E-Learning

eLearning is a term used to describe learning done at a computer, usually connected to a network. eLearning provides the student or learner with information that can be accessed in a setting free from time and place constraints.


Here is some of the effectiveness of eLearning:
Cost savings due to elimination of travel expenses
Improve collaboration and interactivity among students
eLearning is less intimidating than real life courses taught by instructors
Students are able to go through materials at his own pace
Able to access information timely


However, there are also some disadvantages of eLearning such as:
Lack of interaction in real life
Students who do not have self discipline will not study daily
Students will have the tendency to do their work at the eleventh hour
Students will not have a chance to do project work
When faced with a problem, students need to email their instructors to seek help
Certain concepts needs real life experiment to be taught well and fully understood


Personal experience:
Currently, I am attending NTR109 course. NTR109 is an e-Learning course whereby this Web class is a combination of students from Buffalo, NY and students from Singapore Institute of Management in Singapore. Students will have a chance to interact during article discussions and general discussion forums. Students were told to constantly check our email as this is the only way besides Ublearns that we are able to communicate. Checking email frequently also help us know the latest important announcement from our instructor. There are assignments posted up in ublearns and students need to login to complete our work within a certain time frame. Failure to do so will result in loss of marks. Personally, I find eLearning less fun as compared to traditional way of learning in class. eLearning really need a lot of discipline on the students part so that they can excel in their studies. The only visible thing I like about elearning is the fact that we can study at our own time and there is no need for us to wake up so early in the morning.

Microsoft surface technology:

Learning Content Development System is a free software from Microsoft that let you create and publish e-learning courses. You can include software simulations, interactive Flash content (such as Drag and Drop, tile puzzle game, etc.) and the regular true-false / multiple choice style questions in your e-learning content. Once you are done authoring the course, it can preview in the web browser and you may then publish it as a SCORM 1.2 Package for hosting in any Learning Management System.

Future classroom & success rate of eLearning


In my opinion, I think the future classrooms will have computers or laptops for each and every individual student. Nanyang Primary School is now trying out the ipad studying for certain classes of students and students were provided with an ipad each. In Nanyang Polytechnic, students’ timetable includes eLearning every week. Lecturers do not teach during eLearning week and students have to gather at computer labs to finish their worksheets after reading what was posted online. I guess in the near future, eLearning will become more and more popular. However, given the fact that traditional learning method is still more beneficial, I do not foresee a future where traditional learning will be replaced by eLearning.

The TEN reasons

E-commerce provides many new ways for business and consumers to communicate and conduct business. However, there are a number of reasons for the success and failures of e-commerce.

Why is e-commerce so successful?

Being able to conduct business 24x7x365. Time restrictions are nonexistent. Even on holidays or weekends, one can still purchase their products online.

Access the global market place. The internet enables a business concern or individual to reach the global market. The global opportunity via traditional communication is incomparable with the one via internet because users are not charged with communicating overseas.

Opportunity to look for cheaper products. E-commerce gives customers the opportunity to compare the pricing of the products with other sellers. Customers can avoid buying from sellers who intentionally sell their products at a higher price.

Research and feedback is possible. Customers are able to do a research on the products that they are buying. They can also give feedbacks on the products that they bought.

Products are sold at cheaper price. Direct cost-of-sale is lower than traditional means because there is no human interaction during online purchases.

Money saver. It is the cheapest means of doing a business. From the seller’s point of view, E-commerce helps to cut down the cost of marketing the product. Sellers can setup websites or email their loyal customers on existing or new products sold.

Customers’ needs and behavior. Sellers will be able to know the needs and wants of the customers by keeping track on the websites that they browsed. In that way, sellers can look out for products that have good responses from the customers. By doing so, they can bring in more of such products.

Compare and contrast. Customers can easily compare different products at the same time without having to travel from one place to another. This helps to save a lot of time.

Allowing self service at own time. Customers can look for products any time during the entire day when they are free, even as late as midnight. They are not obliged to visit the physical shops if they are too busy with their work. Adults with children can also shop for products online peacefully instead of having to worry about having to bring their young children out.

Time saved. Delivery time and cost can be saved by buyers when they purchase digital goods and services such as e-books and games. Buyers do not have to wait for the physical goods to be delivered to their home.

The possible reasons for the failures of E-commerce

Lack of trust. Internet has still not touched the lives of a great number of people. Many people still do not like the idea of using internet for financial transaction.

Perishable goods. Not suitable for perishable commodities like food items. Though refrigerated transports can be used, goods sold online are usually durable and non-perishable.

Faulty goods. It can be troublesome to return or refund products that are faulty and there are many things to consider when you return it. Who is going to pay the return postage as well as will the refund be paid are two major problems that will arise.

Fraud sites. Anyone can start a business easily. Some may be bad sites which scam customers’ money.

Hackers everywhere. Many hackers always look for opportunities to attack e-commerce site, service and payment gateways.

Product quality. There is no guarantee on product quality because you can only see the product base on the pictures uploaded online. You will not be able to feel it before buying. Moreover, pictures and physical object may be quite different.

Poor laws. Cyber laws are not properly enacted and the existing ones are not clearly defined. Thus, nobody really knows the rules of starting a business online are.

Search engine. In a traditional store, the location of your store will not change unless you move away. However, the location of your business online will not always be the same. It depends on the search engine’s search results.

Huge transactions. The number of transactions allowed for each customers vary from websites to websites. However, many websites allow only one transaction at a time. If one intends to buy many of the same products, he would have to make many transactions.

Data entry errors. This is one of the major drawbacks of e-commerce. If the seller type in the wrong price on the website, he will have to face the consequences of wiping out the profit of all the goods sold.

Friendster VS Facebook

I believe most if not all of us heard of this social networking site call “FACEBOOK!” This social networking site was first launched in February 2004. Till date, it has more than 600million active users! What exactly are the things we can do in FACEBOOK that resulted in such a great response from people all over the world?! Let's take a look at why FACEBOOK is so successful…

You are able to update your status on your current thought or anything that comes to your mind that you would like to share with all your friends in FACEBOOK.

After clicking SHARE, it will appear on your wall and your friends will be able to start commenting on your status.

You can also go to your friend's FACEBOOK page and post anything on their wall to let them know you miss them or simply just anything that comes to your mind.

Facebook also has plenty of games for users to play during their free time. Many people find the games addictive because just like this bejeweled bliz, everyone is trying to hit their highest score such that they will be the top in his/her friend lists. It is always fun to be able to compete with one another thus it becomes addictive!

FACEBOOK also allows us to upload pictures as well as allowing others to tag you in photos where you are present. The ones circled in red are albums created by ourselves while the one circled in green are pictures that your friends tagged you in. If you think those pictures tagged by your friends are ugly, you can also untag yourself and it will not show on your photo pages anymore.

You can also send private message to your friends. A birthday message when you do not have their mobile number is as sweet as sending them an sms via a handphone! Whoever who receives the note from your friend can also reply and response to it.

If you happened to be surfing youtube and found a song that you love and would like to share with your friends, what can you do? You can click on the SHARE button shown above and share it with your loved ones in FACEBOOK too!

After clicking SHARE, it will then appear on your wall where friends and family could simply click on it to listen or to view the videos. They can also comment or like the links that you shared.


How about business opportunities?

People also create FACEBOOK account to promote their blogshops.

There are also links at the right side of the page to show us certain upcoming events that we could anticipate for.

Not only those shown above, one can also use the instant chat in FACEBOOK just like using an msn chat with their friends. There are just too many other interesting stuffs that one can do with FACEBOOK and this is why it has become so popular till date!

How great and awesome is FACEBOOK isn't it?

FRIENDSTER

Ever heard of the social networking site call FRIENDSTER? FRIENDSTER was founded during 2002 and it has over 115million registered users up till date with over 19millions visitors each month. Before the birth of FACEBOOK, FRIENDSTER used to be one of the most popular social networking sites where people come together reunite with their long lost friends. Over the years, FRIENDSTER had improved greatly even though there was a sudden drop in the number of people using it since the birth of FACEBOOK. Let's take a look at some of the things we can do in FRIENDSTER as well as the similarities and differences between the FACEBOOK and the FRIENDSTER.

FRIENDSTER, just like facebook, allows users to post comments on their friends' pages. However, there is no way one can comment on each other's postings unless they create and post a new comment on their friend's page. In that way, things will get messy and everyone will be confused on whose postings are replying to which postings.





FRIENDSTER also allows users to upload photos. In the past, users were not able to post comments but over the years, new amendments were made and now, we are able to do so!

Games from FRIENDSTER and facebook indeed defers. Personally, I think the games in facebook are more enticing and addictive as compare to Friendster's. Just like comments for photographs, in the past, friendster does not have games for users to play too!

As mentioned earlier, facebook allows users to share songs from youtube. However, friendster does not support this function. 

The difference between facebook and friendster could be seen above. Even though they are quite similar in many ways, they differ in many ways too! The reason why many people shifted from facebook to friendster is solely for the fact that facebook indeed offer much more varieties of interesting tools that captures the  heart of users. Friendster on the other hand has been trying to improve over the years however, there are still many areas that were not provided such as not allowing users to share almost everything possible from the world wide web, not being able for users to comment on people's postings as well as not allowing users to have an instant messenger where they can chat with their friends. Their games do not look as interesting too!

Business

I believe certain social networking sites are useful for business opportunities and facebook is definitely one of them, for now. How do we determine if they are useful? More and more people are migrating into the social networking sites during the past few years till date. It has become one's habit(to most of us) to click on facebook daily to check on our friend's current activities, to play games or even just to load facebook for the sake of loading it because it has become part of our lives.

Since many people are in social networking sites these days, we can be sure to say that business opportunities will be more skewed towards the positive side rather than the negative side. To have a good business, the traffic for the social networking site must be high so that even if not everyone hears about such business, at least 10% of the users will come to know about it and hopefully 1% of it will buy the products. If in the first place the traffic for the site is low, we can predict that the business will not do well either. Therefore, it is very important for investors to choose the right social networking sites to invest in.

On the other hand, I feel that social networking sites are hard to last long because new social networking sites will be created and launched. If the current ones are not as good as the new ones, they will very soon be neglected and people will all flock over to the new ones instead. In that way, business will surely suffer. Therefore, I conclude that it is fine to start a business that is not permanent on social networking sites. Such examples are the different blogshops. Traditional ways of advertising via brochure, television programmes, cinema advertisements, magazines as well as newspapers are still the most secure business strategy.