TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED LEARNING (TEL): STUDENT TAILORED PRACTICES IN ELEARNING

Today eLearning means more than learning content and courseware, and it goes far beyond the Learning Management Systems (LMS), Personal Learning Environment (PLE), administration tools and authoring tools for building courses. Addressing both • the lack of face-to-face interaction and • the lack of sophistication in terms of Computer-Based Assessment, along with • the challenge of developing engaging and stimulating on-line lessons for students who shifted from a paper-based culture with handwriting, highlighting, post-it and gap-filling to a screen-based culture, with e-mails, blogging, gaming and webcams, streaming and googling are but a few of the solutions that would tailor eLearning for the 21st century skills and curriculum. Institutions have already challenged themselves unto meeting the new millennial students’ needs by providing courses which foster not only life and career skills, but also learning and innovation ones, in corporate training and formal education environments alike, focused on professional development and encompassed by clear standards, as well as assessment and curriculum issues. The present paper will showcase the actions taken with respect to all these aspects, both in Romania, by a team within “Carol I” National Defense University, and in Spain, by a team from ESADE University. The first team will lay stress on the foreign language education-related organizational and pedagogical changes meant to support blended and eLearning strategies and management, whereas the second one will refer to management and law education; the main objective of the paper is to share the lessons learned, by highlighting both commonalities in terms of educational and methodological approach, and differences in terms of cultural response and attitudes of those benefiting from the eLearning type of education, irrespective of the way the latter is delivered – be it on-line or blended.