E-learning by design

Teachers in higher education throughout the world are making use of course-management systems (CMS) to support their courses. None of these teachers grew up with using a CMS; they must themselves learn how to use them effectively at the same time that they are using them with their students. While institutions commonly provide some sort of introductory workshop for CMS use, these workshops have limitations in terms of their transfer value into practice. In this paper we discuss an example of embedded justin-time support within the CMS itself to help teachers learn how to use a CMS efficiently but also so that both they and their students can take on new roles in the learning process.A new form of computer-based support for teaching and learning has emerged since the late 1990s. It is a system of integrated tools that makes use of both database and web functionalities in order to make a web environment available to support a course or learning event. One name for such a system is a course-management system (CMS). Course-management systems are new tools for teachers and thus teachers must learn how to use them in a technical sense as well as in a meaningful sense. By meaningful, we mean not only to increase the efficiency of participating in a course but also to enrich and extend learning processes.While most off-the-shelf CMSs do not allow much opportunity for tailoring their products to build in such support for teachers as learners, we have taken advantage of the fact that we built our own CMS at the University of Twente to offer teachers tools for their own learning integrated within the CMS system. In this article we discuss two major learning curves for teachers when using a CMS. The first is learning to set up and manage a web environment that best fits their own course and their own students. The second is learning to design and support new types of learning activities where both students and the teacher take on new roles. For each of these, we will show the sorts of built-in teacher support that have helped us in implementing our CMS throughout our university (and also, throughout other settings including other higher-education settings in a number of countries, corporate learning, a military college and even secondary and elementary schools). Although our focus will be on various tools within the CMS itself, we will emphasize that technology will have little impact in practice without accompanying institutional support and a clear motivation for the teacher for using the technology.