Instructional providers along with other E-learning stakeholders in various organizations must now continue leveraging resources for designing and implementing learning and training strategies with the feature of sustained availability “any place any how” to meet the demand and expectations “anytime anywhere”. An important issue in defining the domain and boundaries of e-learning is the necessity of differentiating between training and education. We should be cautious not to assume that what works well in education will necessarily work as well in training. While education and training share the psychological constructs of learning, memory, and motivation, fundamental differences exist. These differences relate to the goals, outcomes, and eventual application of the underlying instruction.
It is important to note that learning outcomes are measures of the knowledge gained from an instructional program. Education has been historically concerned with the social and intellectual development of the whole person; there is no upper limit to how elevated a learning outcome should be. A different way of framing the same issue is that while producing an “over educated” student is inconceivable to education providers, the thought of a student being “over trained” can be costly, in terms of time and money, to training providers. In short, it is better to have the prepared student productive on the job- rather than lingering in the classroom. It follows that while knowledge development is the intended outcome in education; skill development is the intended outcome in training.
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