Today's guest post is written about e-learning tools! I am a huge fan of taking full advantage of the many tools the internet makes available to teachers, and I hope you'll find David's blog helpful.
Anyone involved in
education has been privy to the changes over the past ten years with regard to
online learning. New mobile technologies and e-learning has changed the
landscape of education forever. Of course, there are still some stragglers out
there who have not bought into all of the benefits that the e learning world
has to offer, but they are missing out and soon enough will have to join
alongside the rest of us.
In 2011, seventy seven
percent of corporations in America were utilizing online learning. This is
largely dramatic increase from the mere four percent that it was in 1995. This
means that companies are getting involved in online training due to the
diminishing technological barriers and shifting customer priorities.
The industry for corporate
training is worth two hundred billion dollars, in and of itself. Of this, fifty
six billion represents e-learning. This is expected to grow into one hundred
and seven billion dollars by 2015. This makes e-learning one of the fastest
growing markets that is continuing to make its stride in the education
industry. The reason for this is because of the many new learning tools.
E-learning is growing and
it is growing among all age groups. In fact studies indicate that e-learning
has grown for older adults much more than among younger children with the
average online user age being 34. This key in mind there are many new
technologies which have created learning tools applicable to all grades and all
key demographics.
Learning tools are tools
used for personal learning or professional learning. They can also be used to
teach or train individuals. Key findings suggest that there is an increased
consumption of IT and learning. Learning tools and working tools are merging with
personal tools due to the fact that free online social tools are dominating the
online learning field. Now professional and personal learning is under the
control of the individual. Educational and training tools remain the top
trending category for online learning with video and image tools in second. In
third place is communication tools followed by networking and other platforms
for collaboration. Blogging and web tools are ranked the fifth trend in the
industry.
Within the educational
industry online there are elearning authoring tools such as the elearning
software Articulate. There are also tools such as Udutu which is collaborative
course authoring software as well as Camtasia which is a screencasting tool.
There is a simulation authoring tool called Adobe Captivate and a course
manager called iTunesU. Then there are quizzing tools. Quizlet is a tool that
allows you to study games and use flashcards. Socrative is a student response
system that is quite new. ProProfs Quiz Maker is another new tool which acts as
an online quiz maker.
There are many e-learning
platforms available to users. Moodle is a course management system that is now
widely available to educational and corporate entities alike and Edmono is an
educational social networking platform. Coursera is an MOOC platform that
companies and students can both use and eFront is another course management
system along with Blackboard Learn. The latter two are best suited for
educational institutions but can be easily applied to corporate training online
as well. There are still other educational tools such as TED Talks/Ed which
offers inspirational lessons. There is also GlogsterEDU which is an interactive
poster tool and Learnist which is a pinning tool for learning. You can also use
Khan Academy which is a video learning platform or Voicethread which is a
digital storytelling platform.
