Virtual learning Environments, an Opportunity to Help Promote the Culture of Learning

The culture of learning is a new concept which has found its way into the education literature in recent decades. According to this concept all elements of curriculum, including the educational behavior of teachers and learners who interact in a learning environment, are affected by the cultural atmosphere of that environment. Through the development of information and communication technology and emergence of information society, skills such independent and lifetime learning, self-motivated and path-finding learning, and acquisition of troubleshooting, planning and decision-making skills in complicated situations have taken on more importance and are viewed as important education objectives on various levels. On the other hand, the culture of learning in Iran, which features inaction on the part of learners, weak interactions among learners, teacher-centeredness, lack of self-motivation among learners and their acceptance of data without analysis, is in contrast with education goals of information society. So the main goal of this paper is to present an operational plan to help teachers gradually push the culture of learning in the direction of factors important to information society by virtual learning environment. This article has four parts and seeks to provide an answer to the main question. The first two sections focus on the culture of learning and characteristics of a virtual learning environment respectively. The third section focuses on gradual reformation of the culture of learning through virtual environment, and the fourth part builds on what is discussed in the first three sections to lay out the operational steps needed by teachers to gradually reform the culture of learning in the virtual environment.