Abstract
Many factors influence teaching nowadays. Numbers of students are increasing, some students pay for studies and require more flexible teaching, more students have access to Internet, the learning material is changing rapidly (especially of subjects, related to information technologies), publishing industry is slow and expensive. All that stimulates usage of modern technologies in education. Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) is one of the forms of e-learning. They open new ways of teaching and communication such as management of online learning, course delivery mechanism, communication and assessment tools, student tracking, access to electronic resources, etc. All these means correspond to the needs of contemporary teachers and students. VLEs have primarily been used for distance education but they are being used increasingly as supplement of traditional classroom based education. The author is interested in this latter aspect of VLEs.The paper briefly reviews main types of Virtual Learning Environments and analyses the use of VLEs in Lithuania. The results of the investigation of two different learning environments - traditional (Web CT) and collaborative (FLE3) at the Vilnius Pedagogical University are also discussed in the article.
Highlights
Contemporary teaching has to withstand much pressing, especially the teaching of informatics subjects
Various software packages that control the learning process or individual tools that provide some features of online learning could be regarded as Virtual Learning Environments (Britain, 1999), but, traditionally, VLEs provide web pages with course material, but at least some course management and communication tools within the environment
Further we discuss the use of Virtual Learning Environments in Lithuania, present the results of investigation of traditional VLE Web CT and discuss the use of collaborative Virtual Learning Environment FLE3
Summary
Contemporary teaching has to withstand much pressing, especially the teaching of informatics subjects. Web based learning usually is equated with the use of Internet for teaching purposes. Today’s teachers have a great variety of Internet based tools available to them for supporting their classes. As both teachers and students gain greater access to advanced hardware and network connection, the expansion of web based teaching and learning is proceeding rapidly. Various software packages that control the learning process or individual tools that provide some features of online learning could be regarded as Virtual Learning Environments (Britain, 1999), but, traditionally, VLEs provide web pages with course material, but at least some course management and communication tools within the environment. Two types of VLEs (traditional and collaborative) software were used to develop the learning environments for the research purposes. Questionnaires, statistical data from the automatic student tracking tools and qualitative students’ evaluations of the environments were used to draw conclusions
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