Future of E-Learning in the US

The state of education in the United States is ever fluctuating as the nation tries to catch up with new technologies and improve our educational scores. It seems the country is more worried about test scores and not the actual education the student is learning. The nation has neglected the personalized education that e-earning can provide, but can e-learning help every student? Chatterji and Jones agree that there are numerous recommendations for arresting the decline in American education, by focusing on how educational technology can improve educational outcomes (2012). School Districts in the United States are not ready for that level of technology though and moving to a strict e-learning strategy could hurt their students more than help them. In the last 30 years the United States has slipped from sixth in education worldwide to twenty-seventh (Bendix, 2018). What is the future of e-learning in our education system? Can it help our students, or could it hurt them even more?

What is e-learning though? We can define e-learning as the deployment of “information and communication technologies” to further the dissemination of “learning in the academic and business worlds” (Yusuf & Al-Banawi, 2013).  We can assess how other nations, such as Oman, Saudi Arabia and Romania have moved to e-learning and other techniques to help their students. They are all currently ranked around the same number as the United States, but with their own studies they are quickly changing their ideologies (Education Data Base, 2018)

The current learning experience in these nations relies on antiquated methods and students are only bound to think within the course of those boundaries. Nadia Yusuf and Nisreen Al-Banawi of King Abdul-Aziz University in Saudi Arabia who have an established career in e-learning, blended learning and collaborative learning, believe that the old style of teaching is no longer viable (2013). In their research they observed the test grades of students that participated in traditional learning classes versus those in blended learning and e-learning classes. Their research shows that students who participated in e-learning and blended learning remembered what they learned much longer then a traditionally educated student. They also concluded that e-learners remembered even longer then blended learners. It also showed that the down side of-learning is that the student has full control and may not actually take the time to study the course work (Yusuf & Al-Banawi, 2013). E-learning however can alleviate this boundary and allows for a more fluid and dynamic and self-paced learning system.

E-learning has an excellent chance of becoming the way everyone learns as new emerging technologies become available. Some of the new delivery methods are mobile phones, which is called M-Learning, and blogs, wikis, Podcasts, and other easier to-use tools (Yusuf & Al-Banawi, 2013). As vast as the United States is, it is a perfect fit for e-learning. It seems for the United States there are still areas though that are vastly behind the technology curve. These areas could be hurt by moving to a more e-learning centric curriculum. Making computer technologies available to every school is difficult because education is largely a state prerogative. Standards, teacher certification, curricula, and graduation requirements are determined within individual states and territories, not by the federal government (Adrion, Fall, Ericson, & Guzdial, 2016).

Take such rural areas such as Southern Arizona, right on the Mexican Border, where the population density is sparse and most of the School Districts are small. The budgets for most of these School Districts is very small. During a conference I had the opportunity to talk to two such School District Superintendents, from Tombstone and Palimonies, who struggle with their budgets to include new technologies to their curriculum to help students prepare for life in the business world. Both Superintendents expressed great concerns about being able to keep up with technology as their school budgets were not as large as say Tucson or Phoenix (Devere, 2019; Rosalik, 2019). Mr. Devere even noted that they were still using netbooks from 2005, which were antiquated and falling apart, and that the District didn’t have the money to keep rotating, every five years, the technologies for newer and better (Devere, 2019). School Districts like these two are abundant in the United States, and if they can’t afford to keep the technologies updated then other demographics will suffer.

Informal pathways of teaching computers and other technologies, such as clubs or computer camps, will most likely not reach Female students and underrepresented minorities. These demographic groups are less likely to seek out afterschool activities. If we want to give everyone a chance for an e-learning initiative, we need to start at a more traditional level of education. E-learning needs to be taught through “formal education pathways, for example, primary or elementary school, middle school, high school, community colleges, and universities” (Adrion, Fall, Ericson, & Guzdial, 2016).

There are other areas of concerns that can hinder the use of e-learning but can be mitigated by using available technologies. These areas include disabilities such as vision impairment, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and extraverted/introverted personal traits. Visually impaired students may have a hard time reading course work on computer monitors or their mobile devices. ADHD students though may have a hard time focusing on the course work and maintain their attention.

Visually impaired students may have the hardest time with e-learning as they will have to struggle to read monitors and process that information quickly. In a study conducted by Bucharest Academy in Romania they took a group of visually impaired students who were using e-learning techniques and had them take a test without any visual assistance (Butucea, 2013). The scores on the work were close to failure levels, as each student reported having problems reading the tests. They then took the same group of students and using text-to-speech software and adjusting the monitors to higher contrast colors had them take some different tests. After the adjustments the students scored much higher, between 30 and 45 percent. It was concluded that “the development of assistive technologies has provided great opportunities for people with disabilities to transform their way of life in a productive, efficient and result oriented way” (Butucea, 2013). There are technologies out there that can help visually impaired students keep up, in an e-learning environment, with the rest of the student body and even potentially advance past them.

Another major area of concern for using e-learning are students with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It seems that in today’s modern society this disability has become rampant. It has been reported that cases of ADHD have risen by anywhere from 3% to 6% in the last twenty years and that the previous decade before that saw an even greater rise in ADHD diagnosis (CDC, 2018). ADHD students mostly feel insecure and have problems with understanding or being distracted easily. E-learning has become an interesting form of learning in the current trend where people are experiencing a high-level of customized learning to overcome their ADHD. E-learning has provided them an outlet to move from a more traditional power-point style of course work to a more interactive game style of course work (Banerjee, 2018). No official studies have been done on e-learning and ADHD, though many people believe that it will solve this issue tremendously. Hopefully in the future there will be a number of studies that can lay this issue to rest.

The biggest are of concern in e-learning is how to accommodate learners’ differences during activities. A joint group of researchers from Oman and Korea, suggest that adaptive e-learning systems can effectively address such individual differences and, consequently, they enable more directed tutoring via computer-assisted instruction (Al-Dujaily, Kim, & Ryu, 2013). In their study they used one hundred and forty-five participants from the Computer Science departments of Dhofar University and Hanyang University to participate in the study. They used a two-by-two between-subjects factorial study designed, where the personality traits derived from Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and the two computer-based learning systems (adaptive vs. non-adaptive) were independent variables. The results suggested that extraverted/introverted personality traits significantly influenced learning activity on adaptive e-learning system (Al-Dujaily, Kim, & Ryu, 2013). It seems that e-learning can be designed to fit any type of learner and even become adaptive so that every program can be used by either an extraverted or introverted individual.

Even though the state of education in the United States is ever fluctuating it seems that e-learning can help every student. The traditional route of education is failing in actually teaching and educating future generations. It may take years for School Districts, especially those in rural areas, in the United States to rise to level of technology though and move to a strict e-learning strategy, though in the long run it could greatly increase the education level of the country and provide a higher standard of learning across the board.

References

Adrion, R., Fall, R., Ericson, B., & Guzdial, M. (2016). Education: Broadening access to computing education state by state. Association for Computing Machinery, 32-34. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/2856455

Adrion, R., Fall, R., Ericson, B., & Guzdial, M. (2016). Education: Broadening Access to Computing Education State by State. Association for Computing Machinery. Communications of the ACM, 32-34. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/2856455

Al-Dujaily, A., Kim, J., & Ryu, H. (2013). Am I extravert or introvert? Considering the personality effect toward e-learning system. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 16(3), 14-27. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cda1/c3f014ff9670408935517fb4161d691f5b41.pdf?_ga=2.154087487.627428099.1563590797-366377592.1562960629

Banerjee, S. (2018, Feb 22). How e-learning can be helpful for ADHD students. Retrieved from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-e-learning-can-helpful-adhd-students-santasree-banerjee/

Bendix, A. (2018, Sept 27). The US was once a leader for healthcare and education - now it ranks 27th in the World. (Business Insider) Retrieved from Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-ranks-27th-for-healthcare-and-education-2018-9

Butucea, D. (2013). Personalized e-learning software systems. Extending the solution to assist visually impaired users. Database Systems Journal, IV(3), 41–49. Retrieved from https://doaj.org/article/fd3ee86f595640cba54d64244caa4cdd

CDC. (2018, Sept). ADHD Throughout the Years | CDC. Retrieved from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/timeline.html

Chatterji, A., & Jones, B. (2012, Sept). Harnessing technology to improve K–12 education. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5276/f7a0669de314f72a30eaea1726bee72b4d11.pdf

Devere, R. (2019, July 24). Superintedent. (C. Collins, Interviewer)

Education Data Base. (2018). (New Jersey Minority Educational Development) Retrieved from Educate Every Child on the Planet: The World Top 20 Project: https://worldtop20.org/education-data-base?gclid=Cj0KCQjwj_XpBRCCARIsAItJiuTg3JYSVitbAvsWx4v9EKP-AM2BjJILNgKxmKlRLrFykLpyrjchW-8aAkdFEALw_wcB

Rosalik, S. (2019, July 24). Superintendent. (C. Collins, Interviewer)

Yusuf, N., & Al-Banawi, N. (2013). The impact of changing technology: The case of e-learning. Contemporary Issues in Education Research (Online), 6(2). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.19030/cier.v6i2.7726