E-Learning Forum

I’m making this post for two reasons.

1) To give a link to a very useful blog on e-learning, Auricle at Bath University, to which a regular contributor is Derek Morrison, Acting Head of e-Learning at the Higher Education Academy and one of the most interesting speakers on e-learning in Britain.

2) Because on that blog is a very critical and informed contribution on the problems of e-learning, by Derek himself, see extract:

‘The rhetoric is we are breaking away from monoliths. Yet, we seem to be trapped in a reality of constantly reinforcing the monolith’s walls. Our learning technologist talk may be of eLearning Frameworks, components, Learning Objects, Web Services, Distributed architectures, Service Oriented Architectures, Portals, Reusability, Learning Object Repositories, and eTools, but this is far from the mundane e-learning reality of what’s on offer, or even worse what’s being ‘allowed’.
… Managed to get institutional support for standalone weblogs and wikis yet? … What do you mean the students are using RSS aggregators and free services like Flickr, Blogdigger and Bloglines to access resources we haven’t approved of from outside of the VLE? And what are we going to do with that guy whose developed or exploited an e-tool which doesn’t work with our VLE but yet the student’s love it? Shall we get his Head of Department to send a stiff letter warning him to stop it because it contravenes our institution’s policy?
…
I’ve argued on many occasions that we need to be developing a more flexible technical infrastructure to support e-learning than the current bland proprietary VLE-oriented diet. Such a diet was perhaps useful as an initial starting point for e-learning but, for many, has rapidly becoming the end-point, i.e. “we’ve got e-learning because we’ve got a VLE”. Go on, ask a random member of faculty about e-learning and count the seconds before the VLE dominates the discussion. ‘

I’m sure that strikes bells for many here at Derby, at least those who attended the last e-learning Forum
For the whole article see this.

Pete