What Are the E-Learning Building Blocks

The building blocks for e-learning do not fit together in just one way. You can use some or all of the building blocks for a specific e-learning solution. Tell Me More You can fit these building blocks together in almost any way you want. You can mix and match. What you do will depend on: [...]

Although it’s not part of the learning experience, tracking and reporting are important so you know who has taken what training courses. Tell Me More Although it’s not very important while a student is in the midst of taking a training course, tracking and reporting becomes important to many people after the course is over. [...]

You can provide supplemental reference information to any e-learning course by putting that information on Web pages that your students have access to. The Internet already holds a wealth of information in existing Web pages. You can use this information as “free” supplementary information. Tell Me More In many traditional classroom courses, the instructor will [...]

You can easily provide testing over the Internet to be delivered before the course (pretests), after the course (posttests), or after defined portions of the course. Tell Me More The traditional educational experience uses testing for a number of things: To let the student know what he already knows before taking a class To let [...]

In some cases, students can access remotely some “things” that are important to the learning experience. For example, if you’re learning to be a UNIX systems administrator, you can be in one city but access a UNIX computer in another city to do your practice exercises. Tell Me More In a classroom, you might be [...]

Simulations and games are computer-based, dynamic models of complex real-life situations that let the student learn in an environment that reduces the penalties for mistakes. For example, the penalty for crashing a flight simulator on a simulated landing approach is a lot less than crashing a real airplane. Tell Me More It’s very handy to [...]

You can provide electronic Web books over the Internet that serve the same purpose a textbook serves in a more traditional classroom course. Tell Me More The traditional classroom experience includes a textbook, or at least a binder of text, that the student is expected to read and understand. The textbook is useful for the [...]

Students can interact with the course instructor in a variety of ways over the Internet—allowing them to do such things as ask questions and get answers. Students can also interact with other students taking the course at the same time—allowing them to pose and answer questions and even do group projects. Tell Me More In [...]

You can deliver lectures—an instructor or presenter talking about a topic—over the Internet in the same way you can deliver them face-to-face in a classroom setting. Tell Me More A standard education image is the instructor standing in front of a room of students and lecturing on a topic. (We’re pretty sure that Plato and [...]

There are only a handful of basic elements for e-learning. They include: Virtual presentations and lectures Virtual interaction with people Web books Simulations and games Virtual interaction with real things Virtual reference library Assessments and quizzes The building blocks are seldom used alone—they are usually combined for a specific learning experience. Tell Me More If [...]