EXPLORING IT SOLUTIONS IN A FORM OF E-LEARNING. FROM THE IDEA THROUGH DATA ACQUISITION AND TOOLS RECOGNITION TO FINAL PROJECT REALIZATION

ICT tools play significant role in many fields of human activity. They are used for entertainment, increasing effectiveness of business process but also play important role in educational process. E-learning, so teaching with the use of ICT solutions can bring many profits like fast content delivery, 24/7 accessibility, enhanced collaboration, lower costs per user, suitability for young IT keen on students and workers. This solution has also some disadvantages lack of face-to-face interaction, need for self-discipline, dependence on technology and finally, it requires additional IT skills from both teachers and course attendants. However in the 21st century in the era of digital information, people have to and want to use new IT technologies to make their life easier, their work more effective and education more interesting. E-learning solutions can be therefore successfully used for fast delivering up to date knowledge and skills especially in the area of rapidly changing and fast developing IT tools and global information systems.
In this paper the authors propose the teaching framework, that can be used in education process to enhance the practical skills in the area of global IT tools usage. The article shows the possibility of use of e-learning platform Moodle and its tools in teaching process. It presents the framework of course for students of management that helps to know and understand the functioning of IT solutions provided by global IT companies and shows additional benefits derived from the simultaneous use of many publicly available IT tools provided in the SaaS form.
At the beginning of the article the authors present characteristics of e-learning tools that could be used in IT supported learning process: tools for content creation, content publication and for accessing materials. Authors characterize also main open access tools offered by Google that can be easily used for gathering data, data storage, performing quick analysis and visualizations in a form of charts, diagrams or maps. The second part of the article contains the characteristics and the lessons learned from the implementation of the e-learning course developed by management students during the e-learning labs. The authors describe the framework of e-learning classes, presents the characteristic of virtual environment called “Virtual campus” used for project development, presents also main stages of e-learning project that aimed to acquire practical skills in the use of tools provided by Google.
Implementation of described course showed that students were keen on both e-learning tools offered by Moodle and services provided by Google. The most problematic issues of course preparation and realization were selecting the course topic, division of tasks, choosing preferred course structure and working with more advanced Moodle tools.