Education, Careers & Professional News
E-learning: The New Curl At Education Front
A student in remote Orissa village taking his MBA exams from a Mumbai University using broadband network; American students taking maths lessons from teachers sitting in New Delhi or people from across the globe doing a crash course on disaster management from Honolulu University.
The power of information technology is using learning tools to make learning happen anywhere and any time.
Called e-learning, it uses multimedia and the internet to enable learning process. While the West, especially the European Union has embarked on e-learning bandwagon to realise the dream of making Europe a knowledge based economy by 2010, in countries like India, it is only the private initiatives which have started though the concept is catching on, say experts.
E-learning is an established concept in the west. But in India, while decision makers are convinced of its benefits, there is no single experience yet to say it is successful, says Nicholas George, Sr Vice President, NIIT.
However, he says private inititatives - both at university level and in corportate world have started which are showing good results.
But one thing is for sure, e-learning is bound to happen. There is no other way to succeed in making ours a knowledge based society. The infrastructure needs to be developed at the grass roots level and things will then get going, says George.
A big challenge in e-learning is the low retention rate. While in the West the drop out rate is above 70 per cent even today, compared to 20 per cent in physical learning, in countries like India, it is likely to be above 85 per cent, he says citing language skills and financial constraint as the main reason for high drop-out rate.