How E-Learning Is Changing Education

How E-learning Courses in Ireland are changing the face of education

For many of us, education is deeply rooted in being social: being around other people as part of a community. At school, it’s how most of us learned. Even if you left school a long time ago, the chances are when you plan to learn a new professional skill, your first thought will be to look for a face-to-face group course, where there’ll be other people in the same physical space. But is this still the best way? E-learning is changing education for the better, and we’ll argue in this article, that e-learning is moving us closer to an optimal way of learning with fewer and fewer of the traditional drawbacks.

We take a look at how e-learning is changing education, and why it might be a great time to make the transition. Here are five reasons why your next professional course in Ireland may benefit you more if it’s an e-learning course. 

E-learning is perfect for our social needs

In Galway, like every part of Ireland, we like nothing better than to get together, talk and laugh. Unlike life as schoolkids, one of the huge advantages of any kind of professional training is that as you mature and specialise, you’re increasingly likely to be hanging out with like-minded individuals, with similar goals and objectives. There’s less disruption than in school days and much more opportunity to learn from each other, from our various corporate experiences and pooled knowledge. Until recently, we always thought that getting together had to mean you were in the same geographical place. The Covid-19 crisis has forced us to consider the alternative of remote training, and we think it’s a particularly viable option.

Good quality e-learning creates plenty of space for us to tell our stories, compare notes, and benefit not only from brilliant tutors but also productive peer learning. In this way courses in Ireland online are no different from when we’re sitting in the same room. Feedback from our students suggests that in some cases, the sense of professional community and dialogue created via online courses may be superior. 

E-learning fits our lifestyle better

Even before Coronavirus closed down other options, e-learning was becoming more appropriate to our modern way of life.

You might think that Instagram, IGTV and Tik-Tok have shortened our attention spans down to a couple of seconds per input, but we were heading there anyway. One great thing about consuming information digitally, whether for work, learning or pure amusement, is that it’s on your terms. If you’re bored with a lesson, lecture, or how-to video, or if you need to pause a moment to make a cuppa, or it’s just not going in, and you need to listen again, and again, then with e-learning, it’s an option.

Education where everyone is expected to hit that moment of understanding at the same point before moving from lecture to seminar to homework relies on everyone grasping the essence of the lesson at the same point in time. In reality, that’s rarely the case. E-learning can make the educational content asynchronous, meaning you take it in on your terms, repeat as you like until you’re good and ready to move on.

E-learning can cater to different learning styles

E-learning is also changing education for the better by ensuring more people can succeed. Some of us learn better when someone’s telling us, and we hear it, some of us need to read it for ourselves. Sometimes a diagram will clinch it, for others, it will take a fully immersive audiovisual experience. You could describe a scene verbally, and a room full of students will have a different mental picture. Show everyone the same image, and we’re all on the same page. 

Individual learning styles have always varied. In the past, that meant, depending on the teaching style of the person at the front of the room, some students would benefit, and others would be held back. With rich digital media served via smart online learning platforms, that never need be the case again. 

Here at Galway Business School, we pride ourselves on a learning platform we’ve been perfecting for years, and it integrates completely with our live sessions to make sure you can always learn in a way that suits you best. 

You can find our more about the e-learning platform we use at GBS here. 

E-learning emulates the world of business and builds a broader business network

Business is a truly international game, and you just don’t know where your next useful contact is going to come from. Galway, is a fine city with a great business community, but an e-learning course or component will help you to connect with course companions from all around Ireland, the rest of Europe, and beyond.

In part thanks to the Coronavirus, the business world has taken a giant leap into online conferencing, remote meetings, home working and much more of a task-based way of working. Suddenly people aren’t being judged on their physical presence in the office, but more by the quality of their output. E-learning is no different, and given that it looks like many organisations are going to enjoy the cost-saving of having you work from home when you want, e-learning has suddenly dropped into sync with the world of work.  

Wearing your jim-jams could help you learn more

If you are already working, but have been forced to work from home, you could be experiencing a world of different emotions from caged animal to holiday hedonist.

When it comes to face-to-face learning, especially the kind of part-time and evening business courses we deliver, there is a likelihood that you’ve just come in from work. That could mean you’ve not had time to change yet, your work shoes are still killing your feet, you’ve had to leg it from work to the business school, and you’re a bit hot and bothered.

Cut to the vision of e-learning, and it’s a very different proposition. Sure, you might need to attend the live group session at the same time, but you can be sitting in your comfortable chair, in your pyjamas bottoms with a beverage of choice to hand.

 Being physically and mentally relaxed before class is known to significantly increase your ability to take in new things, be more reflective, and communicate more freely with other people. There is also a lot of evidence to show that you retain new information a lot better with a calm mind.

About Galway Business School

Whether you’re looking for an undergraduate business course, a part-time professional development based evening course, or a fresh start in a new discipline, we think e-learning is a viable solution. We’re proud of some of the approaches we’ve taken here at Galway Business School to not only guarantee an equivalent set of learning outcomes, but in many ways to provide a learning experience which is more enjoyable, more flexible and fits our busy lives better.