Is Digital Learning The Future?
With the rise of digital in all areas of our lives, we are seeing an increase in the use of digital services in learning. According to Solutionpath, experts in digital learning, “It is now widely recognized by institutions that digitalization in education is paramount to providing positive learning experiences and student choice, driving future innovation in practice and delivery and, of course, survival in the new digital world as access to education becomes a global service.”
There are several reasons why digital learning is both beneficial to students and educational institutions. Here are the top 10 of them:
1. Full-Time Access To Materials
One of the most important benefits of using digital learning is that materials are always available to students—24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This gives students complete flexibility over when and where they study, enabling them to take control over the best times to study for themselves as well as how much, and access to a global community.
2. Facilitates Collaboration
Working along with others is an important part of the working life in many businesses in 2022. Education can also benefit from digital learning as a collaboration tool, by bringing people together through video conferencing, enabling students and teachers to use shared documents, or simply by helping to prepare students for the world of work.
3. More Resources
Resources such as recorded lectures or additional reading can be easily shared, giving students the opportunity to maximize their learning, and to go over subjects that they find more challenging as well as get extra information relating to subjects that they wish to understand better.
4. Better Engagement
Digital analysis can help educational institutions to get a better understanding of the engagement of their students with specific parts of their courses, or the institution as a whole. This means that educational institutions can quickly pick up on it if a student is becoming disengaged, struggling with the course, or is ill, and have the tools to remedy the situation more efficiently.
5. Personalized Learning
Digital learning can help enable personalized learning, in that everybody has specific techniques and learning methods that suit them. Digital learning can help students and teachers to get a better understanding of the most effective teaching methods for them, helping the delivery of teaching and learning to be more effective.
6. Facilitates New Digital Learning Strategies
In addition to the existing learning strategies that are employed by educational institutions, there is increasing evidence that learning strategies such as microlearning [1] and gamification [2] are very effective as teaching methods. These "new" ideas are given a face-lift by the incorporation of digital technology into education.
7. Preparation for Work
In the workplace in 2022 and beyond, we are continually having to learn and adapt to new technology. The incorporation of digital learning and teaching, as well as engagement methods, can be a great way to prepare students for working life, both in the technology that they are using and also in the ability to learn how to use new digital tools.
8. Building Peer Communities
Younger people especially often feel more comfortable sharing with their peers online, rather than face-to-face. Whether it is simply through community chat groups or a more structured learning environment, technology can be an excellent way to build communities among students as well as with their teachers, providing support and benefits to everyone. This can be used to connect students from around the world, without the need for them to be confined to the same room.
9. Boosts Accountability
One of the greatest benefits of digital learning is that it can help to enhance student accountability. By giving students more control over their own education, what they are studying, and how they are studying it, they will also have more accountability over their progress. Although this should not mean that the educational institution leaves the responsibility solely with the student, it does mean that the student can have a degree of ownership over their education.
10. Student Progress Tracking
Technology gives educational institutions the ability to track student progress closely. This can include everything from examination results to individual assessments and attendance records. This enables teachers to gain a good understanding of patterns and areas for teaching and learning improvement at any time.
References:
[1] Microlearning 101: An Evolving eLearning Trend
[2] Key Differences Between Game-Based Learning And eLearning Gamification
