Musings: E-learning realities

The fundamental nature of education has scarcely changed over the last number of decades to any great degree, what has occurred however is a realisation of the shear amount of technical possibilities apparent to our everyday teaching and learning needs. This reality has been brought to the fore by talk of the ‘Net Generation’ entering our schools and universities. Where once we thought of students as ‘Play-Station’ aficionados looking for more and more ‘quick fixes’ in their learning processes – we even attempted to account for such a vague predilection by talking of ‘chunking’ information into bite-size elements in an attempt to cater for their ‘limited attention’ spans. The term the Net Generation brings a rather more mature concept, it includes an outlook akin to many of the socio influenced theories that pervade our teaching in line with an innate sense and ability to integrate current technologies into every day existence.

It is this seamlessness, of technology and purpose, that has evaded education, in the majority, when implementing e-learning. In what may appear a circular argument this chapter will aim to introduce the current practices with regard to technology in learning (we will talk in more detail about the terminology of ‘technology in learning’ below), it will point to an initial well meaning, but misguided attempt to integrate technical solutions into education, that failed (and is failing) to make the most of the available solutions – simply because it was the technology that implicitly led the way in which implementations were sourced and created.

The theoretical frameworks that are used in current practice derive from a myriad of psychological and sociological ideologies that are explicit in ‘traditional’ teaching and have been re-purposed (like an ideal re-usable e-resource) for the educational community to ‘pad’ the rationale of use in the practice of e-learning. We will examine the hereditary of these theories and attempt to map a taxonomy of development that accounts for present day practices.

The core argument of this chapter revolves around the issue that it is now time to make the technology explicit in practice and empower the teacher and learner in a way that reflects the needs of our ‘information and knowledge society’ in the way we utilise both technology and information seamlessly – as an integrated whole that serves the purpose of life-long learning.

In the current educational vogue we purport to offer accountability, from the educator, the learner, the institute and its wider geo-political contexts – such as Europe’s Bologna agreement.

Before we begin let us take a perambulation into the term of e-learning. A legal case taken by one of the larger virtual learning environment (VLE) vendors is proving quite contentious... Blackboard Vs Desire2Learn.

E-learning is an often used and perhaps misplaced term. Invariably it stands for one of two things: electronic learning or (the more politically correct) enhanced learning. From this we might assume that as learning implies the ‘act of or experience of one that learns’ then it must be so via electronic means for the term e-learning.

What systems are in place for the novice academic, the old hand and the individual aiming to up skill or simply integrate some minor technological features into their traditional teaching.

Much had been made of the need for inductions to technology on campus, increasing support and training for new tools and the ability of institutions to offer a strategically aligned top down approach to the integration of such technologies across the campus. Rather large sums of money have been spent on purchasing proprietary packages or even writing and creating software solutions in house to enable some formal deployment of e-learning or technology enhanced learning.