Monday, December 30, 2002		Book Review

THE world of ‘e’ is evolving. Steadily and not so slowly, PC and the Net are affecting every aspect of our life, learning included. Though it would be too early to say that e-learning has already taken the world of education by storm yet the fact that e-learning is toddling into the realms of coaching can’t simply be ignored.

The book, written by Gaurav Chadha and S.M. Nafay Kumail, says that learning in the e-era is predictably just a mouse click away. The authors say that e-learning has transformed the traditional premise of educational theorists. The book says people will learn where they spend most of their time, is not an exaggeration. A global academic village is in the making. Education is a function of communication and the Internet is the best tool of communication that mankind has ever seen. Without fantasising about the kind of shape that the Internet will take, it can be safely assumed that the Internet is where the education will happen. E-learning is here to stay.

John Chambers of Cisco says: "The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail like a rounding error."

E-learning represents convergence in education, training and information fields, delivered by computers, through the Web or from an organisation’s LAN. With organisations providing for virtual communities, learners can interact with classmates and peers having similar interests, across other parts of the organisation. The basic benefits are that e-content is less expensive to produce and e-learning sessions are easy to keep up-to-date because the updated materials are simply uploaded to the server. Further, the session is collaborative.

As the book explains, in the new economy learning must be updated every day, every moment, as it were, for it to enable organisations to remain competitive. The services component of e-learning ensures that content keeps pace with the dynamics of the organisations by constantly enabling the creation of new content over the static content.

Implementation is the major component of e-learning. One of the key tools to implement distance education is virtual classroom (VCR). Here the instructor holds the class on the Internet and can virtually see and interact with the learners attending the classrooms.

The authors contend that e-learning is all about performance improvement, which does not bind e-learning to happen purely through the Web. Human intervention, even if virtual, is a crucial element in e-learning that cannot be discounted in any way.

The content is dynamic and e-learning is more of e-sharing. Then another important reasons behind the success and feasibility of e-learning is that it reaches hitherto unreachable learners.

It is a big market. According to estimates, by the end of 2002 nearly 2.2 million persons in the USA will join the bandwagon of online learners. The whole process of e-learning has generated some new jobs as well. At least, in India. India has already attained the reputation of developing both quality and volumes of e-learning products and solutions. Educational software-producing companies are also capitalising on the Internet to disseminate learning through the Web.

However, at present major impediments in e-learning are less bandwidth and cultural issues. There are still a lot of persons around who are dismissing e-learning as nothing more than learning implemented using e-business technologies. The book has merely touched these constraints. It should have dealt with such issues, including its tortoise-paced implementation in India, in a more incisive way. Still, such glitches apart, the book makes an interesting reading.