Colleges, universities and school districts all over the world are adopting E-learning to provide high-quality learning over the Internet in different languages.
SignOnAfrica's powerful enterprise-class software technologies have made it possible for educators, administrators and Learning Service Providers to create, launch and measure learning over the Internet using nothing more than a standard browser.
SignOnAfrica E-learning software is a powerful, interactive, multimedia software platform that uses the Internet to give students remote access to knowledge, immediate assessment of their assimilation, certification of achievement, and instructor and peer guidance as required. Students can register and learn at their own convenience, pace and place or use IntraLezarn to supplement instructor-lead classes.
SignOnAfrica E-learning software is a sophisticated relational database-driven system designed to make it easy for instructors to place classes into the single database and onto the Internet securely and consistently. No programming skills are required to load existing courses into IntraLearn and take advantage of powerful interactive features that include email, chat, live hyperlinks, discussion rooms, instructor Q&A, FAQ, and streaming multimedia.
Using the Internet to Close Job-Skills Gap
As training challenges increase, companies and colleges are turning to the Internet for answers to their training needs and to eliminate the heavy burden of travel expenses and infrastructure operating and maintenance costs. Web delivery of training content is promising a new generation of media-rich, cost-effective training applications.
The Internet offers community colleges an excellent opportunity to extend beyond their physical campuses to reach a much wider prospective student body. The Internet can provide access to training to anyone with a browser at anytime from any location. This accessibility is the essential factor in solving the current training crisis.
To address the job-skills gap, community colleges must adapt asynchronous learning methodologies to conform to the new demographics and lifestyle of the continuing education student-body. The contemporary community college student is as likely to be a professional seeking certification or an adult seeking retraining as he or she would be a full-time student recently graduated from high school. Asynchronous activity, or activity done at the student’s own time and pace, is critical to offer the broad, on-demand accessibility necessary to address these individuals’ training needs.
Asynchronous training tools for the Internet allow users to access training materials, take tests and share files with instructors and fellow students at their own convenience. Web-based, self-paced products offer a continuous learning environment. The student interacts independently with the courseware. Even though there is no need to convene people into an audience for the training experience, the Internet’s streaming multimedia and interactivity, with instant messaging, email and hyperlinks, create a learning environment that enables rewarding interchange between student and teacher.
How to Create On-line Continuing Education Learning Environments
The benefits of the Internet-based, virtual classroom are clear:
- Self-paced, on-demand training
- Dramatic cost savings
- Flexible and easily updated, customized, personalized content
- Interactive communications and multimedia for student/instructor dialogue
- Reduction in training time
- Reduction in travel expenses
- Low cost of creating/purchasing training
- Improved learning performance
To receive these benefits, though, community colleges need an Internet-technology solution that incorporates the following factors:
- Interactivity
- Measurability
- Timeliness
- Cost-Effectiveness
- Accessibility
- Scalability
- Integration
- Security
The primary function of web-based training software is to manage the delivery and flow of content – both courseware and tests. Currently, Web-based training solutions are kludgy affairs patched together from several different proprietary and expensive applications. What the education community needs is a complete, seamlessly integrated, easy-to-use online learning system for putting courses on the Web.
To replicate real-world training, the online learning system must be a container of robust interactive, communications, network and knowledge database functionality, "smart" courseware templates and open-standard Internet technologies which, together, form a resource-rich virtual classroom and remote certification platform. All that should be required is basic PC equipment and any industry-standard Web browser, without any proprietary plug-in. The ideal platform is easy to use to load courseware, without requiring any programming skills. It should include:
- The ability to input courseware from familiar applications, e.g., Word or PowerPoint
- Web-based data entry, eliminating proprietary authoring tools or uploading programs
- Automated test set up wizard, without requiring any programming
- Discussion groups
- Keyboard-based chat sessions
- Threaded bulletin boards
- Email to instructor and others taking the course
- Pre-recorded streaming multimedia for more compelling courses
- White boards, application sharing, and conferencing
- Downloadable reference materials, bibliographies, articles, papers, etc.
- Hyperlinks to Web sites
- Courseware search facility
- Ability to set performance criteria and control pace and testing thresholds
- Assignment creation and issuance
- Student progress tracking
- Self-correcting tests with instructor comments
- Conclusion: The Virtual Community College Partnership
A serious skills gap threatens society’s ability to reap the benefits of our new economic order. Community colleges have an opportunity to solve the skills-gap by providing training to fill specific labor market needs and serve the demographics of the continuing education and retraining markets. The Internet provides a new training delivery system for community colleges to help educate the workforce.
