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4.3 Simplicity
Last but not least, the usability of online courses
should not be disregarded, since the student should
focus on the content and not on the handling of the
interface.
In the OSLab course (see Section 3.1), most of the
students used the Eclipse IDE. Since this is an open
source platform supportingplug-ins, we think it could
be a good improvement to create an interface to our
secured architecture. It would have the advantage that
the students can program in their usual environment
while still providing the needed security for the access
to the lab machines.
In our opinion, eLearning environments could be
improved by using a topic specific wiki for the con-
tent, which can only be edited by approved tutors.
This could be done nation- or world-wide to gather
the knowledge for a specific lecture topic. With a spe-
cial license, e.g., Creative Commons (Creative Com-
mons, 2009), the content could then be reused in other
eLearning courses, which is not necessarily the case
with books.
It could also be a great advantage to use a stan-
dard content creation language, independent from the
used content management system. For instance wiki-
or Tex-based systems would be a good solution, since
these markup languages are widely used at universi-
ties and are designed for easy content creation and
document layout.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this field study we presented the eLearning envi-
ronment (SVC and the SWITCH) as used in Switzer-
land. Furthermore, we described our two online
courses (OSLab and VITELS) and presented our re-
alization of the blended learning concept.
In the following parts we analyzed the attitude of
students, tutors, and developers, resulting in possi-
bly new approaches to improve eLearning as well as
blended learning courses, from the view point of the
staff.
The main observation of this paper is the high rel-
evance of the students’ motivation. Contrary to tra-
ditional courses, online courses do not have regular
schedules, where for instance the students have to
attend once a week lectures and exercises. Further-
more, the content of an eLearning course should be
presented in an attractive and diversified way in order
to keep the studentsfocusedover a longer time period.
In addition, the students should not have the impres-
sion that eLearning courses are a burden or a free ride
compared to traditional courses. Otherwise, eLearn-
ing courses will not be accepted by the students and
thus conventional courses would lead to greater suc-
cess.
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