Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about elearning, one of the topics that will be addressed during the upcoming Business School 2.0 workshop.

E-learning is expanding worldwide and is deeply changing teaching modes and knowledge management practices. We agree that e-learning may lead to positive changes in facilitating circulation of knowledge and access to education of people with social or financial difficulties. Moreover, we may admit that younger people may find in the ICT a funnier way to learn, closer to their habit of social networking on the web.

However, and as any radical innovation which is both technological and social oriented, e-learning does not always reach the expected objectives. And in a more severe way, we postulate that, when mis-implemented and misused, e-learning may undermine knowledge management and teaching modes. Such “dark side” or negative aspect of e-learning are often neglected. We present the main results from a qualitative and inductive research which has been conducted at Euromed Management two years ago around the general topic: “what is ideal course?” and “what are the very appropriate ICT to learn?”

We found that students were facing difficulties, not only in using the "tools 2.0" (collaborative tools, shared resources, ...) but also in understanding and challenging the different resources available to them (Wikipedia-like web sites, online courses, dedicated databases such as EBSCO...).

Before going further with even more complex tools and procedures, those two basic issues point out that the successful e-campus needs to at least address the following:

• What are the online tools ? How to use them? What are their limits? Why should the students use them?

• What is a reliable resource? How to handle two resources with different views on a subject? What is the difference between information and knowledge?

Assuming that current students belonging to the generation Y are at ease with all the technological issues and tools is a big mistake. Posting a message on Facebook has nothing to do with using a collaborative tool or a professional social network. Sending short messages on Twitter has nothing to do with team work.

Appropriation of ICT is not so obvious as it is generally supposed. Appropriation supposes to have ability in using ICT and, moreover, in finding the right technology for the right use (database, work flow, collecting information or analyzing knowledge...). As a consequence, the interviewed students have largely expressed a strong need for training and support in order to help them understand the tools that are made available to them.

Having access to the Net requires a laptop and a network connection. Our experience shows that most students have issues with their hardware or software (virus, bad configuration, ...). The result is that all the online tools, even the best of them, have no value if the student does not understand how to use them, or has hardware/software issues.

Going even further, both the tools and the information that can be extracted are problematic. Is Wikipedia a reliable source (Wikipedia is very often used by students)? This question brings different levels of answers and above all a lot of new questions. What is a reliable source? What is the difference between knowledge and information? What about blogs? Are they reliable sources? What about other resources on the Net? Who decides what are the reliable sources? And so on ! What is behind all that is the ability to step back and to think by oneself. Founding huge amount of resources on the Net has no value at all if the student is not able to step back properly.

The pitfall is that the students think that they have unlimited knowledge because they have access to huge worldwide databases.

We may observe that students have real difficulties in differentiating the various status of the “data” on the web. They express serious difficulties in discriminating information produced with a political (or ideological) aim from information produced according to scientific methodology. Any kind of information is useful (see the debate introduced by Callon and his team on confirmed/layman knowledge). But each information does not serve the same purpose. And students are not used and trained to analyze such different purposes.

Knowledge is not only information. Achieving knowledge requires much more than downloading files and receiving PowerPoint slides from the e-teacher 2.0.

As a way for opening the debate, we postulate that e-learning teaching requires complementary teaching and savoir-faire of the students in discriminating the right information / knowledge for the right use as well as the right ICT for the right task.

Corinne Grenier, Professor, Euromed Management
Mathieu Destrian, Entrepreneur and teacher, Euromed Management