An overview for the ‘understanding my learning’ (the learners experience of e-learning projects) was presented at the recent e-pedagogy experts meeting by Greg Benfield and Ellen Lessner of the support project from this strand of the pedagogy programme.

As part of the synthesis of the projects, a number of guides have been produced for learners, authors and designers, support staff, managers and tutors. The guides make extensive use of the case studies and interviews with students collected during the project. Lots of ‘real’ quotes from ‘real’ students are used to highlight each issue. An overview and links to project outputs including the LEX Final Report are available on the JISC website

A number of interesting messages are coming through from the work in terms of learners beliefs of elearning, including the fact that student’s have very strong emotional attachments to their own technology:

“ … and I was lying on the beach with my iPod and it just had been through so much,
like you remember lying on beach…with iPod. You remember on the plane…with iPod, so
it was an emotional attachment, sad, but I loved that thing.”

but don’t have the same attachment to institutional hardware and indeed software/ learning environments.

“… what annoys me with this is that you have to swipe your card to get into the
building, enter your password to get onto the intranet and then for every individual
thing enter your password. So if I do it at home it’s all set up and I just press OK, but
this time it asks me and I have to do it five times, ‘What is your password?’, and every
time I’m like, ‘It’s still me, I’m not doing anything different!’”

An argument for a PLE if ever I heard one

It also seems to be the case that students have mixed views on the benefits of e-learning, and do still need and value guidance on how to use VLEs. Students expect technology to enhance their learning experience and won’t engage with it unless they see a clear benefit.

I would recommend the final report as it really does give an real insight into the student’s point of view, which unfortunately we are all guilty of forgetting about at times, and isn’t it really the one thing we should all be working towards making as good as possible?