FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE
INTERNET: PEDAGOGICAL AND
TECHNOLOGICAL ASPECTS FOR ELEARNING
Report of IBS Trondheim March 1-4, 2001
Report of IBS Trondheim
March 1-4, 2001
INDICE
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 3
THE CONCEPT OF E-LEARNING. .............................................................................................. 3
DIFFICULTIES TO IMPLEMENT E-LEARNING ON A EUROPEAN SCENE. ............................ 4
DIFFERENT INITIATIVES UNDERTAKEN ON E-LEARNING .................................................... 5
NEEDS AND SOLUTIONS FOR A SUCESSFUL PROJECT ON E-LEARNING. ....................... 6
Report of IBS Trondheim
March 1-4, 2001
Introduction
The European Union, through its various research and development funding
initiatives, has been a major driver of educational change in Europe over the
last 10 years. Some of these initiatives investigate the technology backbone,
some the pedagogical approaches; others set up European study centres, yet
others develop software and courses. All of these are a necessary part of the
movement towards virtual teaching ad integrated environment for a panEuropean delivery of courses.
The rush by traditional campus-based institutions into distance education has
been headlong in the last 5 years in the U.K. and Scandinavian countries. The
power and prestige of the traditional old universities in the rest of Europe, are
still intact, they may leapfrog over the interim step of distance education and go
straight to modest forms of virtual education.
Most of the people tend to mix the concept of e-learning with the idea of open
and distant learning, so the first thing we decided to discuss was what do we
understand with e-learning?
The concept of e-Learning.
After a long discussion of what e-Learning was not, we finally managed to get
an idea of what the goals of an e-learning initiative should be
According to the EU Commission1, “e-Learning seeks to mobilise the
educational and cultural communities, as well as the economic and social
players in Europe, in order to speed up changes in the education and training
systems for Europe’s move to a knowledge-based society”
An effective e-Learning initiative should give the students a wide range of
experiences in various aspects of on-line learning, both as a supplement to
traditional face-to-face courses and to support distance participation.
The aim of this e-learning is to give the opportunity to students from all over
Europe to have the access to the best education all over Europe. E-Learning
should be effective in order to avoid most of the problems that appears with
distant education.
With this idea in mind, we decided to identify most of the problems that appears
when dealing with distant learning.
When we talk about e-learning, we have to make a difference between elearning for business, where the courses are more specific, and more
technically oriented, and the courses on an academic scene. These ones
should be as open as possible, depending only on the topic for the way of
planning them, to achieve the first aim of distant learning, to open possibilities
for learners all over Europe, broadening their mind, and opening new ways for
the best development of their education.
Communication from the Commission, “e-Learning – Designing tomorrow’s education”, Brussels,
24/5/2000
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Difficulties to implement e-learning on a European scene.
1. Previous knowledge: if we think on a wide target audience, we should
also have in mind that European students don’t receive the same kind of
background education. This could be a difficulty while running a course
for the teacher that has to prepare a course based on some previous
knowledge, and also for the students, that would have to follow the
course (they could lose motivation if they don’t understand the topic of
the course, because a previous background knowledge was supposed
on them).
2. Recognition: if we are going to base our education on distant courses,
we should get some kind of reward that would make it valuable for our
degree. But the problem is how this is going to be recognised? up to
what extent?, is it really interesting to give this reward, or the students
that would use e-learning as tool should do it for the sake of their
education?
3. Co-ordination: There are too many universities around Europe, with too
many faculties, and many different subjects that, in principle, could apply
e-learning. There’s a need of a good co-ordination so the offer could be
easily reachable by the students, where the information about what the
course offers, and also the requirements of the course will be easily
accessible. Another issue is to decide which courses could really make a
good on-line course.
4. Motivation of students:
a. Motivation to join the course: Specially, if the course is not
recognised by the home university, why a regular student should
take a course that will take him/her extra effort if there’s no way to
show it in the curricula?
b. Motivation to not give up on the course: one of the major risks of
distant education is to keep up the interest of the students from
the course.
5. Motivation of teachers: Most of the teachers now don’t want to change
their way to teach in order to comply with the requirements of distant
learning, falling into the next mistake (or problem to implement elearning)
6. Not all the subjects are suitable for e-learning
7. Not all the teachers can recycle themselves to teach using e-learning.
8. E-learning will increase the administrative costs: bureaucracy is one of
the things to fight against. On a quick look, e-learning should really help
to make bureaucracy to diminish, but, according to the existing rules
now, more co-operation contracts between universities should be make.
9. Students’ responsibility: we rely too much on students for avoid the risk
of cheating, for not giving up on the middle of the course and for applying
to courses really worthy for their future career (and not as a easy way out
for getting credits and get the degree).
10. Isolation of student: The basic problem of on-line learning is the
psychological dimension. Isolation and its emotional consequences affect
motivation directly. Related problems are easy distraction or sufficient
lack of interest so that the learner drops out. Group dynamics are
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Report of IBS Trondheim
March 1-4, 2001
missing totally and each learner is dependent on the situational mood
and the stimulation the on-line program or other distance education
media provides.
11. Access to technology: The learners taking the course do not always have
access to the newest and fastest equipment. Furthermore, they might
have access to different computer systems.
12. Lack of language and technical skill (for students and for teachers)
13. Time consuming on the preparation of the courses: This could be a
problem for the institutions that will be paying a person for that time,
without being sure of the success of that course
14. Identify the best tool on e-learning for every subject: if we assume that elearning means using different tools than Internet (such us video
conferences, PDA, Mobile communication, e-mail, open discussion
forums, etc), we will have to make sure that a right combination of this
tools are used on each subject according to the needs of the teaching of
that subject.
15. Size of the course: If a course involves only a relatively small number of
students, then the course designers can decide for either very high
interactivity in the course, or a less expensive set-up, or something in
between. As the number of learners becomes larger, the course design
will either have to involve more staff and more complex computer support
in order to keep a clear view on all communication going on in the
course, or the interactivity-level of the course will have to be lowered, so
that the same staff and technical set-up can still work.
16. Adapting materials for use (switching from traditional teaching to eteaching): The management of on-line materials requires knowing about
and using some very important skills:
a. Knowledge of what type of resources are available on-line
b. The skill to search efficiently and effectively for resources to find
and using the various support systems for teachers on-line
c. The skills to select, adapt and allocate resources.
17. Guarantee of the quality of the course
18. Time-management issues: A distance course can have a different time
planning compared to a normal course. In that case personnel and
facilities will have to be available at different times and over a different
period than is usually the case.
19. Cross-cultural communication: It’s not only the language that matters, it
has also, or has even more to do with, morals, manners and other
cultural aspects. And the point with electronic mail is that you cannot see
your partner’s reaction and react on that.
20. There’s also a risk of taking the teachers out of their environment,
making them lose the contact with students, their expectations and their
needs.
Even thought we have identified much more, they are not that important, and
mostly they are a consequence of the ones listed.
Different initiatives undertaken on e-learning
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Report of IBS Trondheim
March 1-4, 2001
The search tem virtual university and Europe, on the Web search engine
AltaVista gives well over 100,000 hits, although none of what I consider the
front runner in virtual education actually appear in this list.
As exercise, and with the aim of testing how accessible the information is
for a regular user, we decided to look for initiatives on e-learning (giving the
freedom to the participants to choose whatever they want, but always talking
about virtual education).
The result was quite demotivating. It was quite hard to find courses
running on internet on universities, and most of he existing ones are not open to
the public: either you have to pay a fee to enter (even to the previous
information of the course), or it’s focused as complement to face-to-face
education (web-sites from universities that have the content on the courses on
the web for their students, of course in their mother tongue).
Another point to stress out is that all of them are Internet based learning, they
don’t use any other tool but Internet, and maybe mail in some cases.
Completely forget about video-conferences, or even chats or discussion rooms.
It seems that all the initiatives on real time are left aside in despite of non-real
time initiatives.
Needs and solutions for a successful project on e-learning.
1. The technical facilities the learners are going to use and which have to
come from the institute will have to be delivered to the learners.
Furthermore, it is not at all certain that the learners will be able to get
everything up and running by themselves. Good documentation, and
support through traditional communication means, such as the
telephone, the mail and face-to-face contact, will have to be available.
The institution running this e-learning courses will have to find out what
kind of facilities the target audience is likely to have access to, and to
decide which systems to support. Extra equipment (such as modems,
software, etc.) can either be part of the course requirements or the
course package.
2. The evaluation question is a course-design problem, but this sub-part of
it needs to get its own exposure in this particular chapter, because it
addresses the need for information from the institute on how the system
was used and how the course organisation could be improved.
Traditional evaluation methods, such as interviews and
questionnaires, can be combined with possibilities offered by the
computer technology such as logging, keeping history files or creating
discussion schemes. This evaluation has to be done in a short period
of time (every 2 or 3 days) so this evaluation could help on improving the
quality of the course and help on the motivation of students.
3. For solving the problem of isolation of students, variations on the
presentation and style should be done. Challenge the learners with
tasks, refer to other options and make them active participants. Shared
work spaces will be excellent for this. PBL would be a good way of
creating these common work spaces.
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Report of IBS Trondheim
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4. About the motivation of students, we start from the idea that e-learning
should be a tool for improving face-to-face education, but not as a
substitute for it. With this idea in mind, we all agreed that the motivation
for a student to go for virtual courses will be the personal interest on the
course, university that is running the course or expert in charge of the
course. We rely then on the need of a high quality course to keep the
motivation of the students to finish the course and also the need of a
specific and clear information in advance. Also of the requirements so
the students have a clear picture in advance of what they are going to be
asked for and also what they are going to receive.
5. For teachers and institutions the motivation will be more a matter of
improving their image.
6. In order to avoid any kind of problems with the lack of skills on
language, technical skills and also help the teachers and experts to
deal with this change between traditional teaching and virtual
teaching, the course design and management will rely on a group of IT
experts, pedagogical experts and experts on the field of the course.
This group will work together in order to find out the best tool for each
subject. They will work together for the whole length of the project, acting
as consultants for problems that will arise during the course, in order to
react quickly on the demands of the students.
7. Also, the participation on discussion forums on how to improve elearning would be very useful for this professional staff. Competitiveness
between institutions on e-learning should be on quality, not on
pedagogical aspects.
8. Another issue that also in linked with the feel of isolation of students, is
the feel of not having a direct contact with the group of experts, for that
we will have to allocate a tutor on the home university of the learners.
This person won’t need to have knowledge on the topic of the virtual
course taken, but a strong knowledge on pedagogy, since he is going to
deal mostly with the problems appeared with demotivation or isolation;
the tutor will be the responsible of following the good development of the
process of learning. The interaction between the groups will be the
following. The only problem is the need of involving also the home
universities of the learners to create such a place.
Students
Teachers
and experts
Tutors
9. In order to accomplish with the quality of the course, the institution
running the course should do a bench marking among other European
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Report of IBS Trondheim
March 1-4, 2001
institutions, in order to find out the quality and level of other courses on
the similar field, so the quality could be above the average.
10. Internal assessment will be very interesting to keep up the quality of the
course. To do so it’s very important a healthy information flow between
the 3 groups involved on a daily base.
11. A kind of external assessment could be also interesting to keep the
quality of the course.
12. Standardisation of the official papers (forms) will help to decrease the
administrative costs for all the stakeholders and institutions involved.
13. A key point is the need of having an effective information in advance.
Students need to find out on an easy way, what they can expect from the
course, the minimum requirements for following the course, and also
specific information about time planning for this course. With this, we will
also solve the problem of the common background knowledge, since
all the students will have to fulfil the minimum requirements to take the
course. Language skills could be also included as common background
knowledge.
14. Virtual education is “linguistically sensitive”, making even the concept
of a pan-European course fall at the first stumbling block. English is the
de facto common language for much cross-country online teaching in
Europe, but this practice inevitably excludes many southern European
participants; teaching material in English but tutoring in the local
language,
simultaneous
translation
of
video-conference
presentations, multilingual databases with intelligent translators
could be solutions to take into consideration to solve the problem.
15. The size of the course should be directly linked to the subject of the
course and also to the tools that will be used for it. So it will depend on
the group of experts to decide the size and the target audience of the
course while planing it.
16. Not to move to an anyplace/anytime instruction. Real time tools are very
effective in order to avoid cultural misunderstandings, and to improve
team building. Those initiatives shouldn’t be discharged, but allocated
when needed.
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