فهرست مطالب tayyebeh gashool darehsibi

Nowadays, e-learning has become an essential aspect of education and learning. Being informed of the key factors of e-learning advancement is of high importance to determine the vision, strategies, and policies in top-level organizations, companies, educational institutions, and enterprises involved in education. In this paper, we discuss technological drivers of e-learning and extract the most important factors according to technology hype cycle. The research has been performed through archival and documentary research and using information attained from published scientific references, reports, documents, and press releases. Main goals of this paper are (1) identifying technological drivers of e-learning and (2) analyzing status of Iran’s higher education according to the identified drivers. The result of the study shows that technological drivers of e-learning are: personalized and adaptive learning, mobile learning, social learning platforms, blended learning, gamification, simulation, cloud computing, integration and interoperability, xAPI standard, virtual reality, massive open online courses (MOOC), and video content management. Moreover, investigation shows that these technologies have not been used extensively in Iran. The current status of e-learning in Iran shows that the activities done in this area are not so coherent, systematic, and unified with the technology transitions. What is necessary to rectify this situation is to change the point of view to the e-learning and exploit the technology in a systematic way in policies, plans, and implementation. Being at the start of the new century and simultaneously formulating Seventh National Development Plan creates an opportunity for universities and Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology to include national policies and programs in that plan. Consequently, they can provide the possibility of rectifying the current path in electronic education in Iran and exploiting its advantages for education system, in a period of 5 years duration.

Nowadays, all aspects of human life are influenced by the advances in information and communication technologies (ICT). Education and learning are also among areas that have been greatly affected by ICT and the speed of its growth. This affectability results in the creation of a new concept, called e-learning. In this paper, we first define the basic concepts of learning. Then, describing the trajectory of the technological course of distance education, we explain the technological background of e-learning and express how ICT affects the formation of personalized intelligent learning. Evolution of distance education can be divided into six generations: correspondence education, audio-visual education, computer-assisted education, web-based education, e-learning 1, and (social) e-learning 2. Additionally, we address to the researches in e-learning through the examination of published papers in e-learning. Our investigation shows the increasing interest of researchers to technological issues of e-learning as well as attempting to match different information technology appearances to it. Scientific problems around e-learning are interesting for many researchers, and solving each of them helps to the evolution of e-learning from some aspect. E-learning, as the most sensible effect of modern information and communication technologies on education and because of its effects on the mind and behaviour of the learners, is so important that ignoring policy making on it makes it impossible to exploit the advantages of applying these technologies in education, increases the costs in future of education, and also widens the gap between education system and citizens of information era.