E-learning and today's students.

[PopeyeFAFL]

Just a question, like this.Do you think that if someone set-up a paid e-learning/web based courses/tutorial on Math's and Physics related subjects, this could be a viable business case, or ....Do you think that today's students who required help in high school Math's will not learn any better doing self-train tutorial since they don't learn in normal school environment.In other words, they need the one-on-one (face to face, role model) teaching?Thanks in advance.P.S.: If someone here has already mounted such a web-based tutorial, what kind of software (HTML?, Java?) is used? and will these tutorials will resist the test of time (or you need to maintain it, constantly).

[jwalcik]

I actually know someone who has a series of math and science tutoring DVDs. To take the same concept and move it online would have various challenges, all of which would depend on what degree of interactivity you wanted to have. If you want to have a variety of mouse interactions with your teaching material (click and drag, drag and drop, etc), you're going to have to go flash or do some wackiness with Java. If you just want to have text-based, fill in the blanks kind of stuff, you could use any scripting language out there (PHP, Perl, Python, ASP .Net, etc) to process form submissions.Those are pretty much your two extremes. There are options in the middle if you have the know-how to write the "glue" to tie different technologies together. For example, working outside of Generator and it's associated technologies, you can use simple URL-encoded query strings to send POST data into a flash move. The idea is definitely viable. The question is, how much would it cost you to get it off the ground, and whether or not you could recoup those costs in an appropriate time frame.

[northvibe]

with younger people being more internet minded it could work for a certain market. BUT to me kids now days hate studying learning (in general). IMO I hated text books or anything like that to learn because I liked asking questions and having things explained, if it was just a video or paragraph i couldnt do that. Specially for physics 1 and 2...holy crap I had to have a human prof as that class was hard.An electronic tutor or help for extra problems may be more viable. something to help repetitive learning (the style i had to use to remember things ) but i dont think it could replace a professor

[PopeyeFAFL]

Quote »with younger people being more internet minded it could work for a certain market. BUT to me kids now days hate studying learning (in general). IMO I hated text books or anything like that to learn because I liked asking questions and having things explained, if it was just a video or paragraph i couldnt do that. Specially for physics 1 and 2...holy crap I had to have a human prof as that class was hard.An electronic tutor or help for extra problems may be more viable. something to help repetitive learning (the style i had to use to remember things ) but i dont think it could replace a professorI think like you, a fair group of young peoples are lazy for study.Humans (contrary to animals) are pretty dumb, they need a lot of teaching (and lot of repetition and overlap) to grasp anything (a small cat knows anything they need to know from the contact of the mother cat).Now if electronic teaching was super efficient, we would only have to sat people in front of zillion of documentary (most of everything we need to know is recorded somewhere), but it does not work like that.

[zionzr2]

This certainly sounds like a viable business idea.Some of the training programs I have had in the retail market were all Web based E-Learning. These covered all aspects of the sales process as well as product kwoeldge for the company I worked for. There is no reason I can see why this could not be adpated into a system for teaching k-12 students or even beyond and/or re-inforce whats tought by traditional schooling methods.I'm sure there would have to be a good deal to maintain it. You may approach some place that implemnt these sorts of training to get an idea of what it takes to create and maintain them.I dont think that E-learning will ever 100% replace face-to-face learning and instruction, but it is a great tool for learning and re-inforcing traditional methods. Also if started early with people as has already happened in schools, E-learning provides additional learning of computers as a side benefit to the material they are actually learning.