 Let us begin this learning dialogue with a reflection spot. You have read on a blog somewhere advice to e-learning designers. It says that in order to create e-learning modules, the main thing one needs to focus on is how to effectively and attractively put up information on an online platform. Do you agree? Pause this reflection spot and when you have made your choice, please resume. What might go wrong if you follow this advice? You might have included some PDFs and uploaded it or you may have done it better and you may have created animations and videos and images which have all the required information and uploaded it. Maybe you have a couple of exercises here and there. Still what's missing in this scenario? Attention to learner motivation. Opportunities to the learner to immediately apply and perform some activities related to the content that they have learnt right after they learnt the content. Immediate practice. Formative assessment and feedback right after they have done the task on whether they are on the right track, do they need to improve and so on. Explicit activities to foster pure learning between learners and which can help form a community of learners. So all this actually points to what's missing is ensuring that there is connect to the learner. The learner is forgotten, their motivation, their needs, their prior knowledge if all we do is think of how to attractively package and put up information. The other thing we have forgotten is the established theories of how people learn. We have seen various challenges associated with e-learning. So now let's try to see how to address these challenges. One way to address these challenges is to adopt a learner-centric approach. What does learner-centric mean? It's essentially a broad pedagogical approach, in fact a mindset almost which comes from constructivist philosophies and the focus in a learner-centric approach shifts from how well did we convey the information to what did the students actually get out of it. It shifts from did I teach well to how well did the students learn. The characteristics of a learner-centric approach include the following. Learners are co-creators of their own knowledge. They construct their knowledge as they interact with the content and with the other activities in the learning environment. This means that prior knowledge affects how they learn in future, what they learn and how they learn. Learners interact with the content and this means they go beyond watching videos, reading text and listening to something. Learners work on different activities sometimes collaboratively. In fact, that is one of the key aspects of a learner-centric approach and they immediately apply their learning from what they learnt in the video or by doing the activities and they get feedback on it from the platform. Learners control their pace of learning, what they do next. They feel included. Learners feel included. There is a personalized element, personalization element between the learning environment which includes the content, the activities, the discussion forums, the way the language is and the learner who is interacting with it. Let us pause at a reflection spot where you can think and in fact reflect on your past experience and write one instance where you may have experienced a learner-centric approach. When you are done writing, please resume. Some of you may have thought of a classroom scenario where there were active discussions between the teacher or the facilitator and all the learners. You may have as adult learners, you may have experienced a workshop where there was an activity you were doing collaboratively, doing problem solving or doing group discussions or perhaps the context where you experienced a learner-centric approach was an online course or other e-learning content where there were certain personalized elements or certain activities which followed the characteristics of a learner-centric approach. In face-to-face context, some of the flavors, the entire spectrum of a learner-centric approach includes active learning, collaborative learning, techniques like think-pair-share or inquiry learning in labs, peer instruction and so on. Now the question is to bring in a learner-centric approach in e-learning. Every e-learning project has its own challenges but in each of these, a key requirement for the designer is to design e-learning content and the entire learning environment to promote engagement of learners, to support them to learn perhaps difficult concepts and apply the core concepts to persevere through the e-learning module and so on. So a learner-centric approach becomes critical. So what are the requirements of a learner-centric approach in the context of e-learning? The content and the learning environment must provide mechanisms to enhance learner engagement. The designer should make sure that learners have sufficient support from the material itself since they have to learn these on their own. The e-learning should enable personalization, it should contextualize the learning to relatable scenarios and help the learner acquire a deeper understanding of the content. A learner-centric approach in e-learning does foster peer learning and being a part of a community. It attempts to cater to diversity and individual needs of learners. So the focus of this course is that in the context of e-learning given the medium, the format, the challenges, the lack of synchronicity between people how do we design the content and the activities and the entire learning environment so that learner-centric principles are followed so that learners go beyond watching and listening and executing prescribed procedures? How do we make sure that learners in fact think and figure out things and express their opinion, learn from peers? How do we foster learner engagement? How do we promote learner engagement? How do we try to make sure that learners feel included and they persevere? So in the rest of this course we will focus on pedagogical design principles which in fact originate from learning theories and help e-learning designers ensure that learner-centric principles are followed and these requirements are met. Thank you.