From e-Learning to e-Education: Goals, Strategic Assessment and Implications

From e-Learning to e-Education: Goals, Strategic Assessment and Implications

Zohar Ben-Asher
Copyright: © 2010 |Pages: 31
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-940-3.ch001
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Abstract

The chapter examines the educational (and schooling) processes as related to the overall social, political and economic processes, so as to set the context within which e-Learning has to be explored and discussed and within which a strategy for it can be forged. Such issues as the economic implications of the educational system, the extent to which economic considerations and realities are actually taken into account in curricula building and in the process of teacher training are discussed, along with the notion of acquisition of knowledge and/or information. The chapter portrays the parameters that are required to create a well balanced strategy for the developing of e-Learning as a major vehicle for the implementation of the overall social goals of education, of which one essential seems to be lacking at times: the preparation of the system’s customer, the pupil, as a critical observer of reality and a careful and discriminative customer of the ever developing consumption oriented society.
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Commonly Perceived Educational Goals And Objectives

Almost any survey in nearly any society in the world would turn out several cliché responses as to what education is all about. The maxim that education is a social process, aimed at social cohesion (or balance) is hardly ever challenged. Yet, the educational discourse seems to be almost entirely divorced from key social issues. To point at one example, the crucial economic processes (and implications) that shape society and its members are hardly ever addressed in the educational discourse. Still another anomaly stands at the heart of the general socio-educational debate: if education aims to change social values and concepts that have over time become undesirable or unwanted (e.g., discrimination, segregation and other outdated concepts), how can educators, themselves products of the system that encouraged these archaic ideals, be expected to eradicate or change such values, ideas and practice? Can they be true agents for such a desired change?

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