Successful and Proactive e-learning Environment Fostered by Teachers’ Motivation in Technology Use

Abstract

This paper emphasizes the problems in e-learning environments with special focus on professors’ role in providing quality of learning outcomes. Furthermore, we focus on professor level of information literacy and its role and importance in providing learnability of system and proactivity of students. In student centred learning environments we need to provide the same level of conditions needed in achieving learning outcomes. Therefore we analyse predictors that mediators in e-learning process (teachers) need to provide in order to create, evaluate, disseminate and distribute learning materials and instructions. In this paper we analyse an e-learning system with 3636 users and 238 courses on a higher education level (professional graduate and undergraduate study). Over the past nine years we have reached high level of e-learning technology use but still facing with students’ dissatisfaction and lack of motivation stemmed by quantity and quality of course contents. In previous papers we have written about the conducted research on student information literacy tested on the Moodle platform in two higher educational institutions in Croatia. In these papers and other relevant research we have noticed student dissatisfaction with e-learning moderators (teachers). Moreover, in annual quality assurance questionnaires students recognized the same problem; namely, most of the teachers do not provide the expected level of information competences related to the course content needs. The students pointed out that their motivation is in correlation with teacher motivation and their contribution to the e-learning class and using technology in general. Our analyses show that more than 2/3 of teachers do not update their class with new information about the field they teach and ignore student interests in an e-learning process. In this paper we analyse predictors to problems with mediators and their perception of lifelong learning importance and their teaching approach to digital natives in the web 2.0 environments.