E-learning continues to grow in importance in different parts of the world. Indeed, some educational planners see it as one of the few relatively unrestricted avenues for innovation in teaching and learning. The European eLearning Action Plan defines e-learning as:
The use of new multimedia technologies and the Internet to improve the quality of learning by facilitating access to resources and services as well as remote exchange and collaboration.
A tendency has, however, grown to use ‘distance education’ and ‘e-learning’ interchangeably. The use of distance education and e-learning as interchangeable or composite phrases introduces a blurring conflation of the terms, which has sometimes led to poor quality strategic planning. It is true that introduction of ICT introduces a new range of educational strategies, but it remains a relatively simple matter to establish whether specific uses of ICT incorporate temporal and/or spatial separation. Thus, for example, learners working independently through a CD-ROM or online course materials are clearly engaged in a distance education practice, while use of satellite-conferencing, although it allows a degree of spatial separation, has more in common with face-to-face education because it requires learners to be in a specific place at a specific time. Many people harnessing ICT seem to think they are harnessing the benefits of good quality distance education, when, in most cases, they are simply finding technologically clever ways of replicating traditional, face-to-face education models.
The only complexity within this is that ICT has created one specific new form of contact, which is not easily classified as either face-to-face or distance. Online communication allows students and academics to remain separated by space and time (although some forms of communication assume people congregating at a common time), but to sustain an ongoing dialogue. Online discussion forums, for example, reflect an instance where the spatial separation between educator and learners is removed by the ‘virtual’ space of the Internet, but where there remains temporal separation. As a discussion forum allows sustained, ongoing communication between academics and students, it is clearly a form of contact not a form of independent study. Thus, there may be cause to introduce a new descriptor for educational methods of direct educator-student contact that are not face-to-face, but are mediated through new communications technologies.
The most important lesson that has emerged from the past 10 years is to ensure that each education intervention using ICT is planned and implemented on its own merits, rather than forced into simplistic, dichotomous categories (such as ‘distance education’ or ‘face-to-face education’), which set arbitrary and unhelpful constraints. Technologies can be applied in a range of ways, to support an almost limitless combination of teaching and learning strategies, and it is essential to keep options as open as possible. Particularly, as Goodyear notes:
We should try to design technology which is appropriate to their actual work rather than technology which embodies our teacher/managers’ beliefs about what students should be doing.
However, it should also be noted that the typical approach currently of experimentally deploying new technologies on campuses does not include processes to quickly scale them up to broad usage when they work and this often creates its own obstacles to full deployment. Thus, careful management is an important requirement.