Can e-Learning Deliver What It Promises?

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Can e-learning today really deliver what it promises? Eight learning experts discuss this question at the Oxford Union. Jutta Mackwell reports.

‘This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow’. This was the motion put to eight e-learning experts for a debate at the prestigious Oxford Union, organised by e-learning company Epic.

E-learning has become one of the buzz words in training and learning and development. It has been praised for its flexibility, cost-efficiency and its ‘greenness’. But does it really do what it promises, and does it help to impart the essential skills of tomorrow? Or is it simply ‘computers instead of books’ (as Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC’s Technology Correspondent who chaired the debate, learned from his taxi driver) or ‘what employers do when they don’t want to pay for proper training’?

According to Professor Diana Laurillard, who holds the chair of learning with digital technologies in the faculty of culture and pedagogy at the University of London, ‘no sane person can say that e-learning is not essential.’...

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