In recent years, e-learning technology has been widely used in the academic institutes for supporting the effectiveness and efficiency of the students’ learning and the educators’ teaching, as a favored approach. However, regarding the student community, the extent to which e-learning technology is used, types of e-learning methods are being mainly used, as well as the barriers for enjoying the advantages of e-technology, remain interesting topics for the educators to explore. This chapter focuses on these issues through an investigation among the students within a higher education institute. The findings give an understanding regarding the usage of e-learning methods and the factors hindering the efficacy of their usage among the students. Also, a primary analysis on the usage difference between undergraduate and postgraduate students is presented.
TopE- Technology In Facilitating Learning
E-learning refers to the application and deployment of the network and digital technologies to facilitate and conduct learning and communication processes (Bose, 2003; Siritongthaworn & Krairit, 2006; Roffe, 2002; Henry, 2001) in different types of organizations. Among these organizations, educational institutes are taken as representative.
With the advance of the information technology, the conduction of instruction has been improved (Shim, et al., 2007), which gives the education institutes a powerful approach in helping the students’ learning process. Within recent years, many higher education institutes have employed e-technology in their academic work (Siritongthaworn & Krairit, 2006; Bose, 2003; Alexander, 2001; Hadengue, 2005). The most popular e-learning technologies include WebCT, Blackboard and Moodle, etc. (Qi, et al., 2009). The e-methods, such as email, instant chatting, etc., commonly contained by them are the focused elements of this paper. In many institutes, e-methods are also used as a new strategy to enrich the learning effect obtained from long existing teaching approaches, namely face to face communication, etc.