ELearningware

Bruce Forrester believes that the term “courseware” when applied to eLearning and been defined too narrowly. In the past 4 years of his research in educational technology at OISE/UT, the main conclusion reached was that the power of eLearning came from the interaction of students through a progressive discourse. This means that what is traditionally defined as courseware (fire and forget, page turners, courses that require no instructor or interaction with other students), while a good way to pass on information, is not an effective eLearning strategy, especially if what you want is for students to learn. Further, the traditional conversion of f2f (face to face) courses to online courses tends to be very expensive. So, by using the number of courses as a performance indicator, we are setting ourselves up for failure, both in terms of ROI and more importantly in actual learning!

What is eLearningware? It is more related to pedagogy than an actual product. It emphasizes the “computer mediated communication” aspect and puts the power of learning into the hands of the students. It includes things like: discussion groups; chat; blogs; wikis; webinars with discussion groups; live virtual class; communities of practice; lesson learned databases; and any combination of the latter. The tools that support these pedagogical techniques are not expensive. In fact, most are currently available through open source.