Does Supply Always Come on the Heels of Demand? Matches and Mismatches in E-learning
25 October 2017
To cite this article: Sridharan, B., Deng, H., & Kinshuk. (2014). Does supply always come on the heels of demand? Matches and mismatches in e-learning. Issues in Educational Research. Issues in Educational Research, 24(3), 260-280. Retrieved from http://www.iier.org.au/iier24/sridharan.html
This paper highlights the need for understanding and aligning preferences of learners with respect to pedagogies, technologies, learning resources and access to learning resources to support the e-learning ecosystem. The findings show that the supply does not always follow on the heels of the demand due to the differences in perceptions and the challenges to fulfilling the demand. In other words, this articles indicates a clear disjunction between what students want and what teachers provide in some key areas.
The findings suggest that major differences between the perceptions of e-learning providers and e-learners exist on two dimensions: pedagogies and management of learning resources. While the use of manifold pedagogies is considered to be critical by e-learning providers, the same is not true of e-learners. The results also indicate the management of learning resources is considered critical by e-learners to support easy and fast access to relevant learning resources. However, teachers feel this is not importance or feasible due to multiplicity of factors including lack of learning management support and other constraints of time and effort required in creating a reusable learning object repository. In regard to technologies and learning resources, the findings indicate synergy between e-learners’ and e-learning providers’ perceptions for sustainable e-learning. However, existence of a gap between idealism and reality is revealed as most of the dimensions perceived as critical are not being implemented.
Many reasons can be attributed to the philosophical differences between e-learning providers and e-learners on the influence of the management of learning resources and metadata ontologies in enhancing e-learning effectiveness. For example, e-learning providers may not pay much attention to the management of learning resources due to lack of time and the huge amount of effort required to manage of learning resources and create of metadata ontologies. There may be resistance to share resources, copyright issues, quality, granularity, version control and validation of learning resources and metadata ontologies. In contrast, quick accessibility to relevant and authentic resources is critical for e-learners’ knowledge acquisition.
This highlights the need for developing more aligned policy measures to unify the critical e-learning dimensions and to eliminate the barriers for sustainable e-learning. The detailed findings may assist e-learning providers to implement policy measures which better align the demand with the supply to enhance e-learning effectiveness. Specific measures include providing capacity building sessions to educate academic staff about the effective use and alignment of all four critical dimensions, embedding powerful plug-in technologies to overcome the inherent limitations of LMS, offering incentives for proactive and innovative initiatives of academic staff, and adopting a balanced approach to innovative teaching and the expectation for quality research.
