E-learning experiment: Web conference activities in teaching at a traditional university

Abstract

Nowadays, higher-education institutions are transforming their educational activities from classic ways of providing knowledge to students towards more flexible and open forms of education, aiming to adapt to the needs of new generations of students. Virtual classrooms and e-learning are therefore being introduced not only at open universities offering distance learning, but also at other traditional universities where face-to-face learning prevails. In this paper, we describe a small-scale experimental e-learning activity concerning the integration of open-source web-conferencing tools into a teaching scenario at a traditional university, aiming to guide future improvements of our current e-learning infrastructure. While the experiment answers positively the question of very affordable technical solutions and reports about positive students' perceptions, it also reveals the need for teachers to be provided with specific knowledge about e-learning pedagogy in order to cope with new challenges, such as achieving student-centred teaching also in learning scenarios, including distance e-learning.