Good and Bad Course

Bad example
Usually bad experiences with learning are bounded somehow unethical behaviour of teachers. But this does not depend on course design. Usually course design is something students do not notice. Once you have to pay attention how course is build up, it means that there is something wrong with it. Form personal experiences just few notes:
• too much material to go through and not enough time for this or too much material and theoretical terms and no context around them.
• no discussion: there is no space or time for discussion or someone (teacher) just will end this with some inappropriate comment
• no clear goals and no communication with learners about the goals of process
• learning materials are out of date or unsuitable (too simple or too complicated)
• no feedback during the process

Good example
Usually good course is something you just enjoy and don't notice how it was built up. And of course: teacher does always give some extra sense to the learning process.
But still few notes:
• clear goals of the process
• common understanding how the process will look like and rules
• support and feedback to students while learning
• good materials and enough time to discover them
• appropriate discussion channels, constant discussion
• flexible assignments and deadlines
• clear structure of course and materials

Reflection - week 4

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
It's hard to say. This week I can not distinction anything. Somehow everything is at the moment blurry.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I struggled again with my motivation and thought a lot about course design. Terjes comments were really interesting and I'm thinking what to answer to them. I read one comment form Terje were she suggested that perhaps student's must not go to deep into all the materials but perhaps should decide what is important and what is not. I tried this approach this week and … did not like it. I can not read diagonally, if I want to take the best out of it, i have to go deep…

3. Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?
No :). I have always wondered if students answer that they do get everything - it is usually a lie.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?
It was really great to read Terjes comments and it gives me motivation to write some answers and continue discussion. And this made me think: what not use this for motivation. What not to make it assignment for one or two weeks? No other homework - students just must read reflections and reading overviews made by others and write comments to them. As we all have read the same papers this might cause deeper reflection even.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I did contact with Terje - we had nice chat about course, just some feedback.

What are the components of course design? week3

It is a bit difficult for me to understand what is meant by components. Short answer would be: learner, teacher, and environment. After some thoughts I added to the list content and materials. After materials structure, methods and goals came. Then it seemed like an outline. To create some circle development and analysis are missing. I tried to draw these components, but it needs some improvement as learner and teacher /coach / facilitator are missing in the chart. But as I can not show this drawing here, I just type keywords:
* goal and need analysis
* content
* environment
- structure
- methods
- materials
* improvement / evaluation
- feedback
- analysis / reflection
* in the middle of this is construction of knowledge
* motivation
* interaction

Now it seems to me that feedback is very important component in elearning course. In classroom it is possible to see and hear the teacher talking and commenting the content, answering to the questions, opening the context in the same moment. In elearning course this is not happening and therefore continuous interaction and feedback are very important to compensate that.
I hope that I will come back to this and perhaps add some more thoughts about components. There are too many terms/words to have a nice chart...
About materials of this week ...
Somehow I don't like problem-based approach or activity-based approach. I call it "pragmatic view" to learning – shoot, shoot, shoot – think when ever you have time, analyse, discuss, reflect not before but after. First it was teacher-centred, then student-centred and now it is activity/problem-centred approach. When I read materials of problem or activity-based learning it makes me wonder: isn't this actually behaviouristic approach? Yes, it takes into consideration context, but something is missing, something what student-centred approach had. I don't like very much the name: problem-based learning. I believe in learning-by-doing, but I don’t see that this takes place only while solving problems. As in that case the base of learning is some situation from real life then it is perhaps better to call it case-based learning. Not every case is a problem!

I‘ve got it now: I don’t believe in student-content interaction. I believe in student-teacher interaction. But problem-based approach has student-content interaction background. Human part/role of/in learning is missing!

Reflection week 3

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
I think that the most important thing I learned was how complicated it is to design and implement a good online course. Having students with very different backgrounds: some argue about socio-cognition (vau!) and some don't know what reflection is.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I struggled all week with my motivation - it was sometimes interesting and sometimes annoying.

3. Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?
There are many questions. As theories behind elearning are quite new, they often arise more questions then they have answers.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?
How to design and implement a good online course?
When I joined this course I had intrinsic motivation. Course sounded so interesting but for some reasons I lost my motivation. So actually I was looking answers why it happened in readings of this week and I tried to reflect my thoughts and expectations just to understand what is going on with me.
I'm not enjoying this course and I'm not having fun. I do understand that I have not been very active during this course yet, but I found so many people among students who are even less active as I am. So the problem is not just me.
Materials of this course are great - very interesting but also difficult. The problem might be that even if students have questions they don’t ask them. I know that I don’t. Usually these questions do not have one right answer and they need some discussion. This is something what is ease to do in classroom: you just ask and you get an answer and then you can ask again and all the time you actually think along. Here, even when I do ask my questions - my thoughts are not all the time with the context. Here time actually disturbs learning process and synergy. Plus I do feel that we have to much information: over 100 pages of different articles, over 100 slides plus blogs of students/facilitators to read. Everything has different approach, different layout …
Second thing is that I don’t know were to start: where should I post my question? Wiki? Forum? E-mail? Blog? I tried blog but I don’t still have no answers. So this is a wrong way. But I don't know what is right! EMIM forum? Until now it is more used to test and it is unclear to me whether it is for deeper discussion or what kind of questions it is for? Here perhaps might be a good idea if facilitators would take a bit more active role and post some questions there. I spent a lot of time to go through other blogs in our course. There are few brilliant students who write brilliant posts. Perhaps it would be good idea that facilitators will choose every week some interesting ideas/questions to post there so everybody will have a visible opportunity to read/discuss with others. So good posts/ideas come visible for them who don't know much about elearning and we could have several brilliant discussions. Perhaps here some encouragement from facilitators side might help. At the moment there very little discussion about theories we read and questions we have. Another thing: I read that many students write that they have no questions … I can not believe this…
Another thing I thought about is that perhaps there are too many tasks for students. In the begging there are to many environments were we have to create an account. Perhaps this is a little scary? For me it was! And it takes time to get to know those environments - more then one week. All students have different background: for some it is technically to demanding (don't be in love with different environments!), for some it is theoretically to demanding (my background is in adult education and sometimes it is hard for me to understand everything or to select what is really important). As we don't have classroom discussions and explanations I do feel left alone with my study and struggles.
Too many challenges create frustration and kill motivation. My suggestion is to take some time off and give students more time to adapt.


5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I wrote 2 comments for Jasna (actually one was more to Terje), one comment for Terje. Via skype communicated shortly with Oleg and Lesavik 
More I read different blogs (facilitators and studens) and their comments. I still need some time to adapt.

just some questions…

... to think about.
Does e-learning enable students to be more self-directed? Or does elearning without good guidance just confuse students?
Is elearning more student-friendly or without good guidance does not attract to learn?
Does elearning support inside motivation?
Is the process of knowledge creation different in elearning?
How is it possible to develop skills (!) in elearning or support it?
How to compensate missing communication between students/teachers? Or is there a need for that?
How can elearning support the creation of new knowledge? Can e-learning develop students academic knowledge/academic reflection or does it support more handcraft skills?

Week 2

What was the most important thing you learned this week?
From article: learning process must have fun together. This very important - perhaps even more important then knowledge about behaviourism, constructivism…
What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
We still don’t have discussion, but it is not ease to have discussion with 70 persons and we just formed our group.
Interesting - I'm still trying to figure out how exactly work with this blog.
Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
There are some thoughts in my readings blog. I must sure how do authors understand "tacit knowledge" and how knowledge becomes "tacit".
What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
Experiences … I'm a little more experienced how to handle my blog… but I'm still not an expert.
Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Moodle, Blog. I looked some links Moodle offered.
MSN, Skype - to communicate with my friends 
MS Word - to write reflections.
With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
There was no communication from my side with co-students during this week. I read blogs of co-students and facilitators and tried to figure out what kind of persons stand behind them.

Which principles of groupwork, communities of practice and collaborative learning should a distributed group consider, when planning the design of an e-learning course? week2

Short answer would be: build trust: towards members of the team, towards technology used and towards learning process. Let learners decide how they want to learn (let them set the rules and roles). Support interaction between learners and give them feedback.
What is important: to give learners time to build trust. It does not happen overnight. Trusting each other means that learners must have time to develop common "language" and common understanding. They must learn to know each others' strengths and weaknesses.
Technical apprehension - this is definitely a problematic question when planning an e-learning course.
How can learners see what they have learned: reflection period and assignments must be thought through? How will they communicate and collaborate.
Networking, knowledge how to communicate, collaborate, how to communicate effectively, how to create opportunities for learning and growth, collect and provide feedback.
And of course: you can not forget the "fun" - this celebration idea in article was great!

But I want to share my thought about the article in the way which does not match perhaps the title of the blog.
First I did not like this article very much (readings last week were much better from my point of view). This one was not very well structured, cases described were not well bounded with literature analysis and differences/similarities of described cases were not deeply analysed. I did get too little new information and they raised more questions than I found answers.
Still there were some moments when I realised that this is something we are trying to do or what is still ahead of us in this class. Like we are trying to "learn about" and "learn how to" at the same time.

As team members know each other before then of course it was easier for them to build trust and to be more successful with online learning/working (this is similar in classroom as well).

What really disturbed me in this article was the approach of authors to the knowledge and more specifically to tacit knowledge. It might be because tacit knowledge is quite obscure term and authors did not explain what they meant with it or how tacit knowledge develops. From my point of view in successful e-learning groups learning process begins with explicit knowledge except for the teams who have worked together before or who previously have had e-learning courses (and have some technological skills), but this is not very common now. Otherwise e-learning is explicit and bounded with "aha"-effect or conflict situation (in both cases learning is explicit). Every team member has his own understanding about the process, has his own learning experience …. So to create a successful e-learning group, the first stage learning must be explicit.

There is one sentence in this article with what it is hard for me to agree: "once team members trust, they are more likely to make their tacit knowledge explicit, transform explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge …" First: if a learner makes (!) tacit knowledge explicit then it must be explicit already. Otherwise tacit knowledge becomes (!) explicit to others. And knowledge becomes more explicit more learners communicate/interact with each other. I'm not sure in the second part of this claim: if trust is the reason why explicit knowledge comes tacit. It has more to do with learners' competence development then team members trust.

Other question for me is: whether learners can learn something "tacitly" or tacit knowledge is something what expands from explicit knowledge?

Now about "Teachable Moments". Of course conflict situations and failures are teachable moments and the best way to learn is from one's own experience. Authors bound teachable moments with failure. It gives an impression like all valuable learning would happen through failure or conflict.
To create secured environment for failures, it means that the feedback to failure (learner does not always recognise this) must take place practically online. As e-learning tends to be more time consuming then it is not easy to do (it is a huge pressure to facilitator).
Other thing is that "teachable moment" can happen through positive success!

About "inciting conflict". I would be very careful to encourage inciting conflict. I have seen (so this is not based on academic knowledge ) some training where facilitator knowing that conflict in the group would take place trying to encourage conflict. The results of that were not great. If one wants to do something like this then one must have perfect knowledge in psychology and perfect sense of individuals so that the group could be put back work together again. Conflict appears in group processes usually anyway - so let it be normal and real conflict what is usable to all group members as well.
It is hard to agree with authors that learning "does not become "real" until conflict occur". Unfortunately authors do not offer definition to "real learning".

Week 1

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby’s taxonomy and many more. Idea that web’s in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. “agent”-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

Archives

Do not edit this page

eLearning blog

My eLearning blog continues during this semester: here

E-learning course: week 1

As this is my first experience with e-learning then there was a lot of confusion with this environment, requirements and materials: lot of links where to orientate and too much information. So first few days I was only looking around and tried to make sense of it. Some links were very good and some did not open :).

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in e-learning we might say are the same as regular learning: it is movement from behaviouristic explanation of learning to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism = why) - this is brilliant.

Although these learning trends reflect in e-learning as well, it is still hard for me to see behaviourism as ground of e-learning. If we want to train students then e-learning is perhaps not the best method.

But as understanding of learning process is changing the way how to plan (how to motivate, assess,…), create materials and learning environment (does it enable interaction; is it ease to understand and orientate), communicate with each is changing.

In behaviourism students do get the learning materials, in constructivism learners should be allowed to construct their knowledge. So the roles of student and teacher are changing: student activity changes from passive learner to active (therefore student motivation is changing as well) participant of learning process. (From personal learning to collaborative and cooperative, interactive learning). With taking active role in learning process student takes more control of his/her learning. Instead of cram facts deeper understanding of content is important.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult.

About trends (what is going to happen next) - it is very hard to predict. Probably a lot of discussion/communication and therefore learning will move to web. This might cause the overload of information and people don't have time to deepen anymore.

It might happen that brilliant guys will get more brilliant and other will have problems with information overload and orientation and therefore they might give up and satisfy with secondary/ light information. So this is the worst what might happen…

We can not say now that e-learning makes learning more accessible when there are many people who don't have a computer and internet.
But for those who have access e-learning … It is still hard to predict. Two main things can cause learning: the will and the need. Will depends on motivation (inside motivation). But how many people you do know who have constant will to learn in formal or even informal way? So a part of learning comes from need (outside motivation). It might even depend on economy …Although form economy-side the future is bright: knowledge-based and flexible economy requires (constant) learning and if e-learning is more accessible then it might become more successful.

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby's taxonomy and many more. Idea that web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.


Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. "agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.


What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.


Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.


With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

Hello

My name is Kersti and currently I am studying at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. I am a student of IMKE.

I like travelling, photographing. Every country is different and there is always something to discover and perpetuate. So I have lot of pictures. If I should somehow categorize them, then the biggest catalogue would carry a name "Croatia" :)

Beautiful country (excellent food, good wine if you know what and where to eat and drink) and from my point of view Varazdin is not a typical Croatian city …

But we in Estonia have white nights in summer-time :)


I have used before: blog, wiki, msn, skype, orkut (community portal).

My interest in this course: what is e-learning, how can e-learning be successful, learning strategies, …

I am little sceptical about e-learning and this is my first e-learning course. I do hope it changes my preconception.

Other expectations:

I want to have some structured knowledge about e-learning.

I am curious whether e-course can create synergy between learners and teachers.

Hello

My name is Kersti and currently I am studying at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. I am a student of IMKE.

I like travelling, photographing. Every country is different and there is always something to discover and perpetuate. So I have lot of pictures. If I should somehow categorize them, then the biggest catalogue would carry a name "Croatia" :)

Beautiful country (excellent food, good wine if you know what and where to eat and drink) and from my point of view Varazdin is not a typical Croatian city …

But we in Estonia have white nights in summer-time :)

I have used before: blog, wiki, msn, skype, orkut (community portal).

My interest in this course: what is e-learning, how can e-learning be successful, learning strategies, …

I am little sceptical about e-learning and this is my first e-learning course. I do hope it changes my preconception.

Other expectations:

I want to have some structured knowledge about e-learning.

I am curious whether e-course can create synergy between learners and teachers.

E-learning course: week 1

As this is my first experience with e-learning then there was a lot of confusion with this environment, requirements and materials: lot of links where to orientate and too much information. So first few days I was only looking around and tried to make sense of it. Some links were very good and some did not openJ.

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in learning we might say is movement from behaviouristic explanation to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism =why) - this is brilliant.

Although these learning trends reflect in e-learning as well, it is still hard for me to see behaviourism as ground of e-learning. If we want to train students then e-learning is perhaps not the best method.

But as understanding of learning process is changing the way how to plan (how to motivate, assess,…), create materials and learning environment (does it enable interaction; is it ease to understand and orientate), communicate with each is changing.

In behaviourism students do get the learning materials, in constructivism learners should be allowed to construct their knowledge. So the roles of student and teacher are changing: student activity changes from passive learner to active (therefore student motivation is changing as well) participant of learning process. (From personal learning to collaborative and cooperative, interactive learning). With taking active role in learning process student takes more control of his/her learning. Instead of cram facts deeper understanding of content is important.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby's taxonomy and many more. Idea that web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. "agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started J

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

E-learning course: week 1

As this is my first experience with e-learning then there was a lot of confusion with this environment, requirements and materials: lot of links where to orientate and too much information. So first few days I was only looking around and tried to make sense of it. Some links were very good and some did not openJ.

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in e-learning we might say are the same as regular learning: it is movement from behaviouristic explanation of learning to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism = why) - this is brilliant.

Although these learning trends reflect in e-learning as well, it is still hard for me to see behaviourism as ground of e-learning. If we want to train students then e-learning is perhaps not the best method.

But as understanding of learning process is changing the way how to plan (how to motivate, assess,…), create materials and learning environment (does it enable interaction; is it ease to understand and orientate), communicate with each is changing.

In behaviourism students do get the learning materials, in constructivism learners should be allowed to construct their knowledge. So the roles of student and teacher are changing: student activity changes from passive learner to active (therefore student motivation is changing as well) participant of learning process. (From personal learning to collaborative and cooperative, interactive learning). With taking active role in learning process student takes more control of his/her learning. Instead of cram facts deeper understanding of content is important.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult.

About trends (what is going to happen next) - it is very hard to predict. Probably a lot of discussion/communication and therefore learning will move to web. This might cause the overload of information and people don't have time to deepen anymore.

It might happen that brilliant guys will get more brilliant and other will have problems with information overload and orientation and therefore they might give up and satisfy with secondary/ light information. So this is the worst what might happen…

We can not say now that e-learning makes learning more accessible when there are many people who don't have a computer and internet.

But for those who have access e-learning … It is still hard to predict. Two main things can cause learning: the will and the need. Will depends on motivation (inside motivation). But how many people you do know who have constant will to learn in formal or even informal way? So a part of learning comes from need (outside motivation). It might even depend on economy …Although form economy-side the future is bright: knowledge-based and flexible economy requires (constant) learning and if e-learning is more accessible then it might become more successful.

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby's taxonomy and many more. Idea that web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. "agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

New Education

Author

Kersti Peenema

Keywords

Education, competencies, creativity, e-learning, knowledge

Abstract

In this article Kersti Peenema from Tallinn University focus on the new goals of education. The main goal of article is to find an answer based on literature analysis to the question whether e-learning can meet the competencies of tomorrow. Peenema expresses her belief that using Web 2.0 tools in education will help develop creativity and competencies of tomorrow.

Intorduction

Development of technology is rapid and this has impact to the society and education. With the development of electronic forms of communication and World Wide Web new learning spaces are being created (Jarvis, Holford & Griffin 2003). As society is changing more knowledgebased the question arises: what kind of education we do need to meet the requirements of tomorrow.

Research Question

How can e-learning meet the competencies of tomorrow?

Method

Method used in this blog is literature analysis.

Future competencies

Ken Robinson (an expert on creativity) argues in one of his presentations, that we do have the same kind of educational system for a long time now: mathematics is still at the top of the curriculum and arts down of the list. He poses a question: whether the structure and goals of today's education meet new requirements of society 50 years in the future? His answer is no as for the future we have to support more creativity.

Quite the same is said in the Report of National Centre of Education and the Economy in 2006 where skills of future are listed as: collaboration, communication, creativity, innovation, information literacy, critical thinking, problem solving and global awareness (Rosenfeld 2007). Erica de Vries argues also, that people need in the future to have competence in defining problems, finding information and collaboration (de Vries 2003). The nature of work is changing: there are more people who are working in the knowledge-based professions. Knowledge-based professions have a continuous need for updating their competence (Severinson Eklundh, Groth, Hedman, Lantz, Rodriguez, Sallnäs 2003). These people are dealing with different mental problems every day. Based on this, we can say: problem solving will be the key issue in future, but successful problem solving can be based only on creativity. So how can we support creativity instead of killing it?

As society is becoming more knowledgebased more people who are part of educational system are representers of knowledge-based professions, it means that lifelong education and the availability of different educational possibilities are growingly important questions. Here e-learning can definitely help by offering different tools to learn in formal as well in informal education. But the question is: will e-learning meet the requirements of tomorrow?

Use of technological solutions and real life

When web changed to web 2.0 it brought along the change of goals and the essence of web. Instead of being just arbitrator of information (offering/receiving) web 2.0 is about creation of new information and knowledge. In web the user was passive and just gained information, in web 2.0 the user is active (!) and takes part of knowledge creation. This is qualitative change and it has changed the goals and structure of web. Similar to web 2.0 there is already discussion about education 2.0 but it remains quite technological. So there must be a qualitative change in education before it is legitimate to use the term education 2.0. Todays discussions about education 2.0 are supporting the same essence of education as it is today. Will there be education 2.0 or are we just using new tools of technology to fulfil old goals of education?

So we don’t have yet deep discussion about education 2.0, but still: can e-learning somehow support creativity as basis tomorrow's competencies? Roschelle and Pea in 1999 have pointed out, that today's web-based communication is pretty much text-based. This leaves knowledge creation to background and supports just passive reading (Järvelä, Häkkinen 2003). So today many opportunities stay unused. More active creation and use of videos, live-conferences, live-interaction, online communities and (why not) different simulations would help us solve that problem and fortunately we can see it already happening. But as the design of virtual environments is political (Gillespie 2003), it must be possible to create a learning environment to support creativity. Let us take for example virtual environment Second Life (SL) what has being used as a learning tool . Terry Beaubois created a virtual classroom on architecture . Since almost everything is possible in SL, it gives to the student's possibility to try out different architectural design. Students can try things what they would never try in a normal classroom: it is possible by either denying the laws of nature (gravitation) or it's just not too expensive. This all enables students to "think out of the box" and foster their creativity.

Of course there rises a question: how can we create a bridge between this kind of learning and real life with real situations. It is very important to know how to transfer our knowledge to the real world. In this transfer reflection has important role: does this kind of learning make students reflect more their knowledge? Visualisation of their knowledge helps to bring out tacit knowledge. Students are more conscious about it and it might become a ground to the creation of new knowledge. It might be even great that you have to visualises everything (even by writing) because if helps to reflect. So this is real win-win situation: tacit knowledge will become visible and conscious and knowledge will be available to others and used a ground for creation something new. The key question is how to do it so that people will want to make it visible.

Second Life is a multiplayer role play game (Doherty, Murphy 2007). As future games will be more complex and realistic and players will have more control over them (story, structure) (Goldstein 2003), this means that using different games in learning will add more fun and creativity to the process. And having fun in learning usually guarantees a good learning outcome. But using different games is hole different approach to the education then usual classroom study.

Different generations

There is one more problem in the field of new education. Differences between the generations are growing larger and larger and not only from an attitude side. Young people of tomorrow will still have another attitude toward life, but they will have a different skill profile and different thinking structure. As technology is more widely available, more people are using it. Because of use of technology there skill and thinking profile is different and this is causing a conflict between the generations. As more learning is becoming knowledgebased there will be a fundamental shift in the relations of teachers and learners (Jarvis et al. 2003). They will be from different generations and the old ways of teaching do not work. So it gets harder to understand and predict the needs of future and the essence of new education. If we can, then it's clear that new education requires radical change in the ways in which learning is organised and executed. E-learning may develop the skills and creativity; it is the great enabler (Thompson, Randall 2001). It all depends whether we can realised that.

Conclusion

In this paper I analysed impact of development of technology to education. Society is changing and therefore the goals of education need to change. With wider use of technology we have different technological tools to support new goals of education.

References:

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