and revealed the next question. After the user was finished, the person scoring the test slipped the test sheet back into the device and noted the score on the counter.

Now we see that this functionality is widely used in online systems like Questionmark Perception. Testing and assessment can be perfectly done in an automated way. The Questionmark Perception assessment management system enables educators and trainers to author, schedule, deliver, and report on surveys, quizzes, tests and exams. It can easy the assessment processes and improve the quality of questions and tests.

http://www.leerbeleving.nl/wbts/1/history_of_elearning.html