01-08-2012, 02:59 PM
E-Learning
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Introduction
As we know the term e-learning has been widely used in education since mid-1990s. E-Learning has the potential to revolutionize traditional education, because it could provide faster learning at reduced costs, increased access to learning, and clear accountability for all participants in the learning process. It enables businesses or schools to distribute training and critical information to multiple locations easily. Employees and students can then access training when it is convenient for them, at home or in the office. E-learning generally is regarded as “the use of telecommunication technology to deliver information for education and training” [11]. Some large and prestigious universities attempts of offering all courses online have sent a signal to institutes on the strategic importance of e-learning regarding the progress of information and communication technology development [11].
Adaptive e-learning
Adaptation that is so natural for teaching by humans is a challenging issue for electronic learning tools. Adaptation in classic teaching is based on observations made about students during teaching. Similar idea was employed in user-adapted (personalized) e-Learning applications. Knowledge about a user inferred from user interactions with the e-Learning systems is used to adapt offered learning resources and guide a learner through them. The Figure 1 gives an overview about knowledge and rules taken into account in current adaptive e-Learning prototypes when adapting learning instructions and determines the how activities perform by adaptive e-learning systems [31]. Adaptation is usually based on knowledge about learning resources and users. Rules are used for heuristics to match the learning resources with learners and infer adaptation decision.
E-Learning Features
In today's fast-paced culture, organizations that implement e-Learning will provide their work force with the ability to turn change into an advantage. However, e-Learning is just now in its infancy [12]. Despite the rapid change, some significant features of future e-Learning can be identified as the following:
• Personalization. The education of the future will become deeply personalized. The learning topics will be selected based on student interest, student aptitude and educational level, and societal need. The menu of available courses presented to any given student will be determined dynamically by the student's prior learning assessment, by the prerequisite for the new course, and by the learning management system. A student's daily menu will be varied and constantly changing, building on each day's achievement.
• Interoperability and reusability. E-Learning systems with different environments and contents from multiple authors must have the ability to work together. There must be a semantic relationship between different e-Learning systems. Learning content may be reused in multiple applications and environments regardless of the tools used to create them. This requires that content be separated from context-specific runtime constraints so that it can be incorporated into other applications. For reuse to be possible, content must also have common interfaces and data.