Considerations of Design and Development Aspects of Collaborative Technologies to Facilitate Ideas on Open Learning

Abstract

Interests on access to open learning, some tangential while others significant, have surfaced as the shared agenda of much debate in the educational community. This emergence of current technologies possesses unimaginable potential to penetrate barriers of physical and social contexts. Unexploited use of collaborative technologies evidently escalates these barriers and places us as individuals, and yet as members of society, in the far end of a constant developing teaching and learning continuum. Thus, it becomes crucial to identify available collaborative technologies to support open learning endeavors, and subsequently to identify how the uses of these collaborative technologies are able to navigate the borders of open learning. This paper brings into discussion a rhetorical perspective on the marriage of collaborative technologies and pedagogical parameters to facilitate ideas on open learning. Attention is thus drawn towards the design and development aspects of the interactive e-learning community (iELC) discussion platform. The iELC was developed using open source Moodle software that caters appropriately for both students and teachers in K-12 education. Conclusively, comprehensive studies on collaborative technologies are a need to justify provisions on open learning. // Paper ID 145