A discussion on E-learning offered in Malaysia universities: Pros and Cons from the students Perspective

In this new era, the traditional teaching method applied by Universities has evolved into a technological method through the introduction of e-learning. Well, e-learning is the modem process of education where part of the learning experience takes place without face to face communication between the teacher and his students. This is a method where tutors or lecturers post up several course modules on the university intranet, and students will have the access to these sources. However, there are some pros and cons in adopting these technologies.

The pros of e-learning include reduction of travelling cost and time. With e-learning, students can access to the internet and get the resource that are needed in seconds without the need to travel all the way to the college to get those resources. This helps students to save the transport costs, which then can be used for other necessary areas. Besides that, it allows students to get resources anywhere they want as long as they have the access to a computer and internet.

Another advantage of e-learning is that it provides wider learning options for students, where it is not restricted to the geographic location. In other words, it means that a student studying in Malaysia can still access to the resources uploaded by foreign University. This makes the life of a student easier in his process of study and learn more about foreign knowledge. This also builds a link between local and foreign students from all over the world. Furthermore, more information or opinions can be exchanged among them.


Although e-learning provides benefits, there are also some inevitable cons. One of the cons of using e-learning is that it might be a bit costly. In order to use e-learning, certain installation costs are needed, such as high-speed internet costs and software applications. Therefore, it requires some costs to implement e-learning.

Besides that, unmotivated learners or students with poor study habits might find it difficult to follow e-learning as they are not familiar with the structure and routine of the process. They may require much more time to understand it.

E-learning sometimes might not be working successfully due to the slow or unreliable internet connections. This may cause inability to access to the resources or inability to upload the resources in time.

Problem with developing relationship with classmates might also occur. With the reliance on e-learning, face-to-face interaction is lesser leading to lack of social relationship development in the society.

References:
http://www.about-elearning.com/e-learning-advantages-and-disadvantages.html
http://www.elearners.com/resources/elearning-faq5.asp

Electronic Currency

What is electronic currency?

Electronic currency can be known as e-money, electronic cash, digital cash, digital currency and digital money. In other words, electronic currency is referring to money or scrip which is exchanged electronically with the use of computer network, the internet and digital stored value systems. Examples of the systems used to transfer electronic currency are Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT).

Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)
This is a computer-based systems used to perform financial transaction electronically. It is a system that transfers money from one bank account directly to another without any paper transaction being done. The most common program that use electronic funds transfer is direct deposit where the payroll of an employee’s is deposited straight into their bank accounts. Besides that, the transfer of funds is done through an electronic terminal, including credit card, ATM, Fedwire and point-of-sales (POS).

Advantages of electronic currency:

Convenience

With the development of E-currency, it makes customers' life more convenient as there is no need for cash to be drawn out for any payment. Now, it is convenient to load the cash into a credit card size like “smart card” which is easy to be carried anywhere. Besides that, it also provides privacy for customer to shop online using credit card rather than original bank account. Banking industry has now adapted this program, which offers customers the ability to transfer funds, purchase stocks, contribute to their retirement plans ( for Canadian) and various services without the need to hand over physical cash or checks. It also makes it more convenient for the customers where they do not need to wait in line for hours and hours.

Security

With the use of E-currency, it makes it safer in this unpretictable world. As mentioned previously, users do not need to bare the risk of being robbed for carrying physical cash. With highly developed technologies such as security codes, the users' personal information is protected. As the E-currency is transfered in the internet, it is impossible to crack the digital sign with those developed technologies. Besides that, the electronic currency information is encrypted so it is impossible for the digital data to be read by unauthorised people.

Disadvantages of electronic currency:








Fraud

Although digital cash have some benefits, yet; it have disadvantages too. One of the disadvantages is fraud, such as incidents like bank accounts being hacked and illegal retrieval of banking records which can lead to a widespread invasion of privacy and identify theft.

Technology failure

Technologies may be very advance but they will definitely have some weakness. Reliance on technologies may lead to loss of record due to the power failure or incompetent software. All these problems may cause a major setback in the introduction of e-currency.

Privacy

Users may fear to use electronic currency such as debit card. This might be due to the reason where they are afraid that their privacy will be interfered and their private information will be widely spreaded.

Examples of those websites that allow people to do e-currency tradings are MG E-currency and JT GOLD.com.

Reference:

http://www.businesspme.com/uk/articles/trade/90/Electronic-money---advantages-and-disadvantages.html

http://www.iit.edu/~peacjen/cs485/ecash2.htm

Phishing: Examples and its prevention methods

As the world has become so dependent on the Internet, it gives chances for crimes to exist such as data being hacked by unauthorized people. Well, phishing is only one of the crime that happen in the worldwide.

What is phishing?

Phishing is a crimeware technique used by unauthorized party to steal the identity of a target company to its customers. Phishing can be an act of sending an e-email to users, falsely claiming to be an established authorized companies with the effort to scam the user into giving freely their private information. It is also known as identity theft. Phishing created a hard challenges for the existing e-commerce enterprises and those enterprises entering e-commerce network.

The most common target for phishing is Paypal, eBay and online banks. For example, a recent phishing happened in Canada, where a loss amounting to $ 10 million occured. U.S. banks, a credit and debit card distribution company and a payment processor had been hack by an Israeli hacker, Ehud Tenenbaum.

How phishing work ?

For the first step of phishing, the phishers will decide which business to be their target and determine how to steal its customers' e-mail addresses. The technique usually used by those phishers as spammers are mass-mailing and address collection.

For the second step, phishers will then create method for delivering the message and collecting the data. The methods which are mostly used are through e-mail address and a web page.

The third step will be the action of sending the false message that appears to be from a
established legitimate enterprise.

Finally, the phishers will be able to access and record the data of the victims once they enter into the web pages or popup windows. With the information that they obtained, various illegal activity can be done by them.

Example of phishing:

1)

2)

3)
4)

How to prevent phishing?

In order to prevent phishing from occuring, the following prevention can be taken:
1) Understand how phishing work. By understanding how it works, users will be more alert in safeguarding their private information or data. You may refer to the article of 'How to defeat phishers relating to the e-mail sent from ebay".

2) Use the outlook 2003 to filter out phishing email. This outlook 2003 is designed with a built-in Junk E-mail folder that does a good job by removing out spam. Therefore, this can help to prevent phisher from getting a chance to hack users' private information.

3) Users must always be aware of the emails and certain internet message received. In other words, they must not simply trust any information that appears in the website.

4) Users might also acquire anti-phishing service that helps in detecting and blocking phishing site to safeguard their confidencial information and date. An example of anti-phishing services is PowerShark Anti-phishing solution

5) Another prevention that users can apply is to do business or any transaction with the companies that you trust. This will reduce the risk of becoming another victim of phishers.

Reference:

Turban, E., King, D., Mckay, J., Marshall, P., Lee, J., & Viehland, D. (2008). Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective 2008 (International Edition). Upper saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Education International.

The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

Nowadays, the implementation of technologies is becoming more and more advance as years passed. Businesses are evolving in the e-commerce world and everything has become more conveniet and effective. In addition, computer has become a necessary component for users to manage their personal data and daily tasks. Yet; with this high reliability on technologies, it creates chances for threats to occur. One of the hottest issues for companies and users is the safety of data in the Internet.

There are many types of threats and attacks in the Internet and it is a challenge to be faced. So far, the potential threats and attacks that had been discovered are as follow:

a) Nontechnical attacks – where a perpetrator uses some form of tricks to persuade
users to reveal their information or performing actions. An example of this type of attack is social engineering attacks.

b) Technical attacks – using software and systems knowledge or expertise to perpetrate an
attack.

c

Denial-of-service (Dos) attack – an attack that happens in website where an attacker uses
specialized software to send a flood of data packets to the
target computer with the plan to overloading its resources.
In other words, it is an attempt to make a computer resource
unavailable to its intended users, as defined by Wikipedia.



d)Virus – it is a computer program that can copy itself and infect the computer without obtaining
the permission or knowledge of the owner.

e) Worm – a software program that runs independently, consuming the resources of its host in
order to maintain itself, and is capable of propagating a complete working version of itself into another machine.

f) Trojon horse – it is a program that appears to be a useful function but it contains a hidden function that will introduce a security risk. An example for this threat is trojon horse virus.

g) Macro virus/ Marco worm – it is a virus or worm that executes when the application object
that contains the marco is opened or a particular procedure is executed.

Therefore, looking at the existence of all these threats and attacks, it is obvious that data that users transfered or presented online is not safeguarded. In order to protect our data and information in the Internet, security on internet should be implemented. Security success can be categorised into three component, which are:

a) Confidentiality – users' private or sensitive information should be kept nicely and avoid their
disclosure to unauthorized individual, entities, or processes.
b) Integrity – it means ensuring that the data uploaded by users is under protection and free from the risk of threat.
c) Availability – this is to ensure that the access of data, the website, or other e-commerce data
service is timely, available, reliable, and restricted to authorized user.

Reference:
Turban, E., King, D., McKay, J., marshall, P., Lee, J., & Viehland, D. (2008). Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective 2008 (International Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Education International.

An example of E-commerce failure and its causes

In the 21st century, many companies try to develop their business in the internet and sell their products and services through e-commerce. Some companies carried out the plan successfully;yet, some experienced failure in doing so. Some of the B2C websites that failed include toysrus.com, eToys.com, Xpeditor.com, Chemdex.com and Webvan.com.

Now, let's talk about eToys.com. eToys Incorporation is an on-line retailer of children's products. One of the top products that the company sell is Barbie dolls. eToys will fulfill any specialized requirements requested by customers on the Barbie dolls' appearance. In others words, it retails different products with 750 brands. Since eToys started to involve its business in the e-commerce world, there were many challenges faced by them such as competition with ToysRUS.com ,which is also a retail sales of toys. However, since February 12, 2009, Toys“R”Us has acquired eToys company. In the early stage of its business conduct via internet network, eToys failed in surviving in the e-commerce world.

The causes that lead to the failure was due to eToys' founders were lack of experience in the retail toys industries. Management experience is one of the important factors in determining the success or failure of business in e-commerce. However, the founders of the eToys, Inc did not have any management experience. The business was being run by a bunch of “twenty-something’s” with no management experience. Without experience, the business was unlikely to be successful.

Another cause that lead to the failure of eToys' e-commerce is its poor demand forecasting. This can be seen clearly in the case happened in 1999 during the Christmas season, where eToys with no experience in managing the business was unable to forecast the demand for the production of the toys. The number of orders was large and eToys was unable to meet the required orders. During that season, all the children celebrated Christmas with sadness and it is known as a disaster for eToys.

Besides that, eToy's poor customer services also caused its failure. For example, no toll free call was provided at the site and this caused inconvenience to customers. If consumers have any questions or problems about their orders, they were unable to contact eToy and make any correction. This lead to the lack of confidence and trust from consumers on the website.

Next, competitive environment also caused the failure of eToys e-commerce network. In the e-commerce world, eToys was not the only one in the retail toy industry. There were other companies such as Toys R’ Us involved in the same industry too. Therefore, eToys has a strong competitor to compete with. Compared to eToys, Toys R’ Us not only has online presence, but it also has the perceived stable infrastructure of bricks and mortar. Furthermore, eToys' strategy to offer more diverse product was in conflict with the strong “toy store” branding they had developed. The pricing competition with other retailers and high customer acquisition cost also lead to the failure of e-commerce.

Reference:

http://www3.toysrus.com/about/