The benefits of e-learning
For participants
- Provide prospective students with clear course descriptions including learning objectives, start and end dates, estimated time requirements, prerequisites, tuition, etc.
- Offer a simple, hassle-free registration system.
- Provide ease-of-navigation for course reading materials.
During the course:
- Enable students to view profiles of their fellow classmates.
- Where appropriate, provide content mastery quizzes.
- Offer simple bookmarks, particularly for self-paced courses.
- Provide intuitive tagging for quick referencing.
- Make it easy for students to contribute and feel their contributions are valued.
After the course:
- Provide summaries of collective learnings and suggestions for follow-up courses.
- Offer workspaces within the Commons Learning Alliance for course graduates to get involved with commons-related projects.
- Provide orientation to the Knowledge Garden so that course graduates can develop educational briefings and presentations for use in their home communities.
For course instructors and facilitators
Before the course:
- Allow for easy uploading of course materials.
- Enable breakout rooms to be formed within a given course.
- Support access to participant/student profiles.
During the course:
- Provide a “green room†for instructors and facilitators to communicate.
- Generate use statistics to track activity of course members.
- Build-in the capability for administering surveys and quizzes.
- Support easy retrieval of tagged material and discussions.
- (Future) Enable VoIP video calls and "WebEx"-type communications.
After the course:
- Enable simple and effective harvesting of participant insights and lessons learned.
- Support dynamic revision of syllabi, curriculum, and course materials.
- If instructor payment is required, to generate remuneration in a timely way.