#cognitivedomain

e-Learning: Learning that is facilitated by the use of digital tools and content. Typically, it involves some form of interactivity, which may include online interaction between the learner and their teacher or peers. 

Educational electronic learning has been known to receive bad press, and their justifications stand true. There are still many problems left unresolved such as the telling of the truth with omission, with regards to the amount of dropout rates or the deactivated accounts that are still used as part of their statistics. Other problems may be the difficulty in grading - what are the testing methods that should be put to practice, MCQ? Short-answer Questions? Essays? How do we ensure that the work done is not by someone else, could it have been copied? Was it guided? 

We all know that there are two faces of a coin - so naturally e-Learning will bring about it’s benefits. The question is - what are they?

Convenience and Flexibility  When everything is online, it is available anywhere anytime 24/7 for learners as they please. They are not confined to physical spaces such as classrooms or lecture halls, saving time on commuting from home/dormitory to school. Additionally, it allows the student who are not natural morning people (like me), to do assignments and attend courses at times that I am most alert (at night, because I am part owl). Moreover, this increases accessibility. All learners need is WiFi and a computer. There is nothing else that deters them other than their self-motivation. I believe that this in turn might result in improved performance in students. The goals of the particular course are already set in stone, allowing students to plan ahead of time in the way they want. Some may prefer to do differing assignments before reports or vice versa. The personalization of such courses that allows smooth flow and lack of disruption of their personal lives out of “e-school” as well. All of this mean is that perhaps e-Learning is the way to go to enhance efficiency through its intensely personal methods as it stays relevant, reliable and engaging to the learner. 

The idea of Authentic Learning comes to mind - Bloom’s Taxonomy divides educational objectives into three primary “domains”. Cognitive, Psychomotor and Affective.

Cognitive is split into two layers - lower and higher order thinking. Under lower order thinking, we must first remember our facts, follow by understand and apply it to real life situations. To reach higher order thinking, we must then use our acquired and mastered information from our previous lower order thinking, and use it to analyse, evaluate and create a new set of ideas or knowledge.

Psychomotor refers to the ability to physically manipulate a particular tool or instrument - this refers to hand-ons skills such learning how to drive a car by actually practising on a car and not just read about it. Or perhaps learning how to fly a plane or handling it during a crash landing through a flight simulator. 

Lastly, there’s Affective where it is targeted at the awareness of attitudes, emotions and feelings. This is a course of, receiving, responding, valuing, organizing and characterizing. 

One of the most successful e-Learning platforms is Coursera. Their mission is to provide universal access to the world’s best education. They have courses from famous institutions such as Princeton University, University of London, The World Bank Group, and even our local university, Nanyang Technological University. Currently, they offer about 1,452 courses from 26 countries and acquired over 15 million learners on the site. Most of the courses are FREE (I repeat, Free!) or available at very low cost. There is really nothing standing in our way at all. At the end of the course, learners will receive a certificate - here’s one from Johns Hopkins University via Coursera in Computing for Data Analysis. 

We can now only hope the e-Learning will be pushed further and be improved and hopefully provide more accessible education to those who need it the most - everyone.

ZNXL