What is e-learning?

Attending courses online (e-learning) gives course participants the flexibility to organise their time to fit around their professional and personal commitments.  It also provides an opportunity to make more of the study time and achieve deeper learning.  Online learning saves the time and expense of travel and classroom attendance and offers flexible participation in the course programmes.
Online learning also allows participants to become part of a community focused on the topic at hand.  This often proves to be more effective than time spent in groups in a classroom environment.

E-learning does not generally require special technical expertise.  No greater IT skill is required than that needed to browse the web, watch clips on YouTube or send an email with an attachment.  Dyslexia Action provides written and audio-visual guides to help with technical aspects of the course.  An IT support helpdesk is also available to students.

The greatest challenge of e-learning is finding the right physical and mental space.  Going to a physical space like the classroom makes it clear that you are not available for other commitments.  This may not always be the case at home or at work.  It is therefore important to assiduously dedicate time and space to study just as if attending a course in a physical location.

How does e-learning work?

Dyslexia Action uses a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) called Moodle, which is also used by a many international and UK colleges and universities including the University of London and the Open University.

The learning environment consists of web pages that represent courses, modules or units. Each course is divided into topics where you will find links to readings, audio/video recordings of lectures and links to external reading resources. 

All courses also contain discussion forums where you can discuss your readings or work on assignments with other course participants and your tutor. Some topics include interactive quizzes or space where you can submit assignments for marking by a tutor.

Students are given a personal account through which to access the learning environment and enrol in individual courses, units or modules.

Technical requirements

Any computer that can run office applications such as Word or PowerPoint and access rich content websites such YouTube or the BBC iPlayer is sufficient to access all the course resources.  No special software or hardware purchases are necessary.  However, it is recommended that students have access to a printer and scanner.  Some courses include the submission of lessons on memory stick in which access to basic video recording equipment is necessary.

It is also strongly recommended that you use Firefox as your web browser.  This is free to download (http://firefox.com ).  We do not support problems encountered if you are using Internet Explorer 6. which is widely recognised as obsolete and insecure (see http://ie6countdown.com/ )

If your institution does not have Firefox, you can download its portable version from http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable .  You can then run it from a USB key or just a folder on any computer.

Broadband connection with a liberal bandwidth usage policy (5GB) is highly recommended. The basic course content can be accessed via mobile broadband or even dialup but the learning experience is likely to be diminished and video/audio content may not be accessible at all.