E-learning at the world's top universities
Original title: Efektivita e-learningových systémov vo vysokoškolskom vzdelávaní a ich porovnanie podľa svetového rebríčka ARWU
E-learning gets talked about as one thing, even though the term covers everything from a recorded lecture to a fully managed teaching system. So together with my student Natália Jurkechová I looked at what e-learning actually is, which types can be distinguished, and how e-learning systems are represented at the universities leading the ARWU world ranking.
Why it is worth reading
It shows what e-learning means at universities in the global top tier — and therefore what we are actually measuring ourselves against.
What to take away
- E-learning is not one thing. Without distinguishing the types, systems cannot be meaningfully compared or assessed.
- The interesting question is not whether a university "has" e-learning, but how deeply it is built into ordinary teaching.
- The ARWU ranking is used here to pick the reference group — an answer to the question of who is worth comparing against.
Why compare against the global top at all
When digitalising education it is easy for a university to compare itself only with itself five years ago. Measured that way, every step looks like progress. More useful, if less comfortable, is to look at those who are ahead.
That is why we took universities from the top of the ARWU ranking as our reference group. Not because rankings are infallible, but because they give at least some verifiable criterion for the selection.
What the article covers
First the dull but necessary part: what e-learning actually is and which types can be distinguished. It sounds like a formality, but without it any comparison falls apart — one university means a managed teaching system by e-learning, another means recorded videos.
We then looked at how e-learning systems are represented at these universities.
Where this article belongs
It is a smaller piece, published in our department journal Pošta, Telekomunikácie a Elektronický obchod. I list it here for three reasons.
I have worked on e-learning for a long time, and that line has not disappeared from my work even though it now sits behind the topics around artificial intelligence. The second reason is that it was written with a student — and when a student and I write something together, they get authorship, not a thank-you in a footnote. The third is that a department journal is a place where work like this can be published properly, with a DOI and peer review.
Bibliographic details
- Authors
- Natália Jurkechová, Juraj Fabuš
- Published in
- Pošta, Telekomunikácie a Elektronický obchod
- Year
- 2025
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 43-49
- Publisher
- University of Žilina
- DOI
- 10.26552/pte.C.2025.2.5
- Keywords
- e-learning, e-learning systems, ARWU, top ranked universities
Show abstract
Official abstract in its original wording.
E-learning has become a useful tool for education not only in leading universities in recent decades. It is an efficient and flexible form of education that uses modern technology to support learning. The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of e-learning, to characterize its different types and to analyze the representation of e-learning systems in leading universities.
Cite
Jurkechová, N. & Fabuš, J. (2025). Efektivita e-learningových systémov vo vysokoškolskom vzdelávaní a ich porovnanie podľa svetového rebríčka ARWU. Pošta, Telekomunikácie a Elektronický obchod, 20(2), 43-49. https://doi.org/10.26552/pte.C.2025.2.5