The Chronicle had a recent article on “Why the E-Learning Boom Went Bust.” I think one of their points was interesting:
What’s the reality? For the most part, faculty members use the electronics to simplify tasks, not to fundamentally change how they teach their subjects. They readily translate lecture notes into PowerPoint presentations. They use course-management tools like Blackboard and WebCT to distribute class materials, grades, and assignments. But the materials are simply scanned, and the assignments neither look nor feel different. Even when the textbook comes with an interactive CD-ROM, or when the publisher makes the same material available on a proprietary Web site, most faculty members do not assign it. Only modest breakthroughs have occurred — in the use of e-mail to communicate rapidly and directly with students and in the adoption of computerized testing materials.Indeed, many people believe that the rapid introduction of course-management tools has actually reduced e-learning’s impact on the way most faculty members teach. Blackboard and WebCT make it almost too easy for professors to transfer their standard teaching materials to the Web. While Blackboard’s promotional materials talk about enabling faculty members to use a host of new applications, the specific promises that the software makes to potential users are less dramatic: the ability for them “to manage their own Internet-based file space on a central system and to collect, share, discover, and manage important materials from articles and research papers to presentations and multimedia files.” All that professors need to use the product are the rudimentary electronic-library skills that most have already mastered. Blackboard and WebCT allow the faculty users, when asked, “Are you involved in e-learning?” to respond, “Yes, my courses are already online!”1
If you don’t have database access to the Chronicle, you can read more on their observations by downloading their report “Thwarted Innovation”
1. Why the E-Learning Boom Went Bust , By: Zemsky, Robert, Massy, William F., Chronicle of Higher Education, 00095982, 7/9/2004, Vol. 50, Issue 44 (On EBSCO)