Building a Successful e-Learning Project in Higher Education

Abstract

Internet has made our world, the way we live and
educate, more dynamic and virtual than ever, creating greater
challenges and new possibilities. In this way, it is important that
higher education institutions have, as a priority, the goal of
finding effective ways of providing new learning opportunities
according to their environment: student characteristics; teacher
training; economic crisis and advancing technology in an effort
to make learning more efficient, equitable and innovative. At
Guarda Polytechnic Institute, Portugal (IPG), we recognize the
needs and the opportunities to create and develop new eeducation
courses in order to engage and motivate students and
teachers according to their needs. Thus, we have, in this last
decade, developed and implemented a set of institutional
objectives with regard to teaching electronic courses which aim
to provide intuitive content online courses, easy to access
anywhere, any time. The main purpose of this paper is to present
our strategies as an institution, vision and goals when we talk
about electronic learning. We bring forward what we believe to
be extremely important and that must be considered when an
organization wants to implement and develop e-Learning. The
paper also presents the outcomes and synthesizes the insights
collected since when we implemented a mobile learning solution.
Findings indicate that building a successful e-learning project
depends basically on two components, teachers’ training and
students’ characteristics. The focus attention on these two
components can create new, successful and powerful
opportunities of e-learning.