Tammy Dukes

By 1999, e-learning was knocking on the door of, if not already becoming part of, the mainstream.Conventional and distance colleges and universities were adopting e-learning programs, often whenever the target audience would be willing to learn this way. Many institutions design instruction through a blended approach, which combines eLearning with face-to-face and this is often demonstrated through online orientations with new students using technology such as webcams .

Although Smartboards came along in 1991, they were not as popular in education until the year 2000 after E-learning became a popular learning method. Smartboards were a great technological tool for classrooms as it provided learners with a hands-on approach to learning while allowing educators to do less lecturing and more guiding in classrooms.

Blogging foreshadowed much of the web during this period as it replaced hand written journals for class or even the work environment. Both students and educators saved time and kept information organized through blogs so they inevitably started to publish and share diaries, journals, and regularly updated resources online through weblinks they shared with peers and anyone else that wanted to view the information.

Web 2.0 was on the scene around the year 2004 but it wasn't until 2006 when the technology became popular with educational use. The practical term “web 2.0” gathered together the user-generated
content services, YouTube, Flickr, and eventually morphed into social media which inevitably led to data being the key source for revenue. Nonetheless, web 2.0 poses a fundamental need in education as it
conducts many of school cherished processes such as peer review and publishing,

The e-portfolio was a place to store all the evidence a learner gathered to exhibit learning, both formal and informal, in order to support lifelong learning and career development.

Founded in 2006, Twitter had moved well beyond the tech-enthusiast bubble by 2009. Students now had the digital means to network and make global connections with their peers and other students from all over the world which is a great way to share content and even create groups solely for coursework purposes. In educational terms,
social media has done much to change the nature of the relationship between academics, students, and the institution.

Dreambox (2019) states that in a personalized learning environment, the learning objectives and content, as well as the method and pace, may all vary. Personalization also encompasses differentiated instruction that supports student progress based on subject matter mastery. With PLE's the focus shifted from a personalized set of tools to a personalized set of resources, and in recent years this has become the goal of personalization

In many ways the MOOC phenomenon can be viewed as the combination of several preceding technologies (the open approach of OER, the application of video, the experimentation of connectivism,
and the revolutionary hype of web 2.0). Ahmad (2018) states While most MOOCs don’t go beyond recorded lectures or PowerPoint slides, the essentially successful MOOCs are carefully curated to embody all walks of differentiated pedagogy and learner engagement. Most MOOCs are designed to be delivered synchronously; however, the differentiated ones do recognize the fact that a large section of learners would appreciate a self-paced asynchronous learning path.