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Return to E-learning
Comfort with Technology - Increasingly, students have grown upwith electronic means of communication, and they expect to use them as they learn. E-learning allows this to happen naturally and easily, and can include chat sessions, threaded discussions, email, links to Web sites, and podcasts.
Other benefits:
- Flexibility - Students are able to fit required courses into their schedules and have access to course material at any time and any place where a computer can access the Internet;
- Reduced costs - Not having to travel to a classroom saves time, travel costs, and energy;
- Access to more faculty - Students have access to a wider variety of faculty and other experts who may provide lectures for the course;
- Access to more “places” - In some courses case studies and field visits can be shown as videos, taking students to places beyond the reach of traditional field trips.
- Networking - A broader variety of students enroll in e-courses, and when they interact they can draw on each other’s experiences to improve the learning experience and create networks that last after the course is over;
- Equal or better student satisfaction - It has been shown in several studies that, if good course design and management principles are followed and the students are engaged in the course, student satisfaction and learning in online courses are equal to or better than in traditional classroom courses. In part this is because students tend to have many more individual interactions with the instructor and classmates, and these interactions are more thorough and thoughtful than is possible in a traditional one-hour class where only a few students tend to dominate the discussion.
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