Article:

E-Learning and Literary Studies: Towards a New Culture of Teaching?

The introduction of digital technologies into the learning processes has meant the creation of new educational spaces that, when they take place in the Internet and are founded in non-presence and asynchrony, are known as VLE (Virtual Learning Environments). VLE constitute new pedagogic realities that must answer to the users’ needs, their educational purposes, the curricula with which they work and, specifically, the formative needs for the people that integrate them. But the key to define “virtual” in terms of human experience and not in terms of technological hardware is the concept of “presence” which is crucial in our pedagogical model and our way of being comparative literature lecturers in a virtual university. E-learning is probably nothing more than a manifestation of e-living. Perhaps circumstances are giving us the opportunity to use the coincidence between the appearance of e-learning as a tool and the need to modify our traditional model of education. After all, learning is learning whether it has an extra 'e' or not and so VLE are only as good or as bad as the ways they are used. Thus, the revolutionary point of their use would not be the technological aspect. We will show the example of a completely virtual university, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), where the learning process takes place in a virtual campus and we will focus on a specific subject: “Comparative literature”. We firmly believe that e-learning is an excellent opportunity for a real improvement of quality if these multimedia technologies lead us to a more humanized teaching process. The possibility to use complex systems in a virtual campus allows and stimulates exchange and collaboration, with remarkable effects in the students’ success and satisfaction. Good e-learning results are reached when there’s a good e-teaching method behind.