Abstract:

Trends indicate that ELearning has become a worldwide ecological system, as introduced in the seminal paper “Towards an Ecology of ELearning” (Shaw & Chacon, 2010). As anticipated in that paper, at the program level we see standardization of eLearning models; growth of Open Educational Resources (OER); accelerated participation of K-12 levels in online ventures; aggressive competition of programs for both traditional and non-traditional college-level students; and proliferation of blended learning that integrates the advantages of both online and face-to-face learning. These trends across national boundaries as indicated by the exchange of content components among eLearning programs: international subscriptions to online resources for education; cross-national ELearning programs; the drift of students to offerings of ELearning in the larger spoken languages; and even international conferences geared specifically to ELearning. Evidence to support these changes comes from different sources reviewed in the paper.

In this presentation, the authors show how viewing ELearning as an ecological system enables us better to understand recent dramatic changes to online education accelerated by COVID19, which provoked historic shifts in all levels of education, particularly Higher Education, towards hybrid or fully online modalities. Additionally, the ecological systems perspective will illuminate directions for change in the future, providing insights into ELearning and Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Learning Analytics, Immersive Systems, Hybrid Learning Modalities, and other ongoing changes.

Keywords:

e-learning, Ecological Systems, Online Learning Trends, e-learning Ecology.