ELearning-only environments may be suit for us presently.It can save our time and arrange our work freely.

It would be helpful to know the characteristics of the elearning only modules, such as automatic assessment and feedback, scaffolding, videos, etc... This will avoid the generic comparisons without understanding context and characteristics. :-)

Online interactive e-learning may be helpful using Video Conferencing.

But all of them have to be at the same frequency following the same notations and with a little bit of Prior Handouts.Otherwise there will be lot of confusion in the mind of the learner and both,the Instructor and the Learner will go in Tandem resulting in Zero output.

E books also are not of much use for Learning except for light reading like Novels,News or Instructions.

One more thing is that there should be a continuity of Power Supply with standby UPS/Generator and becomes expensive.

This is my personal opinion,not only on e-learning,but also for Video Lessons from Standard Institutions about which I have already expressed in R.G.

P.S.

For me, although e learning offers a quick and flexible way of learning, it sometimes has disadvantages as many learners need to live/face to face instruction in order to progress. At times, learners may become confused and may not have the necessary guidance in an e learning scenario. As well, in some countries, (like mine) there are still many people who are technologically challenged, and as such they do not know how to take full advantage of an e learning environment.

The blended learning's main advantage is that takes the best of the classroom (contact with the teacher) and the best of virtuality (ICT) then you can improve achievement and student satisfaction.

The interpersonal guidance issue has always been important for some learners. I have made 'blended learning" an area of research for three decades with applications for technical occupations in aviation and medicine. Perhaps these threads will help:

1) e-learning is most appropriate for cognitive domain material

2) professional learners such as resident (advanced student) physicians and aircraft pilots may have a felt need for human advice and feedback on in vivo training simulations. AI addresses this, but some learners are more comfortable discussing performance issues in-depth with a person who "has been there."

3) In the physician training field the work of Barrows on Problem Based Learning for medical training may be significant

4) The US military TRADOC (raining and Doctrine Command) has many studies in the area. Quite a bit is published and accessible, but of uneven quality.

My work with aviation (pilot) training is outdated at this point. My bias is in the direction of bended mufti-media formats. The University of Illinois Springfield (my home base) has a research arm focusing on on-line instruction and leads the State in application and research in the area.

Now e-learning can be much more than a digital resources respository. You can combine different methodolgies face-to-face classroom and virtual environment. You can use video-conferences, forums, meet students by means skype or adobe-connect or google hangout. You can record your sessions. You can teach a minimum number of hours by means traditional face-to-face classroom and record its. I have experience in all types of teaching modalities: face-toface, b-learning and virtual learning.

Of course, pure e-learning requires a greater degree of commitment and maturity of students.

Well, I'd always opt for blended rather that for e-learning only. Experience has shown that no matter how ambitious students are, unless there is a real physical guidance in a form of a teacher, their motivation and dedications simply slow down. On the other hand, the teacher should not be "the center of their world", not any more than the classroom itself. Technology has proven to be a very useful option for making the classroom teaching a better modernized version, which, by the way, keeps pace with students. They are almost always technologically more advanced than teachers and keeping up is a real challenge, especially for those teachers who truly enjoy it.

What I want to say is that the role of a teacher is becoming more and more of a figure "from the shadows", a guide, a morale booster, etc. Making the environment for the study process as real as possible is one of the main tasks, and nowadays, electronic/ virtual reality is a "real" reality, especially in the business world.

A lot depends on the quality of the e-learning modules and their purpose. Unfortunately, there are examples of industry or educational institutions using e-learning modules more as a method of checking a box. If they are truly interactive and allow the option of researching questions as they come up e-learning modules can be a great tool for introducing new information or practicing techniques. They also may work well for introducing nuanced change to a technology for which the student has a good foundational understanding. It is important to remember that for most technical education, the goal is that the student will be able to use the new knowledge to complete some sort of tangible project. Unless that project exists only in the virtual realm, some sort of non virtual component is needed to reinforce the learning and give confidence to the learner.

While I have used excellent asynchronous e-learning modules, I favor a blended learning approach as both a student and an educator. Human to human observation is an important component of both teaching and learning processes. Electronic communication such as Skype is second best.

1. Learning styles

Respecting the learning styles of our fellow travellers in learning ("students") we need to offer content in as many forms as practicable. There are many styles of e learning from power points nailed to a wall, through to heavily interactive, with prices rising accordingly.

2. Time

Respecting our time as facilitators in the educational process, we have a right to expect that the majority of "content" has been experienced in some sense before face to face engagement on the topic (in person or Skype)

3. Commitment

A blended format encourages, rewards and shows respect for our "students" self motivation. I have found that after an e-learning module "students" show up rather than simply turn up.

E learning is great. However, I have been told about people doing their careers online who are blatantly plagiarizing.

Hi, dear Jon,

I can only speak to (enviromental) health sciences. I believe that we can cover only parts of the scenarios of teaching and learning with mixed forms of teaching. Media can break only traditional courses and can do it well. But they depend on the art and the technical structure of the infrastructure of the teaching as we proved. Therefore, we only speak of 'blended learning’ when teaching content, teaching style and function of the Institute task will be accepted to fill the form of teaching. The simple types of e-learning are virtualization of knowledge.

We organize our teaching model (since over 10 years) in our college this:

• The classical phase face-to-face is enriched with e-learning components.

• In Flex model materials of courses offered to students are provided online with broad subjects mainly available. Face-to-face support is available.

• For the private blend (Self-glare), the literature students visit with media comfort.

• At a higher organizational integration, services and educational materials to the location and time flexible retrieval can be found in the Internet. A complete virtualization of the texture is achieved by teaching letter, students response and teachers response to the response. The final form of teaching is testing in collegiate seminar.

I feel that it to be very important: Blended learning is never an end in itself. It does not matter whether philosophical or technical practice teaching content. All classes must have and get a pre-structured content. This determines the composite media (always realy mixed) of our institution. This is to be asynchronous in planning and implementation.

Of course, that depends of training contents. Even for one specific profession, we could accept that the best way for some contents is only eLearning and for others the best option could be to include some face to face/online video etc. sessions.

Other factor is if you are speaking of initial training or continuous education. In the second case, consider participants at actual working environments, perhaps at locations that do not facilitate the synchronous communication –other continent, nor face-to-face activities.

For these and other reasons, the role of training designers is so important, and it is not as simple as to take a common format and to apply to everyone, everywhere, every time.

E learning only will not give a complete picture to the learner .E learnnig when used along with class room instruction helps the learner to do better and learn faster

The general praise for blended learning is supported in this US Department of Education meta-analysis of classroom and elearning. http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

Elearning was superior to classroom, probably because of flexibility and extension of learning time, but the best outcomes were observed when the two approaches were combined. The authors caution about generalizing the results to K-12 since most of the research base for meta-analysis was from medicine and other technical fields. This would be a strength in your case, since those fields relate to your interest.

The basis of any research (learning in general) lies in the continuous monitoring of a phenomenon. Without continuous monitoring does not update knowledge. So I'm giving my vote only continuous monitoring of certain occurrences in the environment. I personally believe that this is the only correct way to further the knowledge.

e-learning content is one type of learning resource (it has its pros and cons). We can draw an analogy with books. The question becomes: How do you view book-only environments compared to blended learning environments for technical professions? Do we end up in a library ? ;-).

I guess the complement of all kind of material is the "human" thing. What does "human" factors bring to education ? And particularly in technical education ?

Well, I would say something fundamental in education: "pedagogy". "The term pedagogy is generally used in terms of education and, according to Houssaye (1994, p.13), includes general educational theory, such as socio-psychological theory, for example. According to Tochon and Munby (1993) pedagogy stems from the interactive management of time’ (p. 206) (Pepin, 1999)."

I participated (as a learner) in a 'paper-less' post-graduate program that was a mix of e-learning and instruction or contact learning. Over the past few years, I have completed a number of activities via e--learning alone. I am sure, as far as my experiences are concerned, I will prefer a blend to e-learning only. I also believe that any major program must be a blend. e-learning is more suitable for short and relatively smaller and less aggressive programs. Any major change needs some form of manipulation during the learning phase, so that inappropriate affective changes do not overshadow the proper learning objectives....

Irfan Khattak

email [email protected] for reports on corporate elearning and virtual action learning if you like. John

corporate elearing is largely used for techical and corporate proceedures. Even IT firms do leadership development f2f.

action learning is done entirely by elearning, inc. synchronous, with actual claimed advantages.

all this covered in the reports of research offered above.

regards

John Burgoyne

My experience is with synchronous eLearning, i.e. a class with a lecturer is at the college campus and additional classes [without lecturers] at other cities in the country. This arrangement was found to be preferable to un-synchronous on-line teaching. The reason is that students study not merely from the lecturer and books but also from the questions and remarks of their peers.

For courses that involve lab. experiments we have 2 concentrated lab days at the campus.

My experience of blended professional teaching learning indicates that the strategy we follow at our institution is best suited for professional health related courses and one must continuously try to evaluate effectiveness through research to document the experience

Prof Pity Koul

Blended learning is more effective if compare to asynchronous e-learning only. 2 years ago we launched so-called öpen learning" education model (you may see brief about it in my publications).

The open learning model consists of the following components:

1. Live video ("live" means, that recording is made during regular classes combined with webinar). Students access these video recordings asynchronously.

2. Labs with rdp or cloud-based access

3. Individual consulting sessions (in class or by webinar) with the instructor.

Main benefits for students:

- individual study tempo;

- a student may choose only those themes that are relevant to his practice;

- individual consulting sessions with an instrutor.

Also it's great for some technical people"who have some issues with personal communications. For example, the communicate better with a software program or server, rather than to other people.

Main benefits for a training organization:

- effectiveness and efficiency;

- individual work with clients - loyalty grows

I feel that eLearning is only a supplement to learning and not a substitute to learning.Also at times there may be variations in the notation,approach,algorithm etc. For laboratories direct learning will be preferable. P.S.

Today educators debate the true effectiveness of technologies based e-learning on computers. From the evidence suggests that existing e-learning methods are just as effective for teaching or even more, than traditional classrooms. Beyond this, it is clear that e-learning technologies can provide learning opportunities for people who otherwise would not have access to new knowledge. The e-learning methods can be more effective than others for teaching some content types. The combination of classroom learning and learning mail may be the best educational strategy.

From my personal experience with different e-Learning methodologies, it is clear that blended learning has clear advantages over total e-Learning strategies. True, the essence of traditional teaching has changed as a result of the increasing implementation of e-Learning at secondary and tertiary education levels, with the teacher or tutor becoming a facilitator rather than an initiator of the learning process, but the guidance of the teacher is clearly necessary. As a result, the blending of e-Learning in all its forms in which the learner needs to exhibit much initiative and autonomy, with active facilitation of learning by a competent teacher leads to efficient and effective learning that far outstrips the limitations of total e-Learning on the one hand or totally traditional human instruction on the other. Blended learning allows for the adoption of the best of both worlds and leads to improved learning and knowledge mastery and assimilation by learners.

Check out the research reviews on www.dern.org.

Of course the answer to this question depends on what you are teaching.

If this is simply to transfer factual knowledge, such as knowing which fire extinguisher to use, then e-learning alone will be comparable to other methods.

(This assumes the eLearning package is properly done.)

The educational needs of the "technical" professions is clearly more than simply the acquisition of facts.

As discussed above there is the need to educate the learner about learning itself.

Discovering their own learning styles, strengths and weaknesses.

Anchoring their knowledge within the context of their unique workplace.

In addition, we need to consider the "non technical skills" even in a technical profession.

These are the human factors of communication, leadership, situation awareness, mutual support and teamwork.

Without them, it is difficult to translate knowledge into action.

I would appreciate any references that suggest that anything more than the language of human factors can be taught in an eLearning package.

As our students become more discerning, and our time becomes more precious, eLearning can be a useful preparation for getting the knowledge out of the way before the real process of education occurs in a facilitated group.

As Einstein said, "Education is what remains after you forget what your learned"

I came up with a "threshold" e-learning module for senior high school students, and feel that this is something that could boost future engagement in e-learning by students. This is a virtual reality unit, creating a virtual community in which the individual plays out a subjective role in career aspirations, researching and expressing details of that role on line, contributing realistically to a growing community. Often, students have no opportunity to "bring it all together": they have accumulated self-taught and teacher/classroom trained skills, but no point from which to proceed in planning. Many on-line courses are merely blackboard/talking head, test driven lectures transposed to digital that pale in comparison to quality on-line learning/teaching experiences with embedded videos, hot links, facile and responsive inter-connectedness, and the opportunity to face-to-face problem solve with colleagues.

Content quality has the great value in e-learning, and i fully agree with Mr. Edwards.

That is why we prefer different blended offerings for our adult students. part of content they learn using e-learning tools, bur face-to-face meetings with classmates and a trainer are must as students exchange their questions, opinions, and experience.

Adult learning value consists not only in "learning"and teaching", but also in experience sharing, communicating, etc.

Good Answer Arnold Bosman