It’s just ‘learning’ now. OK?
So, we’ve had eLearning, e-learning, elearning, and ‘e learning’.
We’ve had mobile learning, mLearning, mlearning. But not ‘m learning’.
(We’ve also got the VLE, LMS, CMS, and many more besides, but that’s for another post).
I believe we are now at a place with web development where we should drop able all these different ways of saying ‘learning’. We should not need to be talking about the different platforms or devices students use to access their ‘learning’; they should all be scalable and accessible to accommodate students using a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop (or any other device I can’t think of now). Access to learning resources should be across the board, easy, and not determined by the device. Pretty much everything the students need is now online – books, resources, notes, assignments – so the moniker of ‘e’Learning (for ‘electronic’) is void. Students have devices now which do not tether them to either a physical location or a specific IT network that I’m pretty sure we can drop the mLearning (for ‘mobile’) too.
So, where are you taking your LEARNING now?
Image source: Alan Levine (CC BY 2.0)
I think we need to let Blackboard know. It’s 2016 and still no responsive design built into their VLE.
Could be worse. My employer is currently implementing an LMS that is not responsive, with plans to eventually roll it out to learners in 2018. And the vendor has no plans to make it responsive. Pathetic.
I get what you’re saying, but I still think it makes sense to have a term to describe remote, asynchronous, electronic learning. There are areas where it’s not yet true that everything is available online, there are topics that you can’t teach fully without an on-site presence, and – it surprised me too – there are still learners in this day and age who are simply not able to learn online because it’s a challenge for them when they need to look up the weather with google. If I dropped the usage of eLearning in an environment where we have all kinds of methods of reaching our learners, I think I’d be confusing my team quite a bit ;)