I am also a professor who teaches funny and sexy academic subjects such as mathematics, probabilities, statistics and econometrics.

As an introduction to this seminar, I would like to tell you a little very instructive story.
Yesterday morning, I had an exceptional meeting with a group of students, in fact distance learning students on a management course.

When I enter the classroom, they all protest: your subject is very hard, all the documents are online, simulations, animations and so on are not sufficient. We don't understand anything! The examination will be a big catastrophe!

I spent a couple of hours giving explanations and exercises, with a lot of sentences, a lot of dirty graphs and mappings on the blackboard, a lot of theatrical gestures in order to be understood.

Finally the students were less angry, less aggressive, smiling and almost happy. "Now, we understand this course much better!". Speaking with you for two hours is much better than studying alone at home for twenty hours.

As a teacher I was very pleased to be successful with the face to face teaching. But as the project manager of a distance learning system, I was totally afraid by the experiment. Perhaps blended learning was better than purely distance learning. Certainly we have to work again more and more seriously with online materials and with tutoring.

But above all, the evidence was I am not able to pass from theatre to cinema, from direct interaction to the meticulous design and integration of media, without it producing a state of anxiety and insecurity in the learning process.

So I need teacher training for ICT, and other teachers also, to improve the efficiency of distance learning, and to make it as effective as face to face pedagogy, and if possible, more effective.

The eLene-TT project can help me, can help us, to do this. I hope so.

Michel Armatte.