Telematic lessons to be learned in education

The arrival of the personal computer in education did not appear to be greatly significant at first; it did not serve any obvious educational goal, and software was inaccessible, unappealing and impractical, which decreased the popularity of the use of computers for educational purposes. The same seemed to apply to the use of the Internet for education. Properly tailored multimedia software, however, could open up all kinds of possibilities: telematics could give existing educational software a new dimension. There are seven stages to preparing and developing education in the “telelearning environment”: planning the educational route; formalizing the route and signing up; exchange of information about all aspects of the route to the student; practising and sending in first assignments; processing of the assignment data; evaluating the assignments and distribution of new assignments; and final tests. Although, at this point, none of these stages is yet operative, experiments have already taken place and will continue to take place in this area. All this will enhance drastic changes for everyone involved with education: the traditional and classical educational setting, where all teaching responsibilities ‐ preparation, execution and follow‐up care ‐ were carried out by the teacher himself will be replaced by a new way of teaching, based on paying more attention to the individual student, forcing the teacher to delegate educational responsibilities, and increasing the independence of pupils and their responsibility for their own educational development.