Practical Approaches to Enhance the Effectiveness of Student Learning in Internet Courses

With the current crisis of COVID-19, many universities are ordering shutdowns and moving courses on-line. Course offered via the internet is growing rapidly in recent years and will continue to grow into the future. We believe the recent crisis will further accelerate the growth of Internet courses. The reasons for this high growth include the need for social distancing, high cost of providing the education, the geo-graphical dispersion of students who may also currently hold jobs, the students’ increasing access to the internet, the increasing effectiveness internet tools, as well as the lowering of the costs, associated in aiding the communication and learning between the students and instructor. Unlike face-to-face classroom experience, in internet e-learning the instructor does not meet with the students and, thus, the effectiveness of the learning can be difficult to assess because lack of direct face-to-face contact. In this paper, we first discuss the state-of-the-art literature of e-learning. We then propose several important course design principles for asynchronous internet e-learning as well as suggest several implementation guidelines to ensure that such that the internet e-learning course is effective. Finally, we propose several important areas for further research for enhancing e-learning.