Learning in the Digital Age: paving a smooth path with digital lecture halls

In the transition from traditional teaching and learning to e-learning, this paper emphasises smoothness. Many virtual university and corporate university efforts worldwide try to showcase big leaps forward, yet they lack sustainability, suffer from in-vitro conditions and leave behind the majority of teachers (learning and teaching are used in the widest sense of these terms). The Digital Lecture Hall (DLH) project accommodates traditional teaching methods on the spot - making them 'digitally' available for computer assistance - but also reaches out to a large variety of computer-assisted methods and accompanies new organizational and business models. Apart from this smooth, yet far-reaching transition, DLH has a second focus: the attempt to exploit venues which go well beyond the normal classroom size. As opposed to the well-known "electronic classroom" efforts, which are limited to some 15 to 30 local participants, audiences without size limits are supported in DLH, with the fist implementation in operation offering a seating capacity of about 150.