CASE STUDY REGARDING THE USABILITY OF ONLINE PLATFORMS SYSTEM BOTH AS A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT AND A COLLABORATIVE WORKING ENVIRONMENT

Technology is an instrument that has the potential to improve the most important areas of people’s life. Education and training are key beneficiaries and, in the last years, they have been significantly transformed due to the large scale use of the technology. E-Learning is a branch of education and training that experienced a rapidly development due to its advantages. When speaking about e-Learning, we have to take into consideration both the modality to deliver the content to the final user and the modality to connect teachers/instructors with students/stakeholders. Usually, these functionalities are assured by the so called Learning Management Systems (according to the national Romanian law in the domain of education they are called online educational platforms). The aim of this paper is to analyze two perspectives: first, how an online platform could be used as a learning environment and second, how an online platform could be used as a collaborative working environment . The paper presents a case study of an initiative developed by the Human Resources Management Directorate and supported by the Advanced Distributed Learning Department from “Carol I” National Defense University, to improve the foreign languages’ learning process by using electronic resources, as well as online communication technologies. The authors detail how the ILIAS platform was used for the online preliminary language evaluation/assessment, and for collaborative work that supported the development of the online tutoring modules for the online English courses.