The Position of E-Learning Systems in 2001

Despite the increase in published results on e-learning, it appears that the implementation of e-learning systems has not kept pace with advances in technology. This perception is surprising, as the adoption of progressive e-learning technologies have the potential to draw large numbers of students to an institution. Seemingly, presentation is still limited to static pages, promoting a faculty and the courses it offers to a wider geographical reach, with little evidence of instructional interactivity other than instructor accessibility through web communication channels such as e-mail, chatand news-groups. By interactivity we imply the dynamic interaction between student and educational system, not only with regards to course material but also the total course and academic environment, normally integrated into a portal environment. Most academic institutions, it seems, are not yet ready to deliver interactive online instruction, and as a result, the market for e-learning has been slow to take off. The reasons for this lack of readiness/preparedness may vary from institution to institution. Generally speaking, some of the more prominent constraints include, inter alia: substandard technology infrastructure delivery and support; low funding; failure to localize technologies; low levels of lecturer/facilitator expertise and/or commitment coupled with a shortage of educational technology-, instructional design-, and learning development staff; low levels of student accessibility to the Internet; bandwidth availability and/or accessibility; and non-suitability of academic content and goals to such designs. Many commercial e-learning products from companies eager to assist institutions to introduce e-learning systems are in existence. Despite the benefits associated with the use of some these products (such as facilitation and insurance of an acceptable level of instructional interactivity via the Internet), concern remains that these systems are often driven by technology, rather than pedagogical strategies and objectives. Institutions are in need of e-learning systems that will enable them to design and develop e-classroom situations and environments that not only allow for dynamic interaction between students and lecturers, or students and students, but also between students and administration, and students and other institutional services. Palpably, many of the current systems that are available today address a only fraction of the requirements, while the others are simply too complex for full-scale deployment, or have high technical requirements at least too high for students with only entrylevel systems at their disposal. It often seems as if the complexity of e-learning systems is underrated, which results in frustrating experiments and discouraging learning experiences. Some of the issues that need to be addressed by e-learning systems include • Guidance and assistance in course design & development for the electronic environment. • Embedded teaching & learning models and paradigms. • Embedded student-to-lecturer and student-to-student communication systems: the required vs the nice-to-have technologies reducing and not increasing the workload of the facilitators. • Support for multiple instructors, facilitators, evaluators, demonstrators. • Support for collaborative learning methods. • Assessment & feedback structures, capabilities & technologies. • Configurability, manageability & usability of learning environment from different perspectives. • Open systems interaction capabilities. • Course content issues: format, exportability between vendor/system platforms, system dependencies, component driven capabilities, adaptation to and from other formats. • Security & access issues