E-LEARNING

Distance Education is an innovative development in education that uses technology to facilitate learning without the limitations of time or place.

The great advantage of distance education is that it is an important tool for life–long education: it gives students flexibility to achieve an appropriate balance of work, social obligations, and educational commitments.

Mission

• To develop and provide responsive, high-quality and economical on-line degree and non-degree programs in diverse fields to national and international learners.
• To provide educational and training opportunities to busy professionals,women, adults, the visually impaired or blind people, and the less privileged segments of society
• To assis in qualifying the human resources required for the implementation of the national, regional, and international plans of developments
• To Develop learning approaches and modules adaptable to learning styles, and life cycle needs.

Information Technology Support

Effective IT services are essential for distance learning students to communicate with their course tutors, interact with course servers, or consult the electronic library. So the Deanship of Distance Learning provides an appropriate technical infrastructure which comprises instrumentation, communication networking facilities, High efficiency quality servers, internet high-speed line, And a portal and web-site. Basically, the following are Made available:

• Adequate computer laboratories and electronic Simulators for practical and virtual experiments appropriate to the courses offered.
• Adequate number of servers of varying specifications which, together with die computer laboratories, are"" networked using fiber optics and UTP cabling.
• Service center to support the production of teaching audio-visual aids. instruments available include digital cameras, tapes, CDs, scanners, multimedia and software.
• A platform and web-site that form an integrated learning environment with on-line multilingual (Arabic and English) service to display regulations and all inquiries about acadeniic affairs, and to create a virtual electronic community to ensure interaction among
• Communication channels such as E-mail; voice chat, bulletin boards,. forums and, discussion groups, net meetings and video conferencing rooms, E-Academic advising an~ counseling, help desk and FAQ services, search engine, E-tuition and fees payment services, and a learning management system.
• Adequate security systems management, including anti viruses, firewall, authorization and authentication, encryption and decryption, and obscene censorship
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Student Services

• Student entrance and admission criteria and policies that adequately and accurately represent the on-line transfer credits, examinations evaluation, probation, termination, withdrawal, postponement, degree completion requirements, and full description of all curricular offerings.
• Electronic access to a wide range of learning resources and databases. The traditional and electronic libraries of the university, as well as CDs, will facilitate access to general and essential references needed for each discipline offered.
• Adequate access to a range of appropriate student services, academic advising, delivery of course materials, as well as placement and counseling.
• Adequate means for seeing into student complaints
• Subscription in international electronic database make sure learners have full on-line access to search for information

Preface

The E-Learning project encompasses and integrates the various universally used components of E-Learning using multimedia as a means of delivering education and provides a comprehensive solution towards effective learning. The E-Learning Project which is formulated by the E-Learning Committee has been classified into three phases namely – Initial Pilot phase, the Expansion phase and then the Online Curriculum phase. This project which is a direct offshoot of the E-Learning Committee also shelters small attached projects which will be discussed in the following sections.  We can say that the Online Curriculum is nothing but an e-version of the medical curriculum that needs to be contributed by all departments pertaining to the College of Medicine. This contribution is then reflected online for designing and constructing the content.

Introduction

The purpose of the E-Learning Project, as formulated by the E-Learning Committee, College of Medicine, King Saud University, is to enhance the educational methods available to faculty and students of the college as per international standards by renovating the educational technologies available and to encapsulate the various technologies available to make education easier and interesting for the students. The renovated educational methods help to maintain clarity, vision and objectives in a pre-structured format of delivering education that can simplify or rather make education as a protocol equipped with boosters to optimize the goals achieved and to create the highest levels of competencies possible.

For the above mentioned goals, the E-Learning committee started off by focusing on the various solutions necessary towards improving the quality of students and how these solutions can be represented technologically. For understanding the approach, it is better to have an insight into the history of E-Learning. In broad perspective, E-Learning has been found to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary as it has had its ‘up slides and downslides’; ‘Downslides’ for those who ventured and jumped in the midst of the “E – boom” without taking proper precautions and following the trends of other organizations. For a long time, the term E-Learning has had very doubtful meanings; doubtful in the sense as to what it actually implies. Some have defined E-Learning as ‘Online Distance Learning’ while some have defined it as ‘Education via Electronic Media’. From linguistic point of view, we can go along with the latter meaning but what does the evolutionary story say about the meaning of E-Learning, is what is of most concern to us.

Teaching has become more of a ‘Paradigm” and Pedagogies have been widely changing. In other terms education has been undergoing many revolutionary changes based on the strategies of organizations, targeted audience, resources available, demographic requirements, finances available, etc. Even corporate organizations have contributed to the overall evolution. A major hand played by corporate organizations initiated as they planned for effective training of employees. This training began in the form of Computer Based Training popularly known as CBT’s. These CBT’s ran on standalone systems and where expected to train individuals. However, these CBT’s were found to be rather expensive and were incapable of modifications or versioning and needed to be deployed individually. Later, with the advent of Network Technology, the CBT’s became more centralized and were deployed over the network to which users logged on and accessed them. But this also had its limitations, as the networks did not allow the users accessing from offsite campuses or globally distributed branches of the corporate world. Hence, a more centralized system was required where users could access the applications from across the globe. This break through came after the introduction of the internet. Organizations across the world shifted towards this strategy which was cost-effective, easy to use, easy to modify and accessible anytime anywhere. This had a great impact on the evolution of E-learning.

The variations in implementing E-learning arise due to the proportion of combining factors (.i.e. education strategies) involved namely – teaching method such as student centered, active learning, Problem based learning, etc and types of contents, scheduling, assessment formats and most important the technologies used for classroom delivery. It has been found that E-Learning is accomplished best when it evolves over the current strategy of education adopted by an organization. E-learning totally depends upon the ‘Strategy of Education’ so it is important to note that an organization must have a proper foundation of the educational strategy. Some E-Learning experts rightfully say “It is better to be late on the scene than crash on the scene”.

Keeping in mind the above ingredients namely ‘E-learning and Educational Strategy’, the E-Learning Committee of the College of Medicine, King Saud University has classified the E-Learning Project into three phases: Pilot phase, Expansion phase and Online Curriculum Phase.

Project Plan

As mentioned above, the project focuses on providing a comprehensive solution towards E-Learning setup in the College of Medicine. The different components of the project are the Video on Demand (VOD) Portal, the Classroom infrastructure including the Video Conferencing equipments and finally the Online Portal for curriculum Delivery.

Each one of them is discussed in detail below:

Video on Demand (VOD) Portal and Classroom Automation:

The VOD portal is an online portal where recorded sessions of classrooms are stored. These sessions are not only capable of being recorded but also broadcasted live over the King Saud University network as well as over the internet to be accessed for remote purposes such as other colleges located within the kingdom or even globally.  Various methods exist as to how this can be done: namely IP based broadcasting or Web based broadcasting. The qualities of both differ and both are dependent on the bandwidth available for broadcast. Issues exist related to the storing of media files, their magnitude, and how they are streamed over the internet.

A typical session consists of a class equipped with recording equipments and other electronic equipments such as Interactive Boards, Document cameras, PCs, high definition audio system capable of capturing voices along with the video system, etc. The purpose of the recording is to help the students or faculty access the recorded session at a later stage for review or refreshing the knowledge gained. Such a type of setup is particularly useful for PBL (Problem Based Learning) Sessions where it is required to evaluate the flow of session based on group roles. The VOD portal also allows conferencing between two sessions possible. The portal which is used in the pilot project allows the user to upload and download documents, images, PowerPoint presentations, etc. The VOD portal has a scheduling system for recorded sessions along with their details which is monitored and maintained by the system experts.

Online Curriculum:

The online curriculum is a web based portal that contains all the information necessary for running a medical curriculum. In other words, the curriculum hosts the lectures, documents, images, messages, mails, e-books, forums, discussion panels, tutor guides, student guides, assessments, self assessments, and also the topics to be learned by the students. In a typical Problem Based session, a tutor can display the current problem that the students are supposed to learn via the Online Curriculum Portal. This problem is presented by means of multimedia such as video or voice prerecorded into the problem by the Course administrators. After watching this, the students engage in thematic discussions and perform active learning effectively. They can access any additional information or references from this online portal using their laptops via a wireless network.

The Project Phases:

To implement the above mentioned three components of the E-Learning Project, it was decided by the E-Learning Committee to categorize the project into three phases. The first phase, also called the Pilot Phase’ allows the installation of the E-Learning setup in a limited number of venues. The purpose of this phase is to test the quality of the technology used. The components mentioned above namely the video conferencing solution and the Video on Demand Portal, the classroom automation and the Online Curriculum are implemented partially. The video conferencing and the video on demand portal are tested for its quality, bandwidth utilization, user access feasibility and how the portal functions ‘live’ over the internet.  From the classroom automation point of view, the infrastructure used needs to be tested for reliability, scalability, and integration. This phase also acts as a precursor for the coming phases where the both faculty and the students are exposed to new trends of education. In other words, this phase allows the user to get accustomed to the new technologies.

The second phase is the expansion phase where the numbers of venues are increased to fully automate the College of Medicine with the latest advances in education delivery.

The third phase focuses on the Strategic development of the Online Curriculum, based on the revised system of education during which the College of Medicine makes a transition from the Traditional System of Curriculum to an Advanced System of Curriculum.