E-learning 2.0

Is e-Learning a Web 1.0 concept or is it truly embracing the ideas behind Web 2.0 and all that it has to offer? How about this, read the article below and you can be the judge.

E-learning as we know it has been around for ten years or so. During that time, it has emerged from being a radical idea—the effectiveness of which was yet to be proven—to something that is widely regarded as mainstream. It’s the core to numerous business plans and a service offered by most colleges and universities.

And now, e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it’s changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0.

Where We Are Now
Before talking about where e-learning is going, it is worth spending a few words to describe here we are now.

When we think of learning content today, we probably think of a learning object. Originating in the world of computer-based delivery (CBT) systems, learning objects were depicted as being like lego blocks or atoms, little bits of content that could be put together or organized. Standards bodies have refined the concept of learning objects into a rigorous form and have provided specifications on how to sequence and organize these bits of content into courses and package them for delivery as though they were books or training manuals.

Today, e-learning mainly takes the form of online courses. From the resources distributed by MIT’s OpenCourseware project to the design of learning materials in Rice’s Connexions project to the offerings found from colleges and universities everywhere, the course is the basic unit of organization. [Read the rest]

[tags]school,web 2.0,e-learning,teaching[/tags]