e-Learning

The future of long distance education

E-learning appears to us like one of the formative strategies that can solve many of the educative problems whereupon we were, that go from the geographic isolation of the student, from the centers of the knowledge to the necessity of constant improvement that introduces the society of knowledge to us, without forgetting the calls realized on the money saving and time that suppose, or the magic of the interactive world in which we are introduced.

Definitions of E-Learning

The concept of e-Learning is included/understood easily by the majority of people. Even so, a precise definition of this term is pending. In order to give us an idea of the variants that exist at the moment in the conception of the electronic learning, we examine some definitions:

Technically, e-Learning is the delivery of educative material via any electronic means, including Internet, Intranets, Extranets, audio, video, satellite network, interactive television, CD and DVD, among others.

For the educators, e-Learning is the use of technologies of networks and communications to design, to select, to administer, to give and to extend the education.

Being brief and practitioners, e-Learning is the learning based on technology.

WHICH CAN BE THEIR DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS?

Their distinguishing characteristics can be analyzed from a double perspective: on one hand, comparing it with traditional actual education, and on the other, presenting/displaying these distinguishing characteristics.

Formation based on the network

 • It allows the students to go at their own rate of learning

• It is a formation based on the concept of formation at the moment at which it is needed (just-in-Time training)

• It allows the combination of different materials (auditory, visual and audio-visual)

• With a single application it can be taken care of a greater number of students.

• Knowledge is an active process of construction.

 • It tends to reduce the time of formation of the people.

 • It tends to be interactive, between the participants in the process (professor and students) and with the contents

• We have little experience in its use.

• We don’t always have the structural and organizational resources for its operation

Ultimately, it is possible to be said that the formation based on the network talks about a remote formative modality that leans in the network, and that ensures the communication between the professor and the students according to certain synchronous and asynchronous tools of the communication.

WHAT ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES DOES IT PRESENT/DISPLAY?

Since it has happened with all the technologies, to which we talked about, there has been a series of granted disadvantages that must be recognized, they have come more times from the speculation than from the reality of the investigation.

Within the advantages, the most mentioned are the following:

• It puts at the disposal of the students an ample volume of information.

• It facilitates the update of the information and the contents.

• It makes flexible the information, independent of the space and the time in which are the professor and the student.

• It facilitates the autonomy of the student.

• It offers different tools from synchronous and asynchronous communication for the students and the professors.

• It favors a formation multimedia.

• It facilitates a group and collaborative formation.

• It favors the interactivity in different scopes: with the information, with the professor and between the students.

• It facilitates the use of the materials, the objects of learning, in different courses.

• It allows that in the servers the activities performed by the students can be registered.

• It saves costs and displacement.

In the case of the disadvantages, we present/display some:

 • It requires more time reversal on the part of the professor.

• It needs minimum technological competitions on the part of the professor and of the students.

• It requires that the students have abilities for the independent learning.

• The quality of the formation can decrease if professor-student does not occur to a suitable ratio.

• It requires more work than the conventional one.

• It supposes the low quality of many courses and present contents.

• It has resistance to the change of the traditional system.

• It imposes solitude and absence of physical references.

• It depends on a connection to Internet; in addition it has to be fast.

• It has little trained teaching staff.

• It supposes problems of security and besides authentication on the part of the student.

• There is no experience in its use.

• There is digital breach.

• If the role of the professor is important, than it is also the one that the student carries out, because, if he does not modify the traditional role of passive receiver in the formation and he becomes receiving conscious assets, the educative action will fail. At the same time it is important that the student is auto motivated for the study.

• The students in network must own a series of distinguishing characteristics, like motivation, independence and the self-sufficiency of the student, like variables that influence in the learning obtained by the students.

The introverting students are more successful in an education context on line; the homing and auto effectiveness are important for the satisfaction of the students in this type of education; the ability, the preference by an active learning, conditions the learning that the students make in contexts hyper mediate, and the self-regulation is a significant variable.

The attitudes influence and all the students do not have significant attitudes by this procedure, because some prefer a face to face formation. Also it is necessary that the student dominates certain techniques of intellectual work, mainly the ones referred to the independent study and the accomplishment of actions supported in the collaborative work.

Ultimately, the student of e-learning will have to dominate a series of skills: to know when there is a information necessity, to identify this necessity, to know how to work with different sources and symbolic systems, to dominate the overloaded information, to evaluate it and to discriminate its quality, to organize it, to have ability for the exhibition of thoughts, to be effective in the use of the information to direct the problem, and to know how to communicate the information found to others.

If we want to incorporate e-learning in education we must have academic leaders who develop in the society of the knowledge and not in the postindustrial one.

We must have academic leaders who play with the innovation, the creativity and the risk like managing principles, and not with the fear and the disagreement that all change generates. If we want to use technologies of the society of knowledge, we must have academic leaders who can perceive what to do with them and that don´t respond with a simple “yes, students at your university have classes with actual teachers ”… With teachers or virtual, the important thing is to make quality universities. The debate is the same as the one had before, when another “technology” that really had an impact on education: the text books.

And, to conclude, a not indicated variable: the investigation.

If we generally do not know the behavior of the TIC in education, this is accentuated in the case of e-learning, and by it, a series of reasons, that goes from its newness to the speed of transformation, going through the technical difficulties that it had; in counterpart, new doors are opened to extend the lines of investigation, that go from the design of adapted didactic materials to the characteristics of the networks going through the mixed learning, the application of specific didactic strategies, the levels of satisfaction of the students, etc.

Finally, what I want to say is that the technical determinants of the system will not mark the quality and the effectiveness, but the attention that we give to the educative variables and didactic variables that are in operation. Today’s problems are not technological, but they are derived from knowing what to do it and how to do it, and the reason of why we want to do it.