Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

1 – Emerging Technologies in E-learning
example, students transferring from a two-year community
college to a four-year university can use an electronic
portfolio to demonstrate required competencies.
By this means a student can avoid taking unnecessary
classes, and advisors can help the student plot a course
after a quick review of the materials and reflections.
Some of the challenges raised by this idea revolve
around the electronic portfolio process, rather than the
tool or tools. For instance, organizations may need to
clarify what constitutes evidence of competence or even
what learning objectives and prerequisites are critical in
a particular field. Electronic portfolios may very well
inspire changes to long-standing articulation agreements
that will not work in the future.
THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT AND
E-LEARNING 2.0
Whether a classroom is on ground or online, for the
learning environment to be stimulating, reinforcing,
easy to access, relevant, interactive, challenging, participatory,
rewarding, and supportive, it should provide
input, elicit responses, and offer assessment and feedback.
In an online learning environment, these elements
are even more critical because learners are working outside
of the usual classroom social environment.
The Internet itself has always had the capacity to be a
learning medium. Services such as Google and Wikipedia
are probably used more frequently as learning tools than
any formal courses or learning management systems.
Web 2.0 provides new opportunities for learners
through participation and creation. In a 2.0 course, instructors
will no longer be able to rely simply on presenting
material; they will be involved in a mutually
stimulating, dynamic learning environment.
E-learning 2.0 is the application of the principles of
Web 2.0. Through collaboration and creation, E-
learning 2.0 will enable more student-centred, constructivist,
social learning with a corresponding increase in
the use of blogs, wikis, and other social learning tools.
Rosen (2006) offers a perspective of what a 2.0 course
would look like: they “should never be a hodge-podge
assembly of old methodologies delivered through new
technologies. They should be a true ‘2.0 course,’ rather
than a self-propelled PowerPoint presentation or CBT
training presented on a PDA. 2.0 courses provide justin-time
training. They are used as a resource—not a
one-time event. A 2.0 course lasts 15 to 20 minutes, runs
smoothly on any configuration of device (high resolution,
portable) or PDA, and delivers smoothly on all
versions of web browsers. Finally, 2.0 courses incorporate
the best-of-breed techniques from web design and
instructional design” (p. 6).
The term e-learning
Distance learning, distributed learning, online learning,
e-learning, virtual learning, asynchronous learning,
computer supported collaborative learning, web-based
learning . . . these are a few of the many terms used to
describe learning in environments in which students
and instructors are not physically present in the same
location. In burgeoning fields, it is commonplace that a
variety of terminology is used to describe a new phenomenon.
Clark and Mayer (2003) chose the word
e-learning and described its functionality:
[T]he “e” in e-learning refers to the “how”—the
course is digitized so it can be stored in electronic
form. The “learning” in e-learning refers to the
“what”—the course includes content and ways to
help people learn it—and the “why”—that the
purpose is to help individuals achieve educational
goals. (p. 13)
The term e-learning, as well as some of the other
terms, will eventually disappear. Electronic delivery will
become just one of the options which we will consider to
optimize learning for people.
Broadband
What we call broadband today is just a beginning of the
kind of network access we will see in the future. Universities
are connected by a fibre optic network that works
up to 10 gigabits/second. That is 10,000 times faster than
the typical broadband download of 1 megabit/second.
There will be a next generation of broadband which will
enable speeds 10 times greater than we have now and
enable downloading of high definition movies and TV
shows, VoIP, video telephony, full resolution streamed
video and audio and the creation of unimagined learning
environments.
Learning management
E-learning 2.0 will be a challenge for learning management
systems (LMS, also called course management
systems). At the time of this writing, most LMS solutions
are designed for Web 1.0, with minimal capability
for a fully functioning interactive environment. Nevertheless,
LMS vendors will gradually incorporate Web 2.0
capabilities. At this time, education LMS solutions are
ahead of corporate solutions in this respect. In the immediate
future, LMS solutions will continue to be primarily
administrative tools and only secondarily real
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