Making flexible learning more flexible

As a response to the changing environment in which the educational sector operates today and, in particular, the increasingly diverse student population, many universities opt for flexible delivery of their courses. However, there is a tendency to focus too much on technology per se and not on the learning process. At the same time educational technology itself which still is lingering behind current developments in the information technology (IT) industry. We argue that educational technologies are still task-oriented rather than process-oriented and as such not capable of effectively supporting an integrated study process. We present a concept of Flex-eL-a flexible, fully integrated, workflow enabled, learning environment. We argue that flexible learning should be even more flexible and based on that premise, we critically evaluate the existing technologies for flexible delivery. Furthermore, we describe the main features of Flex-eL and discuss some important issues that we have come across during its pilot implementation.