Sunday 24 January 2010

The Importance Of IT Networks In Modern Education System

By Alex Tipu

The arrival of Information Technology in our lives has revolutionized everything, from our professions to our living standards, which includes health, entertainment and last but not the least, our education. Through the advent of new technology, education has become a lot more interactive, informative and collaborative. Although competition has reached a higher peak all around the world due to this change, we get brighter minds equipped with the modern knowledge as a result.

In the past, scholars used to travel around the world in order to enhance their levels of education and meet bright minds from different parts of the globe, in order to share their knowledge and do research. Books and literature on particular topics were present in the libraries of particular countries. So, in order to access this distant literature, people had to travel from one country to another.

Nowadays, the World Wide Web is loaded with information, and knowledge about everything. It has become a lot easier to fetch information of your need, and of the topics that were very difficult to get. Information in the form of research papers, publications, books from various authors, and everything that you can think of, is available on the internet.

There are many big and famous universities of the world, such as Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, and UCL, which are collaborating with each other for the purpose of research. This is only possible because of the high quality, and bandwidth networks between these universities. All the researchers can interact with each other with the help of the facility of video conferencing. It is very easy to share the study material. There is also no need to travel to any country in order to benefit, or access a particular book. All this has been made possible because of the IT networks all around the world.

Through the IT networks, students benefit from the video lectures that are delivered online on different topics. This feature has contributed a lot in improving the state of education because, now students from all around the world can benefit from the lectures of famous lecturers at a very minimum cost.

With the advent of it networks, a new concept of distance learning, or distance education has been introduced in the field of education. As the name states, distance learning includes the impartment of education through technology, and instructional systems design though the students are not physically present at the site of the lecture.

The technologies used in this system can be either synchronous, or asynchronous. In synchronous method, the student has to be present at the site of lecture when the lecture is being delivered. In asynchronous method, the students are at the leisure of accessing, and viewing the course materials when it is convenient for them. Web based VoIP, telephony, video conferencing, web conferencing, emails, and audiocassettes are the mediums that are used for transferring the data.

Overall, IT Networks will continue to improve the modern education system and bring more horizons to us.

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