well, i think it has plenty of benefits, like if you're sick and your class is available as live feed online. that would be perfect! cause sometimes learning from the notes, or copying other's notes is not the same as listening to the lecturer cause what you pick up, or the way you can remember is different than others summarizing it. so yes, but unfortunately, none of my schools have that technology or availability so far. i think its good also when language learning can be done online. like my sisters when they were studying in Nanyang Poly, and they took up French. it was pretty funny and a lil annoying when they were practising and learning their "oui"s and "bonjours" in front of the computer while listening to the correct pronunciation. but i thought it was quite a good way to teach - online, instead of wasting valuable time and effort on the teacher to repeat himself or herself 2000 times over.
E-learning however done during E-learning break I think is totally useless. Especially in poly or some Uni.. unless its a research paper or experiment like our NTRs.. but other than that. eg. in poly during E learning week, we will have some online quizzes, some papers to hand in, some short answer questions online as well.. the best thing is that the questions are limited.. so we wait for a few people to do it, ask for the questions, and viola! a perfect score. the best quizzes (or i would say the worst since we dont learn much) is those that we can take as many times as we like. so we just keep trying for fun til we score full marks... ah. those were the days mann.
I just searched on the future on E-learning and i came across this research paper (http://www.gse.uci.edu/person/warschauer_m/docs/paradox.pdf). what's interesting is that it checks out some of the paradoxes of digital learning, and one of it was about how these learning are quite autonomous, anyone can really learn from anywhere (in a broad online sense) and that these out of school learning may lead to the downfall in formal education.. but i quote "The paradox here is that, at the same time that new opportunities increase for powerful out-of-school learning, formal education is actually rising rather than falling in its impact on people’s lives"and they went on with examples and support and all that. but yeah, that's pretty cool. that maybe digital learning is actually PUSHING people to want to study further or get further formal education.
I think in the future, we would probably be able to get a degree/masters/doctorate from a well known overseas Uni.. (lets say oxford just for the fun of it) while still in hot sunny sweaty singapore, in the comfort of my own aircon room (although i dont have aircon) and all done online! maybe everyday there's a 2-3 hours lecture.. or for the week the lecture is put up and you can enter it virtually.. maybe all the students are IMing online, and the lecturer is also online with us at a certain time so we can discuss any questions we have! that'd be pretty cool in terms of social networking as well! i know some degrees ARE available online now, but i dont believe those are really educational. i think that's just for those who want the cert. but yes. this online way of going to the school might allow those that cannot afford to enrol or fly over there to enter. (maybe they can cap a certain amount of seats for them etc..)
fun ah! maybe few years down the road with web 3.0 i'll get my doctorate this way. FWAHHAHA.
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