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E-learning Trends in 2021

Future of Learning Technology

By David KentPublished 2 years ago 10 min read
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E-learning Trends in 2021
Photo by Liam Charmer on Unsplash

Introduction

The massive changes that we experienced in society and people during the recent COVID-19 pandemic have also been reflected in our habits and ways of consuming educational and training material. Particularly, the drive for online learning and e-learning has been exponential, accelerating and strengthening a lean towards the digital realm.

According to the latest Global Market Insights studies updated after the pandemic, the market will exceed a whopping 1 trillion by 2027.

E-Learning Trends In 2021 & for 2022

E-Learning itself is already a trend and is in excellent health. In recent years it has gained momentum to become the most innovative field of education with the most flexibility to adapt to new technologies and has shown that it was fully prepared to face a pandemic. Therefore, it is not surprising that so many trends in e-Learning will emerge by 2022.

Although it is true that during 2021, we have seen that the focus of traditional education has been to include technology to develop the same learning processes as always. In 2022, we will see how the balance is reached between the use of technology and the digital transformation of education to achieve e-learning equilibrium.

On the other hand, this breeding ground has favoured the development of " ed-tech " and especially of start-ups that have focused on digitising all learning processes, favouring a rapid and natural change towards the real digital transformation of any institution educational.

The components of e-Learning can be classified into the following components:

Technology: refers to the hardware and software necessary to create and manage e-Learning, from an LMS (for example, Moodle) to software to edit a video.

Content: refers to the courses, programs, subjects and/or postgraduates created online and which are accessed by teachers and students to learn.

Service: consulting, student management, teacher training, etc.

Lesson 1: Functionality is Key to Keep Learners Engaged

Interest and motivation

Interest is usually considered a motivational variable with affective and cognitive components oriented to specific content. That is, you are interested in a specific topic, which you understand, which satisfies, and which prompts you to act. Therefore, interest is motivating. But it must be borne in mind that developing and strengthening interests requires a certain expectation of success. If a student considers that he is not competent to carry out a task, even if he considers it interesting, it is possible that he will not do it and that it will gradually cease to interest him. This comment highlights the importance of teachers considering not only the interests of students but also the difficulty of the tasks they are presented with.

Interest stimulates knowledge and encourages commitment to learning. In this way, the student feels more competent in this field (do not forget the initial competence just referred to), which improves their self-esteem and motivation to continue learning. In addition, the increase in interest and competition is normally accompanied by a satisfactory experience that we could call emotion. What are the differences between interest and motivation?

Motivation is a broader construct than interest and is not necessarily related to specific learning content. While interest is motivating, what is motivating is not always interesting.

Therefore, it is possible to learn without being interested, although the main motivating factor will be learned in a more continuous and satisfactory way.

Situational and personal interest

Scholars about interest in learning differentiate two types: situational and individual. The first involves attending to a phenomenon that appears sporadically and that causes us an affective impact—for example, being interested in a solar eclipse, without this implying continuing to search for information about the planets. On the other hand, individual interest is already a positive and continuous predisposition of a person towards certain topics: I am interested in astronomy, I look for information about it, I ask to be given a telescope, etc. It is easily perceived that situational interest can lead to the individual.

Interest to learn better

The most appropriate strategy to favour students' motivation before certain learning is to awaken or strengthen their interest in them since they will attend better, activate their cognitive processes, maintain their motivation, feel satisfied (or sometimes excited), and they will learn better. And they will even want to keep learning.

Interesting means making the task interesting

The student's interest in learning does not come exclusively from his personal disposition or because there is something in the environment that is very attractive. Interest is an interactive process between the person and their environment's physical, social or cultural conditions. Hence the importance of managing the learning content well to get the student interested: it is necessary to make the task interesting, although it is also necessary that there is a certain initial predisposition of the student so that he begins to be interested in it.

Lesson 2: Building an Optimized Learning Experience Will Be Your Top Priority

The conservative and uniform approach that says that to learn, the same model works for everyone does not contemplate an essential element: personalisation. The ICT and e-learning allow you to customise and transform teaching learners into active protagonists of their own learning, promoting the appropriation of technology as a cognitive, social and communication tool.

Custom Goals

As with all courses, training, or learning experiences, you need to identify what the student wants to accomplish. It is important to make a list of the goals you want to achieve in order to design an appropriate learning path.

Lower attrition rates

Personalised Learning Paths help reduce attrition rates in several ways. One of the main ways is that they help increase the level of student engagement with the learning material. When the person is more involved in the learning process, they are less likely to drop out of the course as they are not reviewing material they already know, which can be boring. The time savings associated with personalised learning also help reduce dropout rates.

Split content

Studying hundreds of pages or staying in a classroom for two or three hours are teaching models that are falling into disuse. A personalised learning route allows the fragmentation of the content into more manageable and meaningful sizes. This facilitates the retention of information by students, allows them to take advantage of their periods of maximum attention and passage, mixes different types of content such as audio, text, presentations and videos.

Understand your students

It is important to understand that all students learn differently, and each will have a different learning path. Therefore, it is crucial to gather information about your students, their backgrounds, and their learning preferences. With this information, it's possible to create routes learning and segmented for different groups of students.

Promote a modern learning culture with increased motivation

Distant or remote learning forces the student to transform their learning culture, thus embarking on a multifaceted and transformative journey. Personalised learning means that each student is shown that their individual learning needs are important.

Lesson 3: Designing for Mobile First is a Must in the Near Future

Mobile learning is a step beyond eLearning that is increasingly being introduced among current online training modalities offering augmented benefits with the use of mobile technology.

The fusion of mobile technology with eLearning offers three powerful benefits:

• Flexibility in time, space and place of learning.

• Strengthening of interaction and participation during the teaching-learning process.

• Development of communication in the educational process.

To design courses with mobile-friendliness in mind: requires being way more minimalist, imagining how people use their devices and focusing on a granular design to offer an exceptional user experience, both cognitively and graphically.

The following points are crucial to facilitate the transmission of knowledge while creating an intuitive learning environment to meet the expectations of modern learners.

Keep Navigation Simple

The mobile learning material should offer an interface that is easy to navigate and fully operable within the small operating space.

Instructional designers must consider the screen size and that learners could navigate with the precision of a finger rather than a mouse. So, using concise, clear, and consistent navigation prompts across all screen sizes is essential. There isn't much space for extra things; therefore, prioritise what really matters and include that in a clear format.

Focus on Low Information Density

The information density for mobile learning is lower, and the content should be prepared for shorter attention span, memory and battery limitations of mobile devices.

In general, you should aim to create chunks of information that take no more than five minutes to process, which each of these sections should be available as a separate module allowing students to view the course in a non-linear way and access any specific information when they need it.

So, when developing mobile-friendly courses, think small. Mobile learners are looking for timely and clear content, so it is important to remove anything that is not necessary.

Design for Visual Clarity

Let the learners find every little bit of information they need quickly. Use headings, checklists of bullets to make context clearer and more accurate. And paragraphs should be chopped into easy-to-read lists.

Mobile learning courses should be designed considering the mobility of the students to allow them to access the material in any situation, even when they are outdoors, using public transport, experiencing variations in noise and light levels or receiving frequent interruptions.

The instructional designer should use a combination of titles, symbols, icons, and colours to facilitate the learning process, with a simple and clear language in large fonts to make content easier to absorb on a small screen.

Make course content easy to find

The best feature that learning materials can have on a mobile device is that the information is easily accessible and easy to find. Instructional designers can increase the likelihood that students will find modules by using obvious titles that students can read quickly, combined with an easy-to-use index and menu.

Minimise scrolling time

To avoid unnecessary scrolling, content should extend no more than three scroll lengths on an average size mobile device. If necessary, fragment your content into different screens that only occupy half of the screen, with a clear "next" button, so that students do not have to go too far.

All secondary content, including optional navigation controls, links that are not relevant to the information displayed, copyright notices, and other legal information, should remain at the bottom of the screen to prevent students from being distracted and lost.

Among these considerations, there are several others as well for mobile-friendly eLearning material development. A designer, in general, must consider when and where the learners will use the materials, how to ensure a satisfying experience, and how easy is it for users to study the information.

How Will New Technologies further Improve Learning Systems?

Not long ago, having your own computer or mobile was almost impossible while paying hefty mobile network charges were also the norm, but over time technology has evolved, and these tools are easily available.

New technologies in education provide advantages such as:

Increased motivation. Any student attending school today are probably digital natives, using technology in everything of their lives. If you want to connect with this digital generation, you must use new technologies that turn each subject into attractive and attention-grabbing. This will improve performance and increase motivation.

More interaction. Technology favours the interaction of students with each other and with teachers. This means that they can contribute opinions, express themselves more easily and contribute their point of view.

Teamwork. New technologies in education favour teamwork to promote values such as cooperation, solidarity, respect, etc.

Increased creativity. New technologies in education help students to activate their innate imagination and create new and surprising things.

Two-way communication. The means of communication that allow the use of new technologies favours two-way communication. That is, it is no longer about a teacher who teaches his students that he listens in silence. It is about mutual learning in which communication is more fluid.

Among its advantages we can point out:

• Substantial savings

• Empowerment of human talent

• The semiotics of the medium helps the student and teacher in their digital transformation

• Triple-A Access: (Anywhere, Anyplace and Anytime)

• It can be adapted to the needs

• Less impact on the environment

Conclusion

No matter wherever you are, everyone can certainly benefit from eLearning. The trends are shifting rapidly and seeping deeper into our education, bringing a renewed teaching and learning process. Educators need to understand to utilise modern tools and ways to increase accessibility and convenience of education while adapting to changing behaviours and learners' desires.

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