Tamil Nadu - Tiruchi   

e-learning: simple and wide-ranging

TIRUCHI: Rich content created and delivered in suitable levels of accessibility through e-learning, the technology that enables people to learn anytime and anywhere, facilitates learning at the learner’s place and pace.

Industries facing the challenge of adapting to rapid changes in technology for product development bank on e-classes as a dependable tool for training manpower in various skills that suits market trends. Academic sector, too, is keen on evolving online learning design to facilitate the learning and content delivery process.

A two-day workshop on E-Learning: Trends and Technologies’, organised by the departments of Computer Applications and Computer Engineering at the National Institute of Technology – Tiruchi (NIT-T), highlighted how e-learning, termed ‘a wonderful tool’, can be the best supplement to a teacher, and its advantages to the corporate world.

According to S.R. Balasundaram, coordinator, whose research work was based on ‘e-learning methodology’, in teacher-directed e-learning, knowledge delivery is limited to the syllabi, whereas in learner-centric e-learning, the teacher is a facilitator, and students gain a wide range of knowledge. Mr. B. Ramadoss explained the method of assessing the e-learning process.

S. Raghavan, Professor, Electronics and Communications Engineering, and Arpitraj, final-year student and web designer demonstrated how a difficult but important subject like microwave engineering could be taught through web-based technologies. Mr. Arpitraj explained ways of graphical computation through web technology.

Elaborating on how bio-metrics work very well in e-learning domain, T. Santhanam, Head, PG Research Department of Computer Applications, D.G. Vaishnav College, Chennai, said face, iris, ear, retina, dental, finger print, palm print, hand geometry, signature, voice, gesture, gait, keystroke and DNA were the major types of biometrics that could not be transferred, forgotten, lost or copied.

An overview of ‘e-learning in Indian scenario and corporate’ was provided by G. Nandakumar, Professor, Rajiv Gandhi College of Engineering, Sriperumbudur. He demonstrated how an e-book could be generated, and listed the institutions and industries that used e-learning technologies abundantly. Especially, in the corporate world, the technology facilitated cost saving, stream lining, time saving, and better performance, he said.

Sathya Sai Prakash, a researcher in e-learning summarised that e-learning was the best supplement to a teacher and not a replacement while Rajkumar Kannan of the Department of Computer Science, Bishop Heber College, dwelt on the various methods of information retrieval for e-learning system. Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle), the free open source course management system, is used by universities, colleges, knowledge schools and individual instructors to add web technology to their courses, he said.

Presiding over the inaugural, Director of NIT-T M. Chidambaram emphasised on the immediate need for designing course teaching in the most interactive way for the learners. About 120 delegates from different parts of the State took part.

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