At the same time, misconceptions and myths related to the difficulty of teaching and learning online, technologies available to support online instruction, the support and compensation needed for high-quality instructors, and the needs of online students create challenges for such vision statements and planning documents. In part, this confusion swells as higher education explores dozens of e-learning technologies (for example, electronic books, simulations, text messaging, podcasting, wikis, blogs), with new ones seeming to emerge each week. Such technologies confront instructors and administrators at a time of continued budget retrenchments and rethinking. Adding to this dilemma, bored students are dropping out of online classes while pleading for richer and more engaging online learning experiences. Given the demand for online learning, the plethora of online technologies to incorporate into teaching, the budgetary problems, and the opportunities for innovation, we argue that online learning environments are facing a “perfect e-storm,” linking pedagogy, technology, and learner needs.
The call for application of E-learning in schools is to infuse and inject efficiency and effectiveness in the teaching-learning process. Thus, in a developing nation like Ghana, E-learning is currently encountering the challenges of material devices like the availability of computers, well equipped computer laboratories coupled with internet facilities, videophone systems and teleconferencing devices, fax and wireless applications, digital library, digital classrooms, multimedia systems and the problem of multimedia courseware development among others (Global Information Technology Report, 2010). Other studies revealed that there is a limited trained teacher for E-learning, lack of facilities, infrastructures and equipment (Ikemenjima, 2005; and Jegede & Owolabi, 2003).
E-learning has already influenced the field of teaching, training and development in the developed world. An increasing number of higher institution courses are now taught on the internet and are increasing student numbers (Chang, 2001). Many educational stakeholders are of the opinion that online learning is the future method for their training programmes (Barron, 1999). However, the field lacks enough documentation to show that E-learning is an effective delivery mechanism in relation to the individuals being taught. Aroyo and Dicheva (2004) indicated that many researchers in the area of education systems are concerned with moving their research to a coherent space of collaborative intelligence from scattered intelligent. There are limited studies that have investigated the perception of distance learning students on the influence of e-learning on their academic performance. This study will therefore investigate the impact of online teaching and learning in higher education.
EDITOR'S SOURCE: Project Clue
Posted: at | |