This post is provided by guest blogger, J. Mike Condreay, graduate student at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, MS in Training and Development program.

The spread of COVID-19 has made hands on learning a ‘necessary evil’. The fear of the spread of the virus through contact has in many industries shuttered on the job learning. This issue is forcing training organizations to find remote methods to achieve activity touch time with enough fidelity and confidence that students and workers can perform key tasks safe and error free.

Enter Kuang-Chao Yu and Kuen-Yi Lin (2020) from the National Taiwan Normal University. Their article, Online Learning with Hands-on Activity Enhance Technological Creativity, establishes a framework for e-learning specialists to build on.

The authors demonstrate a method of remote learning that drives home the basic concepts of Math, Science, and Tech, and then finishes the work with innovative, interactive problems that allow the students to integrate the learnings by designing virtual products.

In critiquing the article I found that the concepts of the authors were sound, and the platform they used to simulate the virtual products was creative. The article doesn’t allow for an actual demonstration of the process, instead relying on screen shots to show the work of the students. I am concerned about the cost of a program like this. The creation of realistic simulators that mimics real tasks and activities could require significant capital preventing small businesses and independent operations from investing in this teaching technique. Fortune 500 companies with a large workforce that is spread across the globe may find this technology advantageous in these hands free times.

Reference:

Yu, Kuang-Chao & Lin, Kuen-Yi, (2020, May 21). Online Learning with Hands-on Activity Enhance Technological Creativity Retrieved from https://www.iteea.org/File.aspx?id=86732&v=635f5e9