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Today, I was reading about the trends in e-learning and found a very interesting article in the magazine Communications of the ACM, a publication of ACM. E-learning is the new age learning medium. Corporates are increasingly relying on e-learning to train their employees. In fact, most educational institutes and universities are adopting e-learning to provide online courses to students worldwide.

E-learning is "almost" becoming an alternative to the traditional classroom learning. I emphasize "almost" because it is still premature to say that e-learning will replace traditional learning soon. The reason being e-learning is still very passive, dull, one-way and asynchronous. Most training material created as e-learning courseware are text-heavy information dumps or slide presentation of content. Often students are at a loss to clarify doubts and get answers to important questions.

While the use of multimedia technology makes e-learning more interactive and interesting for the learners, the concept of Virtual Mentor (VM) will certainly make e-learning more effective. VM answers users' queries and caters to the individual learning pace of the learner. VM can be in the form synchronized multimedia materials such as instructional videos, presentation slides or lecture notes. VM can also be a real-life mentor who directly interacts with learners through chat, email or discussion board.

Check out the following article to know more about the role of VM in an e-learning scenario.
http://www.worldbank.org/afr/seia/conf_0603/2.0612-DKakinda-ENG.pdf
(And, if you are an ACM member, do read the article Can E-learning Replace Classroom Learning, May 2004)