NORSYAZREEN RAMLAN (CRITIQUE ARTICLE 2)

INTEGRATING E-LEARNING IN TECHNICAL AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION: A TECHNICAL REVIEW by Muhammad Bappa-Aliyu

1.0       Article’s Summary

E-learning or web-based instruction as the name implies refers to the use of electronic technology and media to deliver, support and enhance teaching, learning and assessment including elements of communication within and between communities of learners and teachers, as well as provision of online content, which may be locally generated or developed elsewhere. Strategies for the effective integration of e-learning are the use of online assignment tool; online journal for reflection and assessment; synchronous communication tools (such as chatting) and asynchronous communications tools (such as forum and journal); lecturer-initiated communication for the PBL case on the e-learning platform and frequent availability of lecturers online for facilitation. Some benefits of integrating e-learning in TVET for teacher such as in develop content, deliver content, track learning, schedule classes and map competencies while benefits for students are in independent learning, group learning, assignment, download lecture note and interact with teacher.

 The challenges to the application of e-learning are to identify the skills required by admitted students; evaluating the progress of students; identifying the appropriate teaching strategy; choosing to use electronic means in laboratory work and the resource required for sharing remote labs; accrediting e-learning-based engineering programs; targeting interactions with international engineering education bodies; estimating the cost of resources serving online engineering education; estimating human and technical infrastructure required; assessing student and staff satisfaction; facing changes in student advising protocols and assessing class software requirements. The major challenges to the implementation of e-learning in TVET lie on technological development, human resources development, infrastructure development, economic issues, content development, managerial and policy making issues. E-learning has many benefits and useful for TVET graduate facing in the changing nature of the world of work so all efforts should have to be on deck to adopt e-learning teaching and learning system.

                 

2.0       Revision, Critique and Discussion

This article describes e-learning in the context of TVET, the strategies, benefits and challenges of integrating e-learning in TVET. I totally agree with this article based from the author’s literature but this article is not complete because of the lacks of explanations and some information. For improvement, this article should state the process or framework for e-learning environment and an example of e-learning model that can be refer by Nigeria. Currently, all over the world, many TVET institution used e-learning effective and efficiently. A configurable and extensible portal framework used for configuring specific e-learning environment and can integrate state of the art e-learning tools. There are three key features of the portal framework: learning community configuration, role settings and system extension; knowledge sharing and management; learning space integrating various e-learning tools.

In addition, there is an example of e-learning model such Adaptive Learning and Assessment System (ALAS) in India used at school computer labs and mobile devices. ALAS is a system that supports personalized assessment-for-learning on both e-learning and mobile devices. ALAS supports formative adaptive evaluations with scaffolds. ALAS also automatically detects end-user device types so as to appropriately adapt the content based on the device, allowing students to continue their adaptive assessment and learning process in almost any environment. Read more in “A New Approach To Personalization: Integrating E-Learning and M-Learning” by Prema and Raghu (2012).   

Reference:

Jian Chen, Hongyuan Wang, Kangping Wang, Yafei Yan, and Jinguo Teng (2012), A Configurable and Extensible Portal Framework for E-Learning Environments. International Conference on e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning. Singapore.

Muhammad Bappa-Aliyu (2012), Integrating E-Learning In Technical And Vocational Education: A Technical Review, International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences.

Prema and Raghu (2012). “A New Approach To Personalization: Integrating E-Learning and M-Learning”, Association for Educational Communications and Technology 2012. Kerala, India.