E-Learning Readiness
An interesting point brought up by Ryan Watkins is that learners need to have ‘e-learning readiness’ if e-learning is to be successful. He makes the point that learning at school is primarily low-tech and highly face-to-face, making the transition to high-tech and low face-to-face in e-learning difficult, which does make sense.
However, the this is balanced by what school students do outside of the classroom. Last month on the train to uni, I heard a couple of school kids – I’d estimate year 8 – talking about the best way to build a computer, adding such-and-such graphics card, hooking this up with that, buying memory cards from this shop, etc, etc. Add this to the startling amount of ten year olds I know who know more about the Internet than I do, and I don’t think that there is a problem with the working knowledge of school students in regards to high-tech or low face-to-face tools.
I think that if there was a problem in acclimatising school students to e-learning, it would be actually accepting and understanding the ways in which learning can be embedded into the technologies that they already know. For me in my e-learning subject, the largest hurdle has been understanding how tools I already know or use can be used in new and different ways. It has been difficult to open my mind to the vast amount of possibilitieswhich technology can give. If there is a problem introducing e-learning to school students, I think that it would be breaking the moulds by which they define learning and the tools by which it can be done.
