History of e-learning at the University of Tartu

The year 1995 may be considered to be the beginning of e-learning at the University of Tartu when the first e-mail based course was delivered for the students of the Faculty of Mathemathics.

In 1998 our Multimedia Centre obtained videoconference facilities with the support of the PHARE Multi-country Project in Distance Education. 1999/2000 university colleges in counties were provided with the ISDN connection and this gave us a possibility to start videoconferences between the main campus and colleges in educational purposes (regular lectures and seminars, meetings, consultations).

In 1998 the first web-based course in the WebCT environment was developed and delivered at our university. Since this year the number of web-based courses has continuously increased.

In January 2000 the University Council gave priority to ICT-based learning at our university. The University Council acclaimed it should be important to inculcate ICT-based learning in all study moulds, to start the developmental programme of ICT-based courses and assigned the Distance Education Centre as a structural unit with the responsibility for developing ICT-based learning at our university.

In 2001 our Multimedia Centre started to create CDs in study purposes.

In February 2002 the portal of the E-University of the University of Tartu was opened. Besides offering learning opportunities and support to learners, this portal provides technical and methodological help for academic staff (professors and tutors) for elaborating ICT-based courses, the information about copyright problems in the Internet, etc.

In 2003 the consortium of Estonian e-University was created and the University of Tartu is one of the member universities of this consortium.

In 2009 University of Tartu started to use Moodle web-based learning environment http://moodle.ut.ee. In same year teachers became the possibility to use virtual classroom software Adobe Connect Pro (http://kontakt.ut.ee).

In 2010 the videoportal (Television of the University of Tartu UTTV, http://uttv.ee) was launched.

In 2011 the Moodle environment was connected with SIS (Study Information System).

At the moment we have approximately 1700 operating web-based courses and a lot of courses are being designed. We have not any totally web-based curriculum, butsingletraditional university, open university and continuing education courses within different curricula.