Paradoxes and Dilemmas in Managing E-Learning in Higher Education. Research & Occasional Paper Series: Cshe.7.03. E-learning Technologies and its Application in Higher Education: A Descriptive Comparison of Germany

The new information and communication technologies (ICT) affect currently most spheres of life, including all educational levels. Their effects are most likely to grow in the future. However, many predictions in the last few years as to the sweeping impact of the ICT on restructuring the teaching/learning practices at universities and their high profit prospects have not been materialized; and several large ventures of e-learning undertaken by the corporate world, new for-profit organizations and some leading universities failed to yield the expected results. This paper examines eight inherent paradoxes and dilemmas in the implementation process of the ICT in various higher education settings worldwide. The paradoxes and dilemmas relate to: the differential infrastructure and readiness of different-type higher education institutions to utilize the ICTs ’ potential; the extent to which the “old ” distance education technologies and the * Sarah Guri-Rosenblit is a Professor at the Open University of Israel in the Education and Psychology Department. Between 1995 and1999 she was the director of the “Rethinking Higher Education Program, ” which was co-sponsored by the Israel Academy of Sciences, the Israel Council of Higher Education and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Her main field of research in the last decade is comparative higher education with a special focus on distance education. She has published dozens of articles in this area, and in 1999 her book Distance and Campus Universities: Tensions and Interactions was published by Pergamon Press & IAU. The book examines the interrelations between classical campus universities and distance teaching universities i