Experts from all over the world analyse the potential and the challenges of e-learning

[Salvador Tordera]

Recently named president of the UOC Josep A. Planell opened the seminar by stressing the controversial subject of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) a question that divides the community of experts in e-learning in terms of their contribution to the sector. In this sense, Planell stated that “MOOCs shouldn't make us lose sight of what e-learning is: a system that offers greater flexibility, greater interaction and greater personalization.” “At a time of low-cost teaching, quality will be the differentiating element,” concluded the president of the UOC.

Expert Martha Stone Wiske from the University of Harvard began the series of papers by stressing the essence of teaching as a method of construction of knowledge to understand the reality that surrounds us. According to Wiske, today “teaching is a passive activity and we shouldn't forget that the aim of teaching is to create knowledge so that students can apply it; the key to the process is in the execution of this knowledge.” Wiske also called for teaching that contemplates the spectrum of multiple intelligences, as defined by her North American colleague Howard Gardner.

The president of the Schools Council of Catalonia, Ferran Ruiz, took up the baton from Wiske to highlight the important role and influence of the managers of the education sector (administrators, politicians, etc.), who usually act with a managerial mentality, removed from the reality and the problems of teaching. “Today, educational relations are structured more as a product of tradition, teachers, economy and managerial convenience rather than due to intrinsic requirements of education and learning,” Ruiz claimed. “We need a new logic based on individuals.” E-learning can provide this redefinition, but “we need managers capable of looking forwards, predicting and changing.”

Greater training in ICT for educators and students

Researcher at the Open University of Israel, Sarah Guri-Rosenblit turned the concept of e-learning on its head and looked at it from the point of view of e-teaching as, according to her, there is a little over-emphasis on the central role of the student in terms of learning models. According to the Israeli teacher, there are other problematic assumptions when tackling teaching with new technologies: do students really know how to use digital tools in their learning process? Are they able to conduct their own study independently? Should the role of teachers in the digital age be relegated to that of accompaniment? According to Guri-Rosenblit, new students are skilled in the use of ICT, but they still lack the capacity of critical thought and problem-solving in the digital environment. On this point, she stressed the role of teachers and counsellors and called for more training in the use of ICT, both for students and for teachers; in addition, MOOCs and OERs (Open Educational Resources) may become a useful tool to reduce the workload of educators providing they receive a proper quality assessment.

Dutch researcher Betty Collis offered an original perspective on e-learning derived from her experience in training in the business environment. Collis worked as a lecturer at the Dutch University of Twente and subsequently in the Shell oil multinational, and she believes that there are some good practices in corporate training that could be extrapolated to the education sector. For example, Collis feels that the business sector works with multidisciplinary teams,of which quick decision-making processes in high-pressure environments are required. This makes “co-responsibility in the learning of the other members of the team” necessary, a non-existent aspect in traditional educational environments, where the tendency is towards the individualisation of each student's educational process.

Collis advocates that for higher education institutions to anticipate this type of professional environment for students, “they have to change the present view of learning for one of a process that emphasizes sharing and co-creation of knowledge among a community of professionals”.

Terry Anderson, a Canadian researcher at Athabasca University, focused his paper on the efficiency of learning models at a time when cuts in the sector are the order of the day. According to Anderson, “we must improve quality, effectiveness, attraction, cost and efficiency in times of the learning experience.” For this reason, he proposed a model that is less centred on the total interaction between the elements of the learning process (teacher-student-content). For Anderson, “deep and significant learning can take place providing the level of interaction of the students with one of the other elements is high, be it with the teacher, between themselves or with the content.”