Formal and Informal Approach for E-learning

Web mining Web mining is the application of data mining which focuses on discovering usage patterns from web logs and web data. Web data has the properties like unstructured nature of data, dynamic, diverse, huge amount of data to name a few. Due to which web data research has experienced a lot of challenges, such as scalability, multimedia compression and temporal issues like extraction of information from a plethora of data. As a result, web users always stuck up into a huge amount of unstructured data and face the problem of information overload while interacting with the web. The applications of web mining include e-services like e-commerce, e-governance, e-learning, e-market, e-finance, e- banking to name a few. In this paper, the focus is on e- learning. E-learning is the use of technology to enable people to learn anytime and anywhere. E-learning can include training, the delivery of just-in-time information and guidance from experts. There are two types of learning systems namely the Learning Management System (LMS) and the Personalized Learning Environment (PLE). These two systems are also called formal and informal approach for learning respectively. In this paper, a survey on these two systems and a comparison based on various parameters has been provided.