E-learning: Let's look around

The evolution of e-learning systems put them in almost all areas of human life. E-learning can be considered in context of continuous societal and technological development. Current trends lead to creation of virtual society, alongside the physical world. As new in-formation communication technologies are developed, it is possible to extend the domain and usability of existing e-learning methodologies. E-learning technologies are used and developed by educational institutes, governmental organisations as well as commercial content vendors and large business corporations. This papers briefly reviews the evolution of learning paradigms and methodologies. With focus on modern e-learning tools and platforms, in the second part, different approaches in organising learning delivery are presented. In the third part, characteristics of e-learning tools and platforms are reviewed. According to the ISO software quality measure standards 9126 and 25000 and available assessing methods for learning systems, we propose a set of important characteristics for descriptive evaluation of e-learning systems. Furthermore, we analyse the impact of developing IT areas on selected characteristics. .