eLearning Africa: Day 1
We are also creating these fantastic tools that undoubtedly have the potential to enhance the learning experience, but do our potential technology-hungry learners actually have the digital competency to consume all this learning media that we are creating?
If eLearning is a revolution we need to ensure that our learners have the prospective tools, abilities and competencies to deal with this new environment for learning.
In the FD 5 conference this morning, presented by a panel of delegates from e-formation/e-partage entitled ‘Creating eLearning Together’, they talked about the French Ministry for Higher Education and Research’s Computer and Internet Certificate being a “MOOC-type system (Massive Open Online Course).
The idea behind digital competency is that learning is a lifelong and integrated process for which we need tools. The notion of going to a University for a three year course to learn or to acquire knowledge should be viewed as a process to gain the skills to continue on a lifelong journey of learning.
Hopefully by making the tools for eLearning open we can go a long way to bringing down the barriers to studying online. Technology doesn’t need to daunting. A person only needs to know how to operate the remote control, not the complicated electronics inside. I think the first thing that SACOB is going to do when we get back from the conference is create an eLearning course about eLearning – a tutorial for all our other courses demystifying all that jargon and process” says Stacey Henn, SACOB principal.
There is another side to this story as well. Why do we need courses at all? Most tech savvy people could find out anything they wanted to know from Google, right? After all, is discovery not the root of all learning? Well, we have all acquired that skill to learn, which is what digital competency is all about. What courses do is collect and collate raw information or media into a sequential learning pathway, in other words, course creators are doing the Google’ing for you.