Blended eLearning: The future is beginning today

The concept of e-learning is used nowadays together with the familiar to everybody concept of “Distance Learning and Education”. Nevertheless, e-learning introduces a wider notion and implicated a combination of different forms and means of learning based on the information and communication technologies.

At present the learning process requires new means implying a wide use of the vast opportunities provided by the Internet and data processing. The main advantage of e-learning is the use of the Internet that implicitly has profoundly changed the Learning process bringing together curricula designers, different specialists and students.

The competition going on among educational institutions resulted in an escalated campaign for attracting new students. The strive of educational institutions for the consolidation of their market positions led up to the development of dozens of thousands curricula. However, a student is sure to choose the learning course or specialty, which is requested by employers.

It is believed that in 2025 virtual universities will prevail in the system of higher education. Why not? And as to the virtual college for vocational training, it should be more flexible regarding learning forms, learning process and techniques so as to gain under market condition within a short period of time a quick respond to the training needs determined by the requirements of clients. Organizations can present various curricula, control the level of the obtained knowledge and build up subgroups of the network students.

There are a number of obstacles hindering the development of learning technologies in Armenia, in particular, absence of the legislative field and indifference of the educational institutions towards the development of the e-learning strategies. The results of the carried out studies prove that in the last few years the attitude of the national higher education institutions to e-learning has changed and a certain interest to it is revealed. The higher educational institutions cannot fail to see the advantages of e-learning and make first steps to bring into practice its methods not only in organizations of both the distance and present day learning process.

The e-learning technologies create also opportunities for advanced vocational training of specialists, especially by offering on-the-job training and improving continually the syllabi. The training organized directly on workplace spares time and finance, which makes it more attractive as compared with others.

At present the level of education has become a serious item challenging educational establishments all over the world. If a few years ago only classical education was in question, nowadays the concept of quality can be applied to e-learning as well. Such an acute interest can be easily explained, as one can hardly find in most countries an educational institution or organization not using e-learning for its students of employees. The quality of the classical education and, to be more precise, its concept, has already been formed to a certain degree. The keystones of the high-quality training are qualified teaching personnel, carefully chosen and thoroughly elaborated curricula, sufficient computer equipment of the training institution and vocational organization of the learning process. The above-mentioned factors are also valid for e-learning, but one must bear in mind the central\main position of e-learning (“In any place at any time”). That is why the e-learning curriculum must be designed in such a way that the students can acquire the necessary knowledge and be trained without his or her daily routine and tempo of living being distorted.

Summarizing the afore-mentioned, we can conclude that when estimating the quality level the following question is to be answered: Can the offered training course really enable the student to learn on his own and meantime to have good records? The answer is to be found in the curriculum of e-learning. It should be also taken into account that besides the available teaching technologies the student gets the opportunity to have a permanent access to the necessary materials, supplementary sources, to communicate with and to transfer information to both and the lecturers and other students.

Yulia Stakyan
Armenia, Yerevan,
August 20, 2006