How to Enable Computer-Based Learning in Educational Environments

The concept of computer-based learning, also known as e-learning, is playing an increasingly important role in all industries. According to Global Market Insights, the market’s total value will exceed $240 billion by 2023, as an increasing number of organizations start to rely more heavily on the internet and electronic resources to enhance the learning experience.

While corporations can significantly benefit from using computer resources for training purposes, no sector is in quite as strong a position to receive a boost from computer-based learning as education. Success of e-learning implementations at any level, however, hinges upon proper implementation.

Here are a few tips and tricks to enable computer-based learning in educational/ training environments.

Restrict Distracting Websites and Applications

Ever since the first computers were installed in classrooms, there have been concerns about students being distracted, or accessing unsavory content on the web. With the inclusion of laptops, Chromebooks and tablets, managing an e-learning environment has only become more difficult for educators at all levels.

In order to foster an engaging learning environment, it’s important that educators have the ability to easily restrict the usage of certain applications and websites on classroom endpoints. The easiest way to do this is to create a whitelist of apps and websites, which have been authorized for access.

Make the Most of Digital Capabilities

The purpose of computer-based learning is to improve education. But successfully leveraging e-learning resources isn’t necessarily intuitive at first; much like in the enterprise, there need to be digital collaboration platforms in place to make the most of a computer environment.

For an educator, these collaboration features entail the following:

1. Easily communicate with one or more students at a time via instant messaging.
2. Create student polls, quizzes and in-class questionnaires and quickly share them with an entire classroom.
3. Instantly launch applications on multiple endpoints from a single dashboard.
4. Co-browse with students to help them solve problems.
5. Display a particular screen to the entire class to walk through a creative solution to a problem.

Achieve Visibility and Control

Ensuring students stay engaged and making full use of a computer’s learning capabilities has great potential to improve an educator’s pool of resources. But this is especially true when you don’t have to worry about whether students are cheating on a pop quiz by looking up the answers online – or doing something on their device that is disruptive to learning. To that end, classroom management software can help with the following:

• Locking down and blanking out students’ screens during lectures.
• Locking down applications during a computer-based exam.
• Viewing a student’s screen to assess or monitor activity.
• Taking screen shots if necessary, either for learning or discipline purposes.

Computer-based learning has immense potential to improve the educational experience for students and teachers alike. It’s really just a matter of leveraging that potential with the right set of classroom management tools, so that you can help students learn more effectively.

To learn more about our classroom management solutions, contact Faronics today.