Learning from E-commerce for E-learning

Both e-learning and e-commerce are increasingly of interest to researchers in recent years. A body of research has emerged regarding the two trends. It was considered that e-learning could be taken as a special type of e-commerce, in which the education service provided online is, in fact, the product that being purchased and delivered online from an e-commerce system. Based on this concept, some lessons or findings drawn from e-commerce researches should also be useful for e-learning system design. The purpose of this paper is to carry out a preliminary investigation on the e-learning system design considerations from users´ (students´) point of view by referring to some of the e-shop designing considerations. With literature reviewed and the author´s previous study on e-commerce, the characteristics of e-learning systems were highlighted and compared with their counterparts in e-commerce systems. It was found that the characteristics of a product affect customers´ preference of online shopping for that particular product. By the same token, an inference was made with this study that the content features of a particular course would influence students´ acceptance of the e-learning approach. Content feature and its suitableness for online delivery may provide a new perspective when designing an e-course, and could be an early signal for the success of the service.