Effective E-learning To Students - Essay Example

? of the The Programme Module Assignment Number of words How E-learning is effective for the as well as for the E-Learning professionals? Introduction Knowledge has been a source of competitive advantage in the new economy. In association with education, social developments and economics are intensely associated with the advancement of human capital (ESCWA, 2005). Countries would be able to enhance the skill-set of their civilians, and its national system of innovation via training and education. This would aid linking the knowledge split with other developed countries as well as within the respective country. Hence, the countries’ success is substantially relying upon highly qualified and skilled individuals in the economy with full of knowledge and this necessitates effective, quick and affordable training and education. Conversely, the way of living and working of people is being influenced by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the ICT progression is substantially enhancing the learning methodologies. Considering this perspective, e-learning methodologies are prominently changing the style of people’s learning as observed by Rosenberg (2001). The prominent advantage of e-learning is primarily the accessibility of educational content/information anytime and everywhere and besides being affordable or less expensive comparatively to the traditional learning. Developments of e-learning courses/products are increasing day by day in numbers which is eventually accelerating the growth of e-learning industry. Now a days, different corporations and universities are investing enormously in e-learning industry. So, the efficacy of e-learning programs as well as products need to be verified or programs should be assessed in rationalizing the investment being made on this industry primarily, and to bring improvements in the quality of e-learning programs and products by helping the developers and managers secondarily. A classification of “effectiveness” should be set up initially in order to evaluate the e-learning program’s effectiveness. Moreover, it will be of great help for corporate universities and learning institutions in order to comprehend the elements influencing the effectiveness of the e-learning programs to route resources to important issues instead of insignificant ones. Therefore, this study defines the factors influencing e-learning effectiveness and enforcing quality measures for the consistent effectiveness and how influencing factors and quality measures are observed by various e-learning experts with respect to business and academics and business ones. Keeping all this in mind, this research will be addressing the following questions used for research: 1. How can we measure the e-Learning effectiveness? 2. What factors impact the programs of e-Learning effectiveness? 3. What are the major significance factors and differences between the business and academic e-Learning practitioners? Literature Review Effectiveness of e-Learning The fast pace growth of e-learning industry made the researchers and experts ended up wondering, that how to measure the effectiveness of e-learning programs. Besides, the disparity in between effectiveness and efficiency should be made visible. Effectiveness is related to outputs though efficiency is fraction of output to input (Rumble, 1997). As he quotes, “An organisation that meets the production outputs that fulfils the demands and needs of their clients is effective. This exhibits the criteria by which the organisation’s success can be measured.” Furthermore, the degree of e-learning programs explaining the enhancement of “learning” is important. For instance, improving students’ satisfaction, improving learners’ grades and helping learners to perform certain tasks with efficiency and etc. can be interrelated to a successful enhancement of “learning” experience. In order to make e-Learning more effective and to change the perception of the student with respect to the same, we need to focus more on student satisfaction and their requirements. Hiltz and Johnson in 1990 carried out a research which was focused on understanding the satisfaction level of learner from different e-Learning systems. As per their suggestion the measurement of satisfaction of e-Learning system is required to specify system effectiveness. They also claimed that to develop an applicable and suitable instrument in order to determine e-Learning systems, it is imperative to include learner satisfaction. Most significantly, in the study, they focus on different features of the system which includes characteristics of learner, quality of information, etc., which they refer as the predictors of satisfaction with respect to the system of e-Learning. This research will be focusing on the outcomes of Hiltz and Johnson’s study which was conducted in 1990, along with some different studies, which will help in the advancement of the measurement of e-Learning effectiveness as well as defining the organism of factors which affect e-Learning, but, modified to the requirements and framework of this research. In 1994, Alavi claimed that previous collaborative learning literature recommended that effectiveness of learning can be measured with respect to the perception of student and their learning and evaluation of experience which the attain from their classrooms. In contrast, in the year 2001 Piccoli, Ives and Ahmad carried out a research to widen the framework of effectiveness of e-Learning. They put forward three major measures for effectiveness, which are, performance, self-efficacy and satisfaction. Factors influence Effectiveness of e-Learning Several studies have been conducted which deals with certain factors that affect the effectiveness of e-Learning, amongst which quite a few has discussed about the integrated side of this dilemma. However, some complications that arise are primarily with the significant amount of variables that influence the effectiveness and efficiency of e-Learning. A research was done by Leidner and Jarvenpaa in 1995 that focused on the various aspects of the characteristics of students and the course content along with the issues that are beyond the trainer and the technology. Hence, the main purpose of the study conducted, could be explicitly defined in a way “the elements that are related with the environment of e-Learning environment mainly the content, teacher and the learner, technology, etc., have a direct impact on e-Learning effectiveness”. In the year 2001, Ives, Piccoli and Ahmad conducted a research to design the structure for the effectiveness of the e-Learning system based on the grounds of hands-on training on the information technology. Furthermore, they anticipated several different factors that are associated with learners for instance motivation, computer anxiety, maturity etc. They also identified factors like style of teaching, technological control that are associated with the instructors. They further highlighted on the aspects of technology and content that include reliability and quality, and most importantly the factual, procedural and the conceptual knowledge. In recent study conducted by Osika et al. in 2005, provided a list of all the crucial factors that include motivation and the technical competency of the student, how the student communicates with the teachers and other students, assessment and the clearly defined objectives etc, to name a few. To gauge the e-Learning effectiveness, another notable research was conducted by the Levy in the year 2006. The focal point of the study’s question was how learner’s perceives the effectiveness and the efficacy of the program related to e-Learning. He gauged the satisfaction and the value of the learners for each of the characteristics of the e-Learning system to identify how the students perceive it. The most distinguishing features of this research were the several different factors that were suggested by Levy which measured the perceived satisfaction of the students and the importance of e-learning system. Some of these factors were the speed of the internet, system errors, 24 hours availability of the assignments and the content, errors in the system, technical support, the extent to which the student interacts with the teacher and with his fellow class mates, the attitude of the teacher, the support by the family, course cost and others. Based on the thorough literature review, the research identifies 44 different factors that affect the effectiveness and the productivity of the e-Learning programs. These factors were particularly suggested and were directly linked to the survey item in the literature, while the rest of the factors that influence the e-learning were not clearly identified. The existing literature is unable to identify the other major factors that have an influence on the effectiveness of the e-learning systems and programs is apparently due to the fast pace technological changes, so these aspects were closely observed through the qualitative and the quantitative analysis by the professionals and experts from the business world and the different universities of e-Learning. Aims and objectives This research is planned to be conducted in order to share the experience of the e-Learning professionals and to share the knowledge of the students of e-learning. The research is planned in order to attain firsthand knowledge and experience of planning, preparing and designing and to gauge it with respect to develop better understanding of effectiveness of E-Learning. The purpose of this study is to understand what the benefits of e-Learning are and what are the measure which can be taken in order to enhance the e-Learning effectiveness. People will be asked to share their experience about how much they have benefited by opting towards this field or by choosing e-Learning as their career. What advancement have they brought in this field and how they rate e-Learning with respect to the traditional or classroom lectures? What are the major reasons which motivate the new comers to start in this field or to choose this field as their career? Research Methodology The Delphi method will be used to differentiate between industrial/professional and academic perspectives. This (Delphi) method fulfils the purpose well if the objective is to comprehend the solutions, opportunities, problems, or to expand forecasts. For example, In 1995 Duncan utilized a Delphi approach in order to identify the features and metrics of IT infrastructure and its flexibility. At initial levels, participants were asked to rate flexibility characteristics which can be identified by literature review and were allowed to add any appropriate characteristics if the like. Round two was a discussion session of the results acquired in the initial round. In the same way, in order to improve the mechanism of issues and the measures of effectiveness of e-Learning which is built from the former literature, a questionnaire which is basically web-based, will be developed which will be both quantitative and qualitative which will give a chance to participants including e-Learning experts both academics and business contexts to provide their ratings and give suggestions and add innovative aspects (if any) to the proposed system. The results will later be discussed in the next round. Sampling Sampling means to choose a representative from small division of population of the entire population (Fowler, 2002). On the other hand, to acquire valid and consistent consequences in this research, it is very crucial to involve appropriate participants. This can become more crucial if the results are based mostly on the knowledge of experts along with their relevant experience. Experts of e-Learning will be targeted in order to carry out this research. However, it will not be a simple task to describe an entire population list; hence, one hundred e-Learning experts will be selected from diverse fields and from various countries. Experts can be defined as the people who are popular in the field of designing, development, research, implementation, and training in e-Learning field. The identification is done with respect to two sources: 1. Professionals who are recognized for their publications and academic reputation. They are acknowledged as an Academic Professional. 2. Professionals who are recognized by their technical skills and are recognized by their position in their company and by their journals. They are acknowledged as Business experts. Besides, our categorization of experts as mentioned earlier, they will be asked to categorize themselves before moving on towards the answers of the questionnaire. This will help in further analysis and will be more accurate. On the other hand they will also be inquired about how can implementations of e-Learning programs, can increase sales, return on investments, profit etc. As in 2006, Rosenberg quoted that, “Understanding whether the learner really like any specific training program and consider it as a session which cover useful information; these measures does not offer the verification of business value which is required and is essential (Rosenberg, 2006). Survey Administration In the first part of the research, there will be a questionnaire which will classify into three classes: 1. General Information along with Demographics, 2. Measures of E-learning effectiveness, and 3. Factors which influence the effectiveness Respondents will be requested to share their rating with respect to the effectiveness of e-Learning measures along with its importance for each factor which influence the effectiveness by means of five points of Likert scale. This approach is usually used in the research of online education (Roberts et al. 2005). The initial part will gather all the information including age, gender, role, experience, and most significantly, the field they work in for instance academic and/or business. In the second phase, it will focus on grading the e-learning effectiveness measures. Professionals will be asked to propose grading from 1 which is “not at all” to 5 which means “Great” measuring the effectiveness. In the third phase of the questionnaire, specialists will be ask to rate the scope of every proposed factor of assessing the effectiveness on the same 1-5 scale from “not at all” to “great” plus they can provide their suggestion if they want to add any other factor. Another round of survey will also be conducted by emailing the participants so their feedback can be reevaluated with reference of initial round results. Around 24 emails will be sent to explore the most likely points of disparities between both of the classes that are business and academic. Limitations In conducting surveys there are always some possibilities of getting influenced by unseen events, listing all the variables that affect the effectiveness of e-learning is highly not possible, different researchers suggest range of factors for gauging the effectiveness of e-learning. However, many of them will support the factors listed here. Moreover, sample size (Schmidt et al., 2001) has always been a point of conflict among many researchers as it is quite difficult to generalize the results of a wider population and their demographics (Brancheau et al., 1996). As a measure to decrease the probable threat a sample of 100 specialists will be selected from 8 different countries. Time plan Name of task Description of work Number of days required Find Background Information Use The Library Use Different Types of Sources Ask a Librarian One Week Develop a Research Question Narrow Your Topic Develop a Working Thesis One week Avoid Plagiarism Take Good Notes Sign Up For Reference Works One Day Research Your Topic Identify Types of Information Develop Search Strategies Find Books Find Articles Use Your Subject Guide Find Web Sites Two week Plan Your Paper Develop your argument Outline your paper One week Write Your First Draft Write Effectively Integrate Your Sources Get Help From the Writing Center Two weeks Revise and Rewrite Do Additional Research Revise Your Work Ten days Cite Your Sources Create a Bibliography Use Reference Works One week Put Your Paper in Final Form Proofread your paper Five days Budget Overall budget for this study includes: 1. Human resources required for the research = $ _____ 2. Research assistance which include technical and field = $ _____ 3. Research expenses: Printing Tools Field expenses Consultations/Meeting for distribution of questionnaire Report printing Purchase of software in order to analyze data Overheads - Travel, ink cartridge for printers Total = $ _____ Total Budget = $ _____ References   ALAVI, M. (1994). Computer-mediated collaborative learning: An empirical evaluation. MIS Quarterly, 18(2), 159-179.  BRANCHEAU, J. C., JANZ, B. D., & WETHERBE, J. C. (1996). Key issues in information systems management: 1994-95 SIM Delphi results. MIS Quarterly, 20(2), 225-243.  DUNCAN, N. B. (1995). Capturing flexibility of information technology infrastructure: A study of resource characteristics and their measure. Journal of Management Information Systems, 12(2), 37 - 58. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), (2005). Information Society Indicators, United Nations, New York, USA. 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