E-learning has become ingrained in conversations that border around learning, however, how much and how effectively e-learning is practiced and understood is an issue that needs further investigation. This paper will first provide an overview of elearning practices in Malaysia followed by detailed findings of e-learning practices at Open University Malaysia. Findings of a survey done on 26 Malaysian organizations show that only 4% truly practice some form of e-learning. Nevertheless most participants in the survey noted that e-learning will be the preferred choice in time to come. The survey also shows that most organizations are still very comfortable with a blended style of learning or training. Findings of a research conducted at Open University Malaysia (OUM) shows that as a new player in e-learning initiatives, the OUM has achieved much especially in ensuring that its over 30,000 students are practicing some form of e-learning. At OUM, although self-managed and face-to-face learning are the preferred choices, much effort and resources are pumped into elearning in ensuring that OUM has the right mix for its blended mode. The paper will present a report on findings of e-learning and explicate issues within to determine how e-learning efforts can be further refined to support the overall blended pedagogy practiced at OUM.

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Web-based distance learning is hampered in many cases by a failure to deliver material in a manner consistent with the ways in which students learn and instructors teach best in traditional environments (Samorski, 2002). Excellent teachers are successful because of the ways in which they mediate content and place the content within the context of the subject matter. It is not the specific content or images the successful teacher presents, but rather the manner in which they are presented and framed within the scope of the topic area. Excellent teachers teach by presenting the content and then providing the students with substantive opportunities to apply the content to real-world problems in an effort to promote critical thinking on the part of the student. This is a highly interactive process with much information being transmitted between the student and the instructor. The interchange between the instructor and the student helps the student build a knowledge base with the assistance of the instructor’s experience and expertise in the topic area. The exact nature of the interchange is not predetermined and depends to a great extent on the creativity and breadth of experience of the instructor. The successful instructor adjusts his or her interaction with the students to the learning styles best suited to them. How do we provide the learner with this important component of traditional classroom education in asynchronous distance education or technology-mediated traditional classes? Web-based instruction is rapidly becoming the preferred mode of distance education, and we must adapt our instructional interaction styles to this medium. Our students now expect more interactive and immersive materials in Web-based learning than that typically provided in the traditional classroom or correspondence distance education (Samoriski, 2002).

ABSTRACT

The interactive, multimedia learning object has become an important part of high quality online education. The cost of producing such learning objects can be prohibitive. Re-purposeable learning objects made with learning object templates allow instructors with little or no programming experience to produce highly interactive and immersive learning objects. These learning object templates are based on key styles of teaching and learning and can be used to create and customize new learning objects within those styles, without creating new source code. The templates allow instructors to create learning objects simply by inserting text, and media (images, movies, etc.) because they closely mimic specific teaching strategies.