e-training or technology enhanced learning?

• Think about your own training and education.
• Ask yourself if you only ever teach in the same way you were taught.
• Can you identify which of the main theories were in use?
• Can you discern why they might have been used?
• State the extent to which you able to apply theoretical principles to the desing of any kinds of teaching materials?
• Decide if you need to read more about learning theory.

One of the main things about doing the whole course is how much it has made me reflect on my own education - and I can spot where different learning approaches were being used. I can see that in seminars we were prompted to engage in discussion, which at the time I found irritating. Several members of my group wouldn't have read anything, and didn't have anything to contribute - and the person at the front with the doctorate and the knowledge had just left the room! How was that going to help? With the benefit of theories of learning, I can see how the act of explaining what I had read to others helped me to form a clearer account of it (constructivism) as well as some transferable skills supposedly applicable in the workplace (not quite critical approaches to HE). Looking back, you can also see the presence of learning theories in assessment.

We had one moment of explicit 'TEL' in my undergrad degree - a series of web-forum posts in an online exchange with a politics class at a US university. It was fairly innovative at the time.

It's easy to fall back on teaching in the way I was taught. I can see myself doing it at times. I think it's easy because it looks like university teaching - to the teacher, to their colleagues and the institution, and to the students. I'm not personally sure about the efficacy of the traditional lecture, but I'll still probably use them.

The social constructivist approach makes the most sense to me - it also fits in with the way I think about the social world outside of education - especially as most of my teaching work is not in mechanical, routine techniques or tasks - but rather attempts to understand or question the world. I can however see the origins of this in the discipline I studied in. There's a politics to education, and especially to education about politics!

Translating this across to online learning, means that its important to account for the variation that comes from individual experience prior to the learning environment, and also for the group dynamics - which are likely to be radically different to the physical encounter, and we might be missing clues from physical behaviour, expression etc.

TEL might have some interested implications for emancipatory education. On one hand, we might have the potential for even more narrowly defined education - tick this box, spend this much time on this exercise, etc. On the other hand we might have better ways to communicate with people (especially with more diverse people), or to access material outside of what we could before. This is why its important to support (and produce) open educational material that is freely accessible. In a non-emancipatory sense, an institution decides its training needs and produces e-training material that meets them. These may not be the needs or the desires of the learners. The ability to change or challenge the structure of the online educational environment is also potentially important (for both educators and learners) - what is the TEL equivalent of 'its a sunny day, lets have this class outside?'