The University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) has developed new postgraduate courses to take advantage of the interest in, and nurture the development of, e-learning.
Starting this March, UTS will offer a masters degree, a graduate certificate and a graduate diploma in e-learning, as part of what the university describes as a recognition of the emergence of electronic technologies as a revolutionary force in education in corporate and a community sectors.
“All sectors have been quick to adopt e-learning as a technique, but little attention has been paid to the nature and process of e-learning,” said program director Dr Lynette Schaverien, of UTS Faculty of Education. This faculty collaborated with the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning to develop the courses.
Believing the study of e-learning needed an “authentic problem-oriented approach,” Schaverien said that “there is an explicit focus in these courses on the educational that must underpin e-learning developments if they are to succeed.”
Schaverien said the universitys students “would be cast wherever possible as active e-learners, e-designers and e-teachers, conceiving and examining potentially viable solutions in real-world educational scenarios. Designers and teachers are operating in a field that rapidly changes. We need second generation systems that are demonstrably better, and we wont get them until we have a clearer understanding of how people learn in these environments.”
As well as supplying students with such skills, UTS hopes the initiative will also see benefit come its own way, with Schaverien saying the courses were a move towards generating new doctoral research on learning in electronically mediated environments.
