By: Dr Bahawodin Baha, University of Brighton, UK.
Electronic Learning (E-Learning)
The advancements in computer and communication technologies over the last three decades have enabled the educators to provide electronic learning knowns as e-Learning which has been utilised by many universities, colleges, schools, and recently other organisations world-wide.
Higher education around world has experienced incredible number of technical innovations and changes over the last two decades. One of those changes is the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in education through an educational tool which is called Learning Management System (LMS) that is employed by educationalists for planning, implementation, and assessment purposes, which will be briefly discussed in the next section.
Learning Management Systems (LMS)
For any institution to embark on e-Learning for their students, they must have a Learning Management System (LMS) which may cost the institutions relatively huge sums of money. An LMS provides the backbone on which the workflow of education runs. An LMS can be adopted for various purposes including sharing notes, introducing assignments, lecture slides and post grades and the students can submit their course work and essays electronically through these platforms.
The main features of an LMS are as follows:
- Provide a platform for sharing lecture notes and slides, teaching plan and assignments, and recorded lectures.
- LMS provide close collaboration between and an instructor with learners.
- Create an educational workflow that makes sense for different environments including blended learning
- Mobile users will be to access teaching materials from anywhere.
There are over hundred software companies which develop LMS systems every year. Examples of the popular LMS systems which most universities in the developed world employ are Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, and many other clouds based LMS systems. However, large sums of money will be needed to deploy such systems, which will be discussed in the next part section of this document.
Cost of LMS systems
The LMS companies which provide services to the schools, colleges and universities charge huge sums of money on annual basis. For instance, University of Brighton in the UK where is author has been working is charged over £90000 annually by Blackboard Inc for the services which they provide. (https://blackboard.coursesites.com/?new_loc=%2Fultra%2Fcourse.
In addition, the university also make payment in the region of £100000 to another company which provide Turnitin facilities (www.turnitinuk.com). Furthermore, each institution is required to make huge amount of further investment for providing the Information and Communication (ICT) services to their students, academics, and administration staff within the institutions.
Remote teaching
In remote teaching, face to face interactions is usually replaced with online lectures/seminars or alternative activities directed through Learning Management Systems (LMS), the system that was discussed earlier in this document. The administrators register all the students in various courses through LMS systems and the academics provide their lectures notes and other materials via LMS which will enable their students to access the teaching materials from anywhere.
Communication tools such as MS-Teams, Zoom or SKPYE are required for delivering lectures remotely. Microsoft provide an attractive licence agreement for their product including MS-Teams to the universities. Therefore, most institutions are using MS-Teams for their remote teaching and meetings. Another advantage of MS-Teams is the strong security features of this tool.
E-Learning and Afghanistan
E-learning is a new concept, and many people are unfamiliar with this terminology in Afghanistan. The main issues for launching eLearning in Afghanistan are as follows:
- The lack of proper IT infrastructure within the educational institutions.
- The lack of reliable high speed internet access and communication networks.
- The lack of suitably IT literate and experienced academics, admin staff and technicians.
- Intermittent electricity supply as pylons and electricity towers are blown up from time to time.
- The lack of strong commitment by academics in the institutions.
- All students may not have access to suitable devices to access online teaching materials.
- The Ministry of Higher education (MoHE) developed a system called HELMS for the whole country; however, the author has not tested the system but has received many complains.
Hence, the following recommendations are made:
- To make huge investment in IT infrastructure at universities
- Train the technicians and all academics to integrate ICT within the education practices.
- The deployment of large LMS systems such as Blackboard, Canvas seems impractical and less cost effective at present. Therefore, the authorities ought to consider cost effective solutions. The author will be happy to share his experience and recommendations to make some progress.