e-Learning: a brief story and rising trends

5 min readApr 22, 2016

E-learning is a modern field of computer-based learning that is experiencing exponential growth within the worldwide educational community today (Edwards & Finger, 2007).

E-learning is the most recent intersection point of distance education and educational technology, two fields that have struggled to find better methods of facilitating education over the last century, and its meteoric rise and diversification demands attention from educators and learners in the corporate and traditional education realms alike.

e-Learning

The field of e-learning is a crucial part of the new dynamic of educational systems in the 21st century; defining it, however, has not been a simple task (Sangrà, 2012). While the term is generally credited with having been coined by Jay Cross in 1998, as the field continues to grow, experts have developed numerous competing definitions (Sangrà, 2012). For the uses of this report, we will begin with the clearheaded definition provided by Jisc Digital Media as a starting point: “e-Learning can be defined as ‘learning facilitated and supported through the use of information and communications technology.’” In essence, that means that e-learning today is a computer and internet-based means of teaching and learning freed from the constraints of time and space that have tethered previous instruction methods to traditional classrooms (Edwards & Finger, 2007). It has shifted the emphasis of instruction to the student, a learnercentric model with greater accessibility and more student control and interaction in the learning process than ever before (Edwards & Finger, 2007). Its three essential dimensions are:

Technology; the internet, digital educational materials, complex application frameworks.
Access; wide time and place accessibility, competitive prices.
Quality; pedagogical research, competition, student education “shopping” (Edwards & Finger, 2007)

The field has, in a scant few years, carved out a “competitive arena, where solutions are created by a fusion of technology, learning, and business” (Roffe, 2004). As we will show in the following sections, it continues to grow, evolve, and carve out new spaces for itself following the successful tenets of accessibility and interactivity established by the struggle of educational technology and distance education throughout the 20th century.

Modern Trends in e-learning

E-learning’s tremendous rise over the last decade has resulted in its spread into a variety of educational niches. What follows are just a few current trends in the field that are informed by the longstanding goals of educational technology and distance learning, building on lessons learned from the 20th century.

Social Learning

One of the areas where e-learning has seen growth in recent years is through social learning. Social learning is the concept of student learning through social interactions, on teaching new concepts through “grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions” (Brown & Adler, 2008).

Social learning is becoming an integral part of e-learning as students are increasingly encouraged to collaborate with one another in online environments using Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis and blogs, and even document co-creation tools like Google Docs.

Open Education Resources (OER)

The Open-Source Initiative originated in 1998 as a group of software engineers collaborated and shared ideas in order to create free software that anyone could reuse and remix in order to make the program better.

The most widely used form of an OER today is Wikipedia. This online “open-source” encyclopedia is growing at a rate of 10 edits per second and averages 750 new articles per day.

Emerging Trends in e-learning

Due to its position on the leading edge of the fields of educational technology and distance education, elearning is a fertile ground for educational and technological innovations. Studying these emerging trends and innovations can give us an idea of where and how e-learning may evolve into the future, how we can keep up with the field, and what is being done to avoid past mistakes like hype-inflation. One excellent source for finding these trends is Christopher Pappas’s 2015 report on statistic for the e-learning industry — a vivid snapshot of how money is being spent on the development and implementation of e-learning products.

Two significant emerging trends that arise in Pappas’s report are the use of MOOCs, Massive Online Open Courses, in corporate training and the increased use of mobile learning in K-12 education. The projected numbers for spending and adoption are quite strong, with anticipated growth of double-digit percentages for both over the next several years (Pappas, 2015).

MOOCs for Corporate Training

MOOCs are free courses of study made available over the internet to large numbers of users. MOOCs have been on the rise as students of all ages take advantage of this free option to continue, supplement, or enhance their education. The major players in the market are currently:

Coursera. Over 6 million users: https://www.coursera.org
OpenupEd. Over 1.8 million users: http://www.openuped.eu
UDACITY. Over 1.8 million users: https://www.udacity.com

Mobile Learning in K-12 Education

Mobile learning, or learning via handheld devices such as tablets or cellphones, is also becoming a rising trend in K-12 education.

Conclusion

E-learning’s future looks to be a bright one. With current exercises in social learning and OERs increasing the access and efficacy that e-learning’s parent fields have long sought, and emerging trends that shift massive online learning in the form of MOOCs to corporations and put more mobile learning devices into K-12 education, e-learning appears to be learning from the mistakes of its predecessors and improving upon their successes.