Parallel sessions - stocktaking (conclusions)

The four stocktaking sessions were summarized during the afternoon plenary session.
I can't count how many times we heard the phrase "let's take the E out of ELearning" - rather obvious, but yet I can't fail to observe how many e-learning solutions focus on technological innovation or software packages instead of learning/teaching.

Interesting was the observation that it's rather easy to identify spectacular failures, but that it proves to be difficult to identify scalable and repeatable success stories. It's not at all obvious to upscale small grassroots projects to.

One of the most intriguing conclusions came from the session "society at large" (reported by Michelle Selinger, Cisco Systems). ELearning was supposed to provide knowledge and skills to those who previously were unable to participate in the information society... However, we can't fail to observe that this goal has not been reached - on the contrary: elearning increases the gap between the information literates and illiterates. It often seems to reinforce outmoded forms of pedagogy - pushing content to learners in an online environment is just as bad as in a classroom environment.

Low achievers perform even worse in an online learning environment: there is often less support, a problematic home situation making self-study difficult, and a horrible lack of interaction, making the learning even more difficult for them.