What is the dominant problem in the British education system for which you wanted to find an answer with a new eLearning strategy?

Diana Laurillard: How to enable everyone to achieve their learning potential. This is inclusive of all ages and types of people, and does not assume they necessarily should set out to do this. However but if they wish to, government should make it possible. It does not define a general standard: your learning potential can be defined in terms of whatever skill or discipline or activity you choose, but you should be able to go as far as your potential can take you.

This is not a problem - it is an aim of a state education system. Our problem is that too few achieve their potential, either at school or in post-compulsory education. The eLearning strategy was focused on 'personalisation' to motivate, engage, and support learners better; 'flexibility' to respond to what and how learners want to study; 'inclusion' to enable disabled or disaffected learners to participate in education; and 'productivity' to make sure both learners and teachers are using their time to best advantage.

How do students learn these days? Is there a "net generation"? What qualifications should university teachers have?

Diana Laurillard: What it takes to learn difficult skills and complex ideas - the stuff of formal education - does not change. For over 100 years, since the work of John Dewey in the US, there has been a constant thread of understanding of what it takes to learn: the learner must be motivated, active, able to work at the pace that suits them, able to practice with feedback, able to share ideas with others, etc. There is a lot more, but most of it is not in dispute at the most general level of definition. I believe this will not change.

There is a net generation in the sense that they are comfortable with finding their way in new technologies, but I don't align it with an age group so much as with an attitude of mind - plenty of young people don't engage with it, plenty of old people do. But when people learn through the net, they are finding the ways in which new technologies afford learning and provide all those classic requirements of learning: motivation, activity, personal control of the process, repeated practice with immediate feedback... whether it is Facebook or Second Life.

In order to make higher education as engaging as the other aspects of life, it has to borrow the same techniques: make the seminar as lively as a discussion at the pub or give students the opportunity to explore each others' personal study projects, as they can in Facebook. So university teachers, if they are to be fully professional, should be licensed to practice and have to be given the support they need to explore and innovate.

At the Campus Innovation Conference last year, a speaker said, "The times of chalk and talk methods are over"?

Diana Laurillard: The traditional methods will not suffice to integrate masses of students in higher education, particularly not in countries like China or India.

What is your opinion? Is eLearning really a method to fight the digital divide?

Diana Laurillard: Yes. The current problem is access to the technology, but this is an interim problem that will be solved in the near future. The much more difficult problem is changing the human and organisational systems to exploit the technology to the full, in service of both the quantity and the quality of educational provision worldwide. That is what our eLearning strategy was about: trying to make the early steps towards an education system capable of doing that.

What makes a university a learning organisation?

Diana Laurillard: It needs all the characteristics of a good learning process -

• access to good information and ideas;
• debate and discussion at all levels about the ideas, intentions, concepts, plans, etc.
• appropriate to that level;
• the means to experiment, iteratively, with the implementation of these ideas and plans;
• feedback on the effects of the experiment;
• the means to share and compare different ways of implementing the ideas;
• the opportunity to reflect and discuss again the ideas, concepts and plans.

And keep on working through this cyclical process of ideas, experiment, discovery, reflection and debate.