The Integration of e-learning in the Algerian universities: Where do we stand? Abstract

Abstract

Digital technologies affect many aspects of our daily life. The rapid and incredible growth of the use of these new technologies during the last two decades has caused an impact on our interest in promoting new policies and strategies to build knowledge individually and collectively in higher education worldwide. Due to these recent changes, the new challenge of higher education institutions is to strive to redefine their student competencies, their partners and competitors and to redesign their research infrastructures and teaching practices. In the local scene, in Algeria, employing these new digital technologies efficiently and effectively is still backward. What is, therefore, significant in reality is that the national institutions at the tertiary level do not possess the appropriate infrastructure for utilizing the wide spectrum of the technologies’ capabilities, nor do they possess a clear policy and its inherent strategies to implement such technologies in order to enable them to operate on the ground. Worse, the majority of practitioners, and at all levels, in higher education are unprepared and less qualified to adopt and use the digital technologies because they have not sought for to change their traditional and outmoded own methods and practices. Those latter are seen not to meet the exigencies and requirements of the present time and the future. Therefore , in this new Age of the digital technology , it is of tremendous importance for higher education in Algeria to work hard for the purpose to narrow the huge gap between the reality they face and live in and the potential of the new technologies in order to keep abreast with the standard norms of modern education . Undoubtedly, some uses of the digital technologies are quite promising but require substantial reorganisation and rethinking of the roles of the individuals and institutions. In the sphere of this problematic, in the present work, we purport to explain the gap between the existing, prevailing reality of the Algerian universities and the expectations of the effects of the digital technologies in the academic world of higher education. In precise terms, this communication will tackle the question of to which extent the Algerian universities are prepared to implement and use the new technologies as part of their current practices for the purposes they can serve, and discuss the challenges and problems the institutions in higher education are facing to place information and communication technologies as central to teaching and learning.