Technology-Enhanced Learning

Today was a one-day workshop held at the Carnegie Stand, organised by our Pro-Vice Chancellor for Assessment, Learning, and Teaching, Sally Brown. I somehow had missed this event - and yesterday evening Sally invited me to participate. I was only able to attend in the morning, because I again had a meeting this afternoon that had been previously scheduled.

We discussed the use of online learning and the issues associated with it. It emerged that the current implementations are still quite away from the ideal solution, where students can use these online "eLearning" systems for individual learning - but we are on the way. Leeds Met has invested significantly into WebCT, and will continue to use this system.

One issue that was brought up was that students nowadays do not always accept the "institutional" online systems provided by the university (email, discussion boards) - and rather use forums and discussion boards outside of the university. This just has to be accepted - one cannot "force" students to use a specific system, as they have a great choice of where they want to participate. The solution might be to link to these other resources and to provide an attractive and easy to use portal. There may still be some work to do on our side...
Graffiti Board with questions and issues.