Month: September 2022

According to Martin Weller’s “25 Years of Ed Tech”, he discusses the development of e-learning, and how this new mode of education gradually became acceptable and made an impact on people’s learning.

In fact, people were opposed to the the implication of e-learning for education area when it was first proposed in 1998. They over-romanticized the use of fact-to-face learning. They only wanted to pay for the face-to-face education, and they even rejected to hear and accept the new word, e-learning, which represented the exploration of digital education. At first, e-learning was defined as any use of electronic media for learning, and it gradually represented more about the online delivery.  Since e-learning had been broadly argued, the blended learning was come up. It allowed people to blend face-to-face learning with the online delivery, which made online delivery more feasible and created more opportunities for the online education. In other words, the blended learning laid the foundation for the acceptance and the success of first fully online undergraduate course in 1999, which ended the controversy of the e-learning. Besides, people perceived that the cost of the e-learning per student is relatively low in a long term, and the reuse of digital resources also economized many physical resources. 

In a nutshell, the development of e-learning positively affects people’s study, and the success of the e-learning sets the framework for the future educational mode, which means it has really a long term impact on online learning.

I chose this activity because I was really interested in the development of the digital education, and this area of knowledge perfectly aligned with my learning goals. Specifically, one of my learning goals is to understand how social media could affect people’s learning and social life. This activity helped me learn the development of e-learning since it was first proposed, and understand how people gradually adapted to this new mode of learning, which benefited me a lot. I also learned that the term of blended learning was from the development of e-learning, which made online delivery more feasible and acceptable; meanwhile, it created more opportunities for the online education. Thanks to the development of e-learning, it benefits people’s learning and  eventually becomes a mainstream in educational field now. 

References:

Chapter 6 of “25 Years of Ed”

Audio