Learning in the Digital Age: Paving a Smooth Path with Digital Lecture Halls

In the transition from traditional teaching and learning to eLearning, this paper emphasizes smoothness. We claim that many virtual university and corporate university efforts worldwide try to showcase big leaps forward yet lack sustainability, suffer from in-vitro conditions, and leave behind the big mass of teachers (learning and teaching are used in the largest sense of these terms). The digital lecture hall (DLH) project accommodates traditional teaching methods right on the spot – making them ‘digitally’ available for computer assistance – but also reaches out to a large variety of computer assisted methods and to accompanying new organizational and business models. Apart from this smooth transition yet far reach, DLH has a second focus: the attempt to exploit venues which go well beyond class room size; as opposed to known “electronic classroom” efforts which are limited to some 15 to 30 local participants, audiences without size limits are supported in DLH, with the first implementation in operation offering a seating capacity of about 150.