We are delighted to introduce a new guest blogger today. Simone Sucupira is a teacher at Cultura Inglesa São Paulo (CISP) - Campinas. She writes:

Simone Sucupira

This year's LABCI conference invited us to discuss education in a situation of changing learning needs. We were challenged to think about what kind of education our society is likely to need in the near future. We asked ourselves the following question: 'How can we make a difference?'

Bearing this in mind, I chose the title 'The e-Campus and Self-Paced courses: the next revolution' for my presentation at LABCI.

Here at CISP, we've been using the e-Campus for quite some time and its adoption has revolutionized our regular courses. The e-Campus has made such a huge difference because although it's a single tool, it's brought many new innovations to our teaching! Here are some of the benefits of the e-Campus: 

•       It's a virtual learning environment which offers consistent content and flexible delivery: students can have optimized input of language anywhere, anytime they like.
  
•       It has added a new, less controlled, asynchronous element to our courses: students are much more free to decide what to do when they are not in the classroom. It promotes learner autonomy! 

One of my students, Guilherme Nunes, once told me: 'The e-Campus as it is now, offers students a lot.' This made me wonder what else we could offer given that the e-Campus has already been so successfully integrated to our courses. Then I realized that listening to what our students have to say about their learning needs is the key to understanding how we can make a difference.

Guilherme kindly granted me an interview which became the basis for discussing two of the most important questions I posed during my presentation:

•     What kind of learning opportunities could our students need that we might not be offering at the moment?
•     As an e-learning tool, has the e-campus achieved its full potential?

Here's Guilherme's interview.

In my presentation, I tried to demonstrate that the e-Campus currently offers students at CISP a great deal but has potential for much more! It might evolve from a supplementary tool into a self-contained, independent, on-line learning course.

At CISP we will be as ready to adapt as we are keen to offer the best learning opportunities to our students who, as in the case of Guilherme, sometimes cannot fit their schedules to our regular classes.