THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT AND E-LEARNING 2.0
Whether a classroom is on ground or online, for the learning environment to be stimulating, reinforcing, easy to access, relevant, interactive, challenging, participatory, rewarding, and supportive, it should provide input, elicit responses, and offer assessment and feedback. In an online learning environment, these elements are even more critical because learners are working outside of the usual classroom social environment. The Internet itself has always had the capacity to be a learning medium. Services such as Google and Wikipedia are probably used more frequently as learning tools than any formal courses or learning management systems. Web 2.0 provides new opportunities for learners through participation and creation. In a 2.0 course, instructors will no longer be able to rely simply on presenting material; they will be involved in a mutually stimulating, dynamic learning environment. E-learning 2.0 is the application of the principles of Web 2.0. Through collaboration and creation, Elearning 2.0 will enable more student-centred, constructivist, social learning with a corresponding increase in the use of blogs, wikis, and other social learning tools. Rosen (2006) offers a perspective of what a 2.0 course would look like: they “should never be a hodge-podge assembly of old methodologies delivered through new technologies. They should be a true ‘2.0 course,’ rather than a self-propelled PowerPoint presentation or CBT training presented on a PDA. 2.0 courses provide justin-time training. They are used as a resource—not a one-time event. A 2.0 course lasts 15 to 20 minutes, runs smoothly on any configuration of device (high resolution, portable) or PDA, and delivers smoothly on all versions of web browsers. Finally, 2.0 courses incorpo
rate the best-of-breed techniques from web design and instructional design” (p. 6).