THE NEW GENERATION OF VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN LITHUANIA

Abstract

E-learning development in Lithuania can be traced back to early nineties and pilot projects, mainly supported by European funding initiatives. Many projects resulted in new content and spontaneous expansion. Yet each institution over and over again invented its' own approach to e-learning. In this paper we present e-learning process taxonomy as an expert based method to validate completeness of a virtual learning environment. E-learning is broken down into roles, groups and relationships. E-learning processes and related technologies are presented as bound actions particular for every actor group. Process taxonomy is applied to evaluate learning information systems in Lithuania. The paper is summarized by drawing certain recommendations resulting from the taxonomic analysis, articulating the core need for integration of diverse information systems and XML standards, as the core premise, to achieve this goal.