Learning about eLearning

I was thinking that I didn’t have any eLearning experience at all. However, after reading some definitions of eLearning, I realized that, in fact, I do have a little experience – mostly in the sense of “blended learning” where eLearning and face-to-face teaching and learning are combined. For many of my courses, both at the University of Hamburg and at Gettysburg College in the U.S., there was an internet platform used mostly to publish course dates, important notices, material and assignments. These were Stine or BSCW for the University of Hamburg and CNAV for Gettysburg College. For some of my courses at Gettysburg, there were apart from reading material and assignments also tests posted on CNAV, which you had to work on online and then post via CNAV. In my role as a teacher, this platform was very convenient, as I could use it to send messages to the entire class, or contact my students’ advisors, or simply see who is in my class and learn names before the start of the semester. For students as well, this was a way to get in touch with their classmates.

I’ve made the experience that Stine is hardly used once the semester and the course have started. BSCW was used for sociology to post PowerPoint presentations and other announcements.

In general, I think that it’s very convenient to use such an internet platform to post material and assignments. At Gettysburg, many of the texts were put on “electronic reserve”. Otherwise, 20 or 30 students would have had to wait to check out the only available copy at the library and copy it page by page. Also, by posting material online, everyone has access to the material, even if he or she missed a class.

However, since these internet platforms were mostly used to organize courses but not really for communication, I am not sure if this really fits the definition of eLearning. Was computer technology the medium of instruction, or did it just provide access to material and were the medium of instruction then just plain old texts and face-to-face classroom discussions?

Also, about six or seven semesters ago, I took a class on “New Media in Primary School”. We were asked to use an internet platform (I don’t remember which one) for group discussions and also to post the results of our group projects. If I remember correctly, this did not really work too well. Not a lot of people contributed to the class discussions and it proved to be difficult to work on a group project because some of the group members did not have regular access to the internet and as we were not online simultaneously it generally took very long to get questions answered or thoughts discussed.

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