Cultural Differences Between E-Learning And Online Education

Once Professor Saymour Papert, Mathematician and an educationist in MIT rightly said, “You can’t teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.” Herein lies the need for e-learning, online education which can satisfy our unquenchable thirst for knowledge. After all, we are the people of 21st century, an age of scientific revolution where people need to know each and everything. And it is only internet which has made this happen.

E-Learning or in other words, Web –based learning has revolutionised and transformed the sphere of Education, it has not only upgraded it but taken it to the highest level one can ever imagine. Now a person sitting anywhere in the world can get to know about everything happening in the world.

There lies a number of differences between the traditional mode of learning and E-learning or

The internet technology has made the best teaching material and best education technology available to all students irrespective of their geographical location and political affiliations. A number of surveys have been in order to realize how much effective e-learning really is. I am here highlighting the findings of some of those surveys, (the information has been derived from a research work published on e-learning) -

The findings of a US Department of Education’s Survey – Evaluation of Evidence-based practices in Online Learning : A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies –

1. Students who took all or part of their course online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.

2. Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed than in those studies where online learners worked