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E-learning in education

Bozena Mannová

E-learning CTU Prague



Introduction
The adoption of e-learning into education can be currently described as a steady trend, resulting from the combination of factors such as pure technology (as technology advancements, server/browser evolution), socio-technologic (web access penetration at home level) demographic effects, market considerations, pedagogical and administrative/managerial reasons, etc.
E-learning platforms are offering the tools for teachers to design flexible approaches to learning, supporting collaboration, facilitating interaction among teachers and students, promoting new evaluation methods, reinforcing the learning context, enhancing a more participated teaching and learning process and allowing the development of knowledge communities.
The e-learning is good tool for any kind of education, so it may be good also for education of seniors. But it needs not only seniors willing to use this kind of support, seniors which are familiar with Internet and computers, but also seniors with Internet connected computers. Because for seniors in the Czech Republic there is no common to have Internet at home, we have to start to use e-learning within the Universities of the Tried Age at CTU.

Teaching with E-support
From 1998 we have taught at Department of Computer Science and Engineering courses with a different e-learning support: WebCT, TWT, TopClass and now with Moodle. Courses were always offered in standard form and e-support was just a new dimension for teaching and learning.
At the end of each term we did evaluation of the teaching experience from students and from teachers of the courses. We gave a 17 - pages questionnaire where we asked about experience with different functions of the e-support and general satisfaction with the tool. The students did this electronically and the questionnaire is on the page http://sen.felk.cvut.cz/twt and there are some interesting results from this. For example, at CTU 93% of students have access to Internet from home, but 55% of them are using e-learning at school. The average of student access to the course was 2.9 times per week and they spent 0.9 hours on e-learning per week. They needed 0.2 hours of support each week and initial training of 3.2 hours. This means that to start using e-learning, it requires a lot of time from the teachers and course designers and also from the students.
The general satisfaction with e-learning was relatively high. Students gave an average rating of 3.6 from a range of 1 to 5 (5 highest value) and teachers gave an average rating of 4. We feel that those are good results and it means that this type of teaching is a good innovation.

Future Development and Conclusion
This year we prepared general questionnaires for trainers, educators and students to determine their needs. We distributed these among 6 main universities teaching e-learning courses in the Czech Republic. The evaluation will give us an overview of the situation and also helps us to developing new training tools and methods in e-learning.
The expectation and understanding about the role of technologies are quite diverse among teachers. Also the support each teacher requires to be able to incorporate e-learning into their teaching model is ranging from information group sessions to individual consulting meetings.
In next year we also prepare part of our seniors courses with e-learning support. We are curious how the seniors will cope with it. It may be advantage for them that they may work as fast as they need, but they will need (at least from the beginning) some special support.
E-learning give us a new dimension of teaching/learning support. But don't forget the classics! As educators we are transmitting a culture to our scholars, the culture of education. One part of that culture is the awareness of the "classical" literature of the field. But in case o seniors this is obvious.