Experiences of Technology Enhanced Learning: What Went Wrong?

The e-learning community is beginning to amass a great deal of experience of successful practice, but typically final project reports and associated papers concentrate only on the successful outcomes. There has been very little published on the innovations that failed or the unexpected and unwanted outcomes of such projects. This experiences paper presents four case studies of projects in which the the authors have been involved over the last 15 years. The contribution of this paper is to focus on the aspects of the projects that were not successful or were unwanted, analyzing the causes. The paper concludes by suggesting that most projects have both successful and unsuccessful components, and that the community would be better informed if they were more often provided with the complete picture.