We Always Come Back to Didactics

Last friday, I had the honour to open the first E-Learning Day at FH Dortmund (Tag der mediengestützten Lehre) with a speach about "Didaktische Potenziale von ILIAS" (didactical capabilities of ILIAS). When I prepared my presentation I noticed that we spent a lot of time in the last ten years of e-learning at German universities with technical evaluation and discussion, especially in the first years. I remember well that we got almost once a month a request to fill out an evaluation paper about ILIAS and its capabilities. There were discussions whether open source or commercial software is better and sustainable. We disputed about the advantages of PHP and Java a.s.o.

But suddenly, this discussion came to an end and we entered a second stage of e-learning development: the question of integration and organisation. Main trigger for this discussion was the implementation of Bologna at German universities. I believe that Bologna has a bigger influence on the further development and implementation of e-learning at our universities then any national or EU funded IT and e-learning programme. We started to connect our e-learning platforms with campus management systems and tried to implement an integrated information and identity management. At several universities this step towards an integration of e-learning into the IT infrastrucutre and adminstration processes is well-developed today.

So, now is the time for a third stage: starting (again) with e-learning. I still use this word - regardless of a current discussion in the German e-learning scene to abolish this term. And so we come back to didactics. As long as most of our platforms are nothing but a download center for pdf and powerpoint files, I see a lot of possibilities of improvement from this point of view. The technical and organisational framework is given (at a lot of institutions). Now we should focus on how we support classroom teaching with appropriate e-learning. No matter if it is more cooperative or collaborative, if we support self-assessment or adaptive learning, as long as teachers/professors are creative and interested to use the existing tools and use them in daily teaching, I am confident of an improvement of e-learning. And we go on to offer the right tool for it. ;-)