The e-Winter school

Helping students to better learning

Abstract

E-learning is relatively new to the United Arab Emirates, arriving as it did, in around 2002 for most college institutions. Nowadays, most tertiary institutions have allocated Information Communication Technology resources to provide alternatives to the previously used teacher-centered, “chalk and talk” approach to learning and teaching. This is particularly true within the tertiary sector in the UAE. In line with this, at Dubai Women’s College we are developing the e-Winter School program, using a blended-learning model that caters to that community of students who needs extra support: the ones that don’t quite ‘fit’ into the blueprint. This paper details some of the pedagogical underpinnings of the program, discusses how it is constructed and explores the relative merits of the way in which the community is taught. It also deals with some of the methods of instruction involved in such an undertaking and details actual results achieved by the students. The contents of this paper may be of interest to those faculty members, designers and developers who need to examine some examples of emerging practice that attempt to combine on-line learning with face-to-face, classroom tuition. The paper represents a work in progress and will explore how, when we combine something which is called the “LOAF” approach, with on-line learning, we have a model that is, judging by the lack of evidence to the contrary, quite unique to this part of the world.