Student Support Services in eLearning

Kurzbeschreibung des Sokrates-Minerva Projektes "student support services" in eLearning Das Projekt "student support services in eLearning" reagiert auf die Aussage des US amerikanischen Experten Davenport, der 2001 noch geschrieben hat " Elearning findet normalerweise ohne Betreuung von Tutoren oder Lehrern statt und ist gerade deshalb ökonomisch effizient." (http://www.linezine.com/7.2/articles/tdeatae.htm). Mißtrauen gegenüber eLearning ist nach wie vor groß, erhebliche Abbruchquoten scheinen diesem Mißtrauen Recht zu geben. Die Palette der Möglichkeiten, eLearning durch student support services zu unterstützen soll in diesem Projekt systematisch untersucht werden. Gerade die Einbeziehung von Interaktionsmöglichkeiten durch Medien hat dem Fernstudium in seiner Geschichte den Weg geebnet von sogenanntem "selbst-instruierndem Material" zu einer voll anerkannten Organisationsform akademischen Studiums. Das Projekt will demgemäß "student support services" systematisch in eLearning einbeziehen, um so solchen Angeboten den Weg in die akademische Anerkennung ebnen zu helfen.

Student support services in eLearning responds to the statement of the American expert T.H.Davenport writing in 2001: "The use of eLearning is generally unsupervised by any instructor or training professional; this is one way it achieves economic efficiencies" (http://www.linezine.com/7.2/articles/tdeatae.htm). This contributes to the distrust of eLearning in recent surveys: "Recent opinion surveys, give indicators that the world is reluctant to accept eLearning on a par with residential instruction" (http://www.geteducated.com/vug/oct01/vug1001c.htm). Another factor is the unacceptable level of drop-outs and non-completion in many eLearning programmes. Distrust of eLearning needs to be faced if eLearning is to become an essential part of provision, as envisaged in e-Learning - designing tomorrow's education of 24.05.2000 and other Commission documentation. A major solution is the provision of student support services in eLearning as proposed in this project. In spite of the importance of the learning materials in ODL systems, it was the provision of student support services that distinguished distance education programmes from Teach Yourself Books or Self Instruction Packages and justified the awarding of nationally and internationally recognised degrees, diplomas, and training certification through distance learning. This project proposes to put in place for eLearning, student support services similar to those that brought about the success of distance education.

• a) accessibility, which not only means that institutions, which offer e-learning should have a strategy to make themselves known by a homepage which really is fast enough and barrier-free not to keep away students but which also takes effort to reach search machines and the like by
• b) metatagging their offer.
• c) full information:In many countries we know of consumer-protection laws which force the institution to offer all relevant information, withholding none of the important information. In Germany e.g. the "FernUnterrichtsschutzgesetz" forces the institute to give all of a list of information items.
• d) pre-enrolment counselling which can be seen as similar to a visitors day or the like in normal universities.
• e) counselling during the process of enrolment which also is meant to prevent students from drop-out.
  f) Quality assurance from the students' point of view comments in power-point

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  evaluation of the project - (RomaIII and ZIFF) contrasting drop-out experience