By Dr. R. Srinivasan, CTO, iCMG, Bangalore

Continuing my earlier article on "Why e-Learning?", I would like to bring in some more references to substantiate the projection on the future of e-Learning. John Chambers , CEO CISCO Systems, predicted, in his address in COMDEX 1999, "the next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail look like a rounding error". The e-learning wave has already started, particularly in a country like United States. According to Dr. Darab Unwalla of Florida Atalantic University, India is not far behind and he ascertains, "when things happen in India, they happen in an epidemic manner" (Ref. TOI, March 19, 2001). e-Learning is a typical example of self-learning; however self-learning is not new. It is said that self-help books grew at 21% in a period of five years in 1993-97; but learning through the net, will provide more facilities than this and so it is predicted that by 2003, corporate training , in particular, in USA will expand to $62.5 billion with $15 billion in outsourced training. This prediction is based on many benefits of e-Learning, as described under the article on "Facts, Figures and Forces behind e-Learning" by e-Learnframe, viz., Internet Technology revolutionizes education yielding motivated, skilled and loyal knowledge workers who make use of this anywhere, anytime self-paced learning. E-Learning is also cost effective, facilitates higher retention of contents through personalized learning and above all Online learning is less intimidating than instructor-led courses. The spectrum of courses envisaged under e-learning are going to be of many folds, all the way from catering to students of high schools to the degree courses in science and engineering and then to the employees of corporate sectors. Because of the infrastructure availability of real audio and video in Internet, even the courses which were mainly instructor-lead like communication skills, honing of Business and Management skills, Time Management, Personality Development, etc. are also being planned to be available for self-learning.

However any new technology being brought to be complementary to the existing one will not be able to see the light of the day unless it becomes user friendly. So, whatever may be the type of the course, the need is to have some of kind of standard or uniformity. Simply porting the textual material of a course on the net will not be anyway different from a physical book; in fact reading a book is easier than reading pages on the screens which will not only be time consuming but also strenuous. Whatever may be the course, it should be developed under a standard framework. Moreover it should be ensured that the courses developed by various vendors are "interoperable". Efforts are being made to bring out standards in e-Learning such as IMS initiative from Educause, IEEE Learning Standards Technology Committee and the project from World Association for Online Education.