Opportunities and challenges of ICT for training

Trainers of the Network of Remote French-speaking education of Canada REFAD have pointed out very exhaustively opportunities and challenges linked to the Web 2.0's tools :

Opportunities :

• Mobility and portability and hence an increased flexibility for users which have access anywhere and anytime.
• An increased motivation of at least part of the trainees, particularly the youngest, leading maybe to more persevering.
• The trainee as a producer of learning contents, and thus a more visible apprenticeship leading to an improvement of his taking over of the matter, of his autonomy and of his getting a sense of responsability.
• Numerous possibilities of cooperation, of socialization and exchanges and thus of apprenticeship of collaboration and team work so much for the students than for the trainers and institutions.
• Theexpression under various forms, including multimédia, allowing a personalization and a suppport to different styles of apprenticeship.
• Theease and speed of the information's dissemination at very low cost, independent of distance, increasing its impact.
• The multiplicity ou pervasiveness of tools being able to bear all the aspects of an educational experience.
• Awide access to contents, to experts and trainings, constituting a factor of levelling out, in particular between regions.
• New possibilities of organizing information and of creation of metadata.
• An opportunity of apprenticeship of the use of media and ICT tools and of information literacy, transferable to other contexts.
• Anopportunity of educational innovation, of widening to new approaches and organizational innovation, among other more personalized and contextualized learnings.

Challenges :

• The need for teachers and institutions to share their power and supervision. An evaluation of authority towards transparency, from expert to facilitator, from presentation to participation.
• The support to motivation and participation necessary to the evolution of the trainee's role from passive listener to active and creative participant.
• A need for apprenticeship of numerous information literacies : use of technologies, informational skills, management of digital identity, etc.
• Questions linked to intellectual property and to evolution in contents of producing practices and works (assemblies, cooperations, etc).
• The management of immediacy of communications and fast evolution of social softwares.
• Risks linked to safety of information on the Web and to cybercrime.
• Choice of tools and of their integration to institutional systems or not.

in : WIKIS, BLOGS AND WEB 2.0 ,Opportunités et impacts pour la formation à distance , 2010 Full text