E-Learning – An Introduction: The Changing form of e-Learning

Relax! I am not going to give you an overdose of what e-Learning is. I assume that you already have a general idea of what it is, and that you’ve been exposed to either the good, or the bad, or even the ugly of e-Learning, at some point in your life.

Let me begin by telling you what pure, un-adulterated e-Learning is. e-Learning is “learning transferred through electronic media.” Without driving you crazy with diodes and triodes and other such zany stuff, let me say that all the communication devices that you see around are electronic. So, your TV, phone, iphone, iPad, and computer – they all are electronic mediums. If you are using any of these things to transfer any sort of learning to anyone – you are using e-Learning.

Does it mean that all those advertisements, jokes, SMSs, MMSs, etc. can be called e-Learning?

Note that the “learning” in the e-Learning is more important than the “e”, which simply says that the vehicle transporting that learning to the learner is electronic. So focus on learning – if the content being transferred cannot be called learning, then you can simply use the term electronic communication.

An important point to remember is that people like us, whose work is related to information technology, are always standing on a threshold of change. For us, change doesn’t come in phases. It is always present.

e-Learning is changing form, right now, this instant. With world’s population growing at a breakneck speed, every morning we wake up to a world that has more new young learners joining our expanding audience pool. The last two years have seen iPad and other tablets  replacing notebook computers for online content browsing and reading. m-Learning, which started in a small way a few years ago, today has a Billion Dollar market, which is growing at a CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) of more than 25%! This of course doesn’t mean that traditional eLearning is going to be wiped out – the population that’s grown up with notebooks and desktops isn’t going to dump them, but it means that e-Learning will have an equally strong m-Learning avatar.

In my forthcoming write-ups we will discuss how to be more creative with e-Learning and how to prepare ourselves for m-Learning…so watch this space 🙂