A resource released under a Creative Commons licence permitting free use, adaptation and redistribution is classified as:

An Open Educational Resource (OER)

A key ethical issue specifically facing the e-teacher, distinct from concerns primarily about the e-learner, is:

Ownership of intellectual property in a recorded lecture

Equitable access to devices and bandwidth

Ownership of intellectual property in a recorded lecture

Academic integrity during unsupervised assessment

Personal data privacy from platform tracking

INFLIBNET's Shodhganga, a digital repository of Indian doctoral theses, is an example of ICT used in:

Administration (test generators)

Emerging trends (social learning)

Technology in/for Education II: E-learning, Emerging Trends, Open Education Resources, E-inclusion, Quality of E-learning, and ICT in Evaluation, Administration and Research

The second half of Unit 8 covers e-learning fully: its concept and approaches, the emerging trends of social learning and open resources, e-inclusion, the model used to measure e-learning quality, the ethical issues facing online learners and teachers, and finally how ICT is used in evaluation, administration and research — e-portfolios, online repositories, and online assessment tools. The paper asks which approach to e-learning a described mode is, which named element of the D&M IS Success Model a described failure represents, and which ICT tool a described research or administrative task uses; every term carries its defining feature.

1. Concept and approaches to e-learning

E-learning is learning facilitated and supported through electronic technology — a broad umbrella covering everything from a single downloaded video to a fully interactive online degree, distinguished chiefly by how much of the interaction it removes or preserves relative to a face-to-face classroom.

Approaches to e-learning
Approach	Meaning
Offline	Content is accessed without an active internet connection at the point of use (downloaded materials, CD/DVD-based courseware, locally installed software)
Online	Content and interaction require an active internet connection, typically through a learning management system or website
Synchronous	Teacher and learners interact in real time at the same scheduled moment (a live video class, a live chat session), preserving immediate back-and-forth but requiring everyone present at once
Asynchronous	Learners engage with content and each other at times of their own choosing (recorded lectures, discussion forums, email), trading immediacy for flexibility — the mode most compatible with andragogy's self-pacing assumption (Unit 7)
Blended learning	Deliberately combines face-to-face and online instruction within one course, aiming to keep the strengths of both (direct human contact and flexible, self-paced digital content) rather than replacing one fully with the other
Mobile learning (m-learning)	Learning mediated specifically through portable, handheld devices (smartphones, tablets), enabling access anywhere rather than only at a fixed desktop or classroom location

⚠️ These are independent dimensions, not a single spectrum

A course can be online AND synchronous (a live webinar), online AND asynchronous (a recorded course on a portal), offline AND asynchronous (a downloaded video watched anytime) — offline-synchronous is the one combination that does not really occur, since 'synchronous' implies a live network connection linking participants. Blended learning and mobile learning are separate design choices layered on top of these dimensions, not additional points on the same online/offline or synchronous/asynchronous axes — a course can be blended AND delivered partly through mobile devices at the same time.

2. Emerging trends in e-learning: social learning, OER, e-inclusion

Social learning online — Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking sites, video conferencing, chats) let learners build and share knowledge collaboratively rather than only consume content pushed to them, extending Bandura's social learning theory (Unit 3) and the collaborative transactional approach (Unit 4) into a networked, often asynchronous digital setting.
Open Educational Resources (OER) — teaching, learning and research materials released under an open licence (most commonly a Creative Commons licence) permitting free use, adaptation and redistribution, removing both the cost and copyright barriers that would otherwise restrict who can use a resource and how.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) — free or low-cost, large-scale online courses open to unlimited enrolment, delivered asynchronously and often for a fixed duration, pioneered by platforms such as Coursera, edX and, in India, SWAYAM (2017, the government's own MOOC platform, whose credits many universities now recognise).
E-inclusion — the deliberate effort to ensure digital and online learning does not exclude learners on grounds of disability, language, geography, gender or socio-economic status, applying assistive technology (fuller treatment in Unit 10) within e-learning specifically — a screen reader for a visually impaired online learner, subtitled videos, or low-bandwidth versions of content for areas with poor connectivity.

🎯 Why OER and MOOCs are named together but are not the same thing

OER is fundamentally about licensing — a resource is OER because of the legal permissions attached to it, whether it is a single image, a textbook chapter or an entire course, and OER materials are often reused as building blocks inside other courses, including MOOCs. A MOOC is fundamentally about scale and openness of enrolment — a course is a MOOC because anyone can join in large numbers, regardless of whether its individual materials carry an open licence permitting reuse elsewhere. A MOOC's materials may or may not be OER; a piece of OER is not automatically a MOOC. Confusing the two conflates a licensing concept with a course-format concept.

3. Quality of e-learning and ethical issues for e-learners and e-teachers

The DeLone and McLean Information Systems Success Model (D&M IS Success Model, originally 1992, updated 2003) is the framework the syllabus names for measuring the quality of an e-learning (or any information) system across six interrelated dimensions.

The D&M IS Success Model's six dimensions
Dimension	What it measures
Information quality	The accuracy, completeness, relevance and currency of the content the system delivers
System quality	The technical performance of the platform itself — reliability, usability, response time, availability
Service quality	The quality of support given to users — helpdesk responsiveness, technical assistance, training provided
Use (or intention to use)	The actual extent and pattern of learners' and teachers' engagement with the system
User satisfaction	How positively users evaluate their overall experience with the system
Net benefits	The ultimate positive or negative impact of the system on individuals, the institution and the wider society — improved learning outcomes, cost savings, or conversely, wasted resources and frustration

🧠 Placing a complaint at its D&M dimension

'The course content has outdated facts' → information quality. 'The video keeps buffering and the app crashes' → system quality. 'No one answers when I email for technical help' → service quality. 'Students log in but barely engage with the material' → use. 'Learners rate the experience poorly in a survey' → user satisfaction. 'Despite good ratings, exam scores did not actually improve' → a gap between user satisfaction and net benefits, the model's own warning that satisfaction alone does not guarantee real impact.

Ethical issues for the e-learner — academic integrity in an unsupervised environment (plagiarism, unauthorised collaboration during online assessment), data privacy (what personal and behavioural data a platform collects and how it is used), and equitable access (not everyone has the same device, bandwidth or quiet study space).
Ethical issues for the e-teacher — intellectual property (who owns a recorded lecture or a course module — the teacher, the institution or both), maintaining academic rigour and genuine assessment integrity when direct proctoring is limited, and equitable, responsive engagement with learners who are not physically visible in the way a classroom makes them.
Ethical issues for research — using learner analytics data (clickstreams, time-on-task, forum activity) for research raises consent and privacy questions distinct from those of a conventional survey or interview, since the data is often collected passively as a by-product of the platform's normal operation rather than through an explicit research-participation agreement.

4. Use of ICT in evaluation, administration and research

E-portfolios — a digital version of the portfolio assessment covered in Unit 7, extended by ICT's ability to include multimedia evidence (video of a presentation, audio, interactive work) and to be shared, commented on and revised collaboratively online, rather than existing only as a physical folder.
Online repositories and online libraries — digital collections of research articles, theses, datasets and reference material accessible remotely, exemplified in India by INFLIBNET's Shodhganga (theses repository) and N-LIST (journal/e-book access for institutions), which ICT makes searchable and shareable at a scale a physical library cannot match.
Online and offline assessment tools — online survey tools and test generators (Google Forms and dedicated assessment platforms) automate item creation, randomisation, timed delivery, scoring and analytics, concept and development running from item-bank design through pilot testing and validity/reliability checks (Unit 6) before large-scale deployment, whether the final delivery is online or exported for offline/paper administration.

🎯 Why this chapter closes the unit on evaluation, administration and research together

ICT's contribution across these three is the same underlying capability applied three ways: automating and scaling what a human previously did manually and slowly. An e-portfolio does for assessment what an online repository does for research and an online test generator does for administration — each takes a process this course has already described in principle (portfolio assessment, Unit 7; sampling and tools, Unit 6; the systems approach to instructional design, this unit) and shows how ICT makes it faster, more shareable and more data-rich, closing Unit 8 by tying its own technology content back to the assessment and research vocabulary the earlier units built.

Key takeaways

E-learning varies along independent dimensions — offline/online, synchronous/asynchronous — with blended and mobile learning as separate layered design choices; asynchronous online learning best fits andragogy's self-pacing assumption.
Emerging trends: Web 2.0 social learning tools, Open Educational Resources (licensing-defined, Creative Commons), MOOCs (scale-and-openness defined, India's SWAYAM since 2017) and e-inclusion extending assistive technology into e-learning.
The D&M IS Success Model measures e-learning quality across information, system and service quality, use, user satisfaction and net benefits, six interrelated dimensions; e-learners, e-teachers and e-research each face distinct ethical issues of integrity, privacy and consent.
ICT in evaluation, administration and research runs through e-portfolios, online repositories/libraries (Shodhganga, N-LIST) and online/offline assessment-tool development — each automating and scaling a process the course already described in principle.

Practice questions (8)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

Learning where teachers and learners interact in real time at the same scheduled moment, such as a live video class, is called:
1. Asynchronous
2. Synchronous
3. Offline
4. Blended
Show answer
Answer: B — Synchronous
Synchronous learning happens at a shared, scheduled moment. Asynchronous learning happens at each learner's own chosen time; offline means no active internet connection at point of use; blended combines face-to-face and online instruction, a separate design choice.
A resource released under a Creative Commons licence permitting free use, adaptation and redistribution is classified as:
1. A MOOC
2. An Open Educational Resource (OER)
3. CBT
4. An e-portfolio
Show answer
Answer: B — An Open Educational Resource (OER)
OER is defined by its open licence. A MOOC is defined by scale and openness of enrolment, not licensing, and its materials may or may not be OER; CBT is a self-contained computer training package; an e-portfolio is a digital assessment collection, unrelated to licensing.
India's government-run MOOC platform, launched in 2017, whose credits many universities now recognise, is:
1. SWAYAM
2. Shodhganga
3. N-LIST
4. DIKSHA
Show answer
Answer: A — SWAYAM
SWAYAM (2017) is India's own MOOC platform. Shodhganga is INFLIBNET's theses repository; N-LIST provides journal/e-book access to institutions; DIKSHA is a school-education digital infrastructure platform, a different named initiative.
In the D&M IS Success Model, complaints that a learning platform's video keeps buffering and the app frequently crashes point to a failure of:
1. Information quality
2. System quality
3. Service quality
4. Net benefits
Show answer
Answer: B — System quality
System quality covers technical performance — reliability, usability, response time. Information quality concerns content accuracy; service quality concerns user support; net benefits concern the system's ultimate impact, not its technical function.
A learning platform receives high user-satisfaction ratings in a survey, but a follow-up study finds exam scores did not actually improve after its introduction. This gap is best described, in the D&M IS Success Model, as a gap between user satisfaction and:
1. System quality
2. Net benefits
3. Information quality
4. Use
Show answer
Answer: B — Net benefits
Net benefits measure the system's ultimate real-world impact, such as improved learning outcomes — satisfaction alone does not guarantee this, exactly the gap described. System and information quality concern the platform and content directly, not outcomes; use concerns engagement patterns, not exam results.
A key ethical issue specifically facing the e-teacher, distinct from concerns primarily about the e-learner, is:
1. Equitable access to devices and bandwidth
2. Ownership of intellectual property in a recorded lecture
3. Academic integrity during unsupervised assessment
4. Personal data privacy from platform tracking
Show answer
Answer: B — Ownership of intellectual property in a recorded lecture
Intellectual property ownership of recorded teaching material is named specifically as an e-teacher issue. Equitable access, academic integrity during assessment and data privacy are named as e-learner concerns in this chapter.
INFLIBNET's Shodhganga, a digital repository of Indian doctoral theses, is an example of ICT used in:
1. Research (online repositories)
2. Evaluation (e-portfolios)
3. Administration (test generators)
4. Emerging trends (social learning)
Show answer
Answer: A — Research (online repositories)
Shodhganga is named as an online repository under ICT in research. E-portfolios are a distinct evaluation tool; test generators are an administration/assessment tool; social learning tools are a separate emerging-trends topic.
A course that is delivered partly through recorded videos accessed anytime and partly through scheduled face-to-face classroom sessions is best described as:
1. Purely synchronous
2. Blended learning
3. A MOOC
4. CML
Show answer
Answer: B — Blended learning
This deliberate combination of face-to-face and online (here, asynchronous recorded) instruction is blended learning. It is not purely synchronous since part is asynchronous; it need not be a MOOC (which is defined by open, large-scale enrolment, not this delivery mix); CML is a computer-managed-learning category from the previous chapter, unrelated to delivery mode.