The benefits of implementing e-learning

A fruitful discussion by Meher Fatima on e-learning benefits and the challenges

Written by: Meher Fatima 

The pandemic has given rise to the culture of online classes since we don’t want educational sabotage. With the rising motto of “stay home stay safe” e-learning is the new trend for education all around the world. Generally, as soon as the situation gets better in any place the face-to-face classes are resumed. Is that because online classes are not as good as onsite classes?

Let us look into this matter more deeply. The best thing about e-learning is that learning did not stop even in the adverse circumstances that Covid puts us into.

Moreover, most students felt happy about the fact that they don’t need to go to school and can learn comfortably at home. Since the lectures were recorded, they could listen to them again in case anything remained unclear.

The concepts were explained in a better way because of videos shown in between the lectures and the use of technology created a stronger impact on the students which is not possible otherwise.

Taking into consideration all these facts there is still a conviction that classroom teaching is far better. The reasons are:

·        Students get to socialize with each other and get a chance to make friends at school

·        Not every student has a facility of a good internet connection and a personal computer or laptop so they may feel left out in the process of e-learning.

·        At school, co-curricular activities influence the personality development of a student in a positive way. This healthy interaction is not possible online.

·        Teachers can focus individually on students in the class which is not that easy while teaching online.

·        Students take online classes casually so it may not be as effective as classroom teaching.

·        Students can easily cheat during the examination as they cannot be well supervised in online classes.

·        The other applications on the phone, computer, or laptop; whatever gadget they are using; may cause distraction during the lesson.

·        Staying at home and not doing any physical activity is quite unhealthy for students.

·        Screen exposure is damaging to the eyes and e-learning increases screen time.

Hence, we can conclude that e-learning is just the best possible solution in the pandemic battle which seems to have no end now. Schools, colleges, and universities are doing their best to sustain learning. However, we should keep in mind that online teaching and learning can never be as good as classroom teaching and learning.

The only good thing is that since institutions have become used to the implementation of online learning with teachers devising ways of integrating technology to make their lessons more interesting, it paves the way to use tech-based teaching in classrooms to some extent.

Now teachers are much more comfortable with the usage of computers and can devise some mixed-method of teaching where they could use technology to their advantage.

What are your views about e-learning? Do you think it has brought some good change in the teaching and learning process?

Meher Fatima is a writer with precision and clarity in every piece of information she brings