The 'e' of e-learning

I had recently read that the 'e' of e-learning is to be dropped shortly as when the phrase was first coined, it differentiated learning in a classroom to online learning.

I have now been delivering online courses for quite a few years now and find that the appeal to me is the challenge of engaging my students in their learning, building a collaborative online community and having successful outcomes.

The latter important for the continuity of the course, a successful outcome for the student in completing their course with Competence and building the ability of students to encompass 21st Century literacy into their profile.

What do I mean by 21st Century literacy, the ability to use technology and the Internet.

Tony Gurr believes the following is true of 21st Century learners: http://tinyurl.com/7k4q7fn

Time and time again, we hear exactly the same answers. It doesn’t matter what country we’re in. It doesn’t matter who the stakeholders are. Consistently, these are the answers we hear most:

• Problem solving: Students need the ability to solve complex problems in real time.

• Creativity: Students need to be able to think and creatively in both digital and non-digital environments to develop unique and useful solutions.

• Analytic thinking: Students need the ability to think analytically, which includes facility with comparing, contrasting, evaluating, synthesizing, and applying without instruction or supervision and being able to use the higher end of Bloom’s taxonomy.

• Collaboration: Students must possess the ability to collaborate seamlessly in both physical and virtual spaces, with real and virtual partners globally.

• Communication: Students must be able to communicate, not just with text or speech, but in multiple multimedia formats. They must be able to communicate visually, through video and imagery, in the absence of text, as actively as they do with text and speech.

• Ethics, Action, Accountability: This cluster includes responses such as adaptability, fiscal responsibility, personal accountability, environmental awareness, empathy, tolerance, and many more. Though the language may vary a little, every group of stakeholders (parents through national-level officials) give us more or less the same answers.

Having seen the same topics of discussion on several websites this reinforces my thinking that lecturers and teachers alike need to ensure that they use technology only as a tool for 21st Century use and that it takes nothing away from the pedagogy of learning.