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 on the Internet and are founded in non-presence and asynchrony, are known as “Virtual Learning Environ- ments” (VLE). 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. Technologies are tools capable of building a learning frame, although it is necessary to endow them with contents and humanity. Different voices have warned of the sterility of a technological environment that does not have any pedagogic or didactic specificity (different from the traditional models). After all, learning is learning whether it has an ex- tra “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 whether they really offer new ways of teaching. We will show the example of a completely virtual university, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), where the learning process takes place in a virtual campus, and we will focus on a specific subject: Universal Literary Topics.

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