CURRENT APPROACHES IN E-TEACHING AND LEARNING

Abstract

Science and technology have started to advance at an incredible pace already, the political, social, and economic environment is to be found in a perpetual state of transformation, therefore the usual life of the ,,usual" people has to adapt, too. After graduating school, more often than not, we no longer have the physical time to go to school, but still we need to learn. Life-long learning is the key to success in our era. This is one of the main reasons why e-learning has been gaining so much ground lately imposing a different perspective on teaching means. Together with the means, the teaching methods are changed too and teachers, before being able to pass on their knowledge, they must assume the students' roles themselves. The goal of this paper is to approach the concept of e-learning for foreign languages from various angles: that of the course organizer, that of the course ,,final" beneficiary (the company or organization sending an employee to be trained thus) who, willy-nilly, gives me as a teacher the course purpose and direction. The second beneficiary is taken into account afterwards, the ,,direct" beneficiary, that who takes part in the course. In this respect we will refer to different teaching methods, making the difference between the approaches used in the organization of a traditional language course - according to the level - and the approaches used in organizing an on-line course, underlining the most significant aspects that must not be overlooked in order to obtain the best results. Although we support the importance of e-learning in foreign language training nowadays, we intend to also reveal some drawbacks of this system, with the sole intention of showing that, if correctly identified and analyzed, each drawback can be ,,corrected". The third point in our agenda will be that of the technical means used in language e-learning which are relevant for the teaching process and are considered to have emerged as such together with Web 2.0. Finally, we will mention some of the possibilities of implementing this system of teaching/learning by anyone, no matter where they are.