Can we re-invent e-learning?

Somebody once said:

Although e-learning began as a new way to deliver training, it cannot remain that way because it is no longer able to adequately support all the learning needs of individuals and organizations by itself - if it every was. E-learning has moved in a new, somewhat unanticipated direction that is not always reminiscent of an instructional framework. To be more influential, e-learning must be reinvented. While continuing to provide a viable instructional option in a formal learning setting, it must also move toward informational and collaborative solutions that focus more prominently on the specific jobs people do. It must move beyond courseware and classrooms and into work. To reinvent e-learning is, in many ways, to reinvent learning itself.

(Marc J. Rosenberg, Beyond E-learning)

In essence, this means transforming learning, so that learning activities and resources are situated around

1. the learner
2. their environment
3. their tasks

enabling learners to construct their own knowledge in the context of what resources they need to carry out their activities effectively.

David Jonassen says:

In constructivist learning environments, technologies are used to situate learning tasks in a variety of contexts. With video, very rich and engaging contexts can be created.

He asserts that in the traditional organizational approach that

[u]nfortunately, most e-learning replicates the worst features of face-to-face instruction. So, it may be cheaper to "deliver" knowledge over the Internet, but it will not be more effective.

In the context of organizational development and workplace learning, this is commonly known as the systems-based approach to instructional design & development (ISD). A system is a set of elements or components that must integrate to perform a specific function. Every job in an organization is used by the organizational ecosystem to produce a product or output. The product or output is the means by which a organization generates its assets and remains self-supporting. In theory, this leads to the creation of a virtuous circle of continuous growth and development.

In learning and development, this systems-based approach is epitomized by the ADDIE conceptual framework, most notably refined by Dick & Carey in The Systematic Design of Instruction (1996).

The ADDIE approach has been one of the core tenets of instructional design for the best part of two decades.

I think ADDIE is a myth.

And I'm not alone in reaching this conclusion. In his article In Search of the Elusive ADDIE Model (2003), Michael Molenda undertook a Livingstonian attempt to discover the source for the original reference to the ADDIE model. Molenda’s research uncovered no original reference for the ADDIE model. This lack of an original reference led Molenda to write,

I am satisfied at this point to conclude that the ADDIE Model is merely a colloquial term used to describe a systematic approach to instructional development, virtually synonymous with instructional systems development (ISD). The label seems not to have a single author, but rather to have evolved informally through oral tradition. There is no original, fully elaborated model, just an umbrella term that refers to a family of models that share a common underlying structure.

(p.1)

My view is that ADDIE emerged from the principles of project management, and resemble the philosophy and practice to this discipline's methodology more than a pedagogy. Treating learning like a project leads to "training outcomes" equivalent to project deliverables.

While these training deliverables may have value in and of themselves, they have limited value for learners in the longer term. We could even say that the training outputs are valid; some of the objectives of the learning intervention designed according to the precepts of ADDIE may be met but

Our field of educational communications is founded on the premise that communicating content to students will result in learning. In educational communications, information or intelligence (in many different forms) is encoded visually or verbally in the symbols systems employed by each technology. During the "instructional" process, learners perceive the messages encoded in the medium and sometimes "interact" with the technology. Interaction is normally operationalized in terms of student input to the technology, which triggers some form of answer judging and response from the technology in the form of some previously encoded (canned) message. Technologies as conveyors of information have been used for centuries to "teach" students by presenting prescribed information to them which they are obligated to "learn."

(Jonassen, 2001)

So, can we re-invent e-learning?

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References:
Dick, W. & Carey, L. (1996). The Systematic Design of Instruction (4th Ed.). New York: Harper Collins College Publishers.

Exclusive Interview with Professor David Jonassen (2001) IN: elearningpost [Internet] Available from: http://www.elearningpost.com/articles/archives/
exclusive_interview_with_professor_david_jonassen [Accessed 12th January 2007]

Molenda, M. (2003). In Search of the Elusive ADDIE Model. [Internet] Available from: http://www.indiana.edu/~molpage/
In%20Search%20of%20Elusive%20ADDIE.pdf Accessed 12 May 2008

Rosenberg, M.J. (2001) What Lies Beyond E-Learning? learningcircuits.org e-zine [Internet] Available from: http://www.learningcircuits.org/2006/March/rosenberg.htm Accessed 14th April 2007

E-Learning and the Economic Downturn: April Update

It's just over two months since I posted on Recession and the Challenge to E-learning. It's a subject that I said I would monitoring as the "Credit Crunch" became a downturn, which may or may not lead to a recession.

As a reminder, at the time I suggested that the appropriate social and economic innovations required to support e-learning were now sufficiently embedded (compared to 2001) to ensure the e-learning industry would certainly survive and maybe even thrive an economic downturn. I tempered this assertion by asking

will the positive economic, organisational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses to recessionary times? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

Now read on...

Some preliminary evidence is now emerging which may indicate that the E-learning Industry is doing quite in the current economic climate. Electric News Net (ENN) has reported that SkillSoft and ThirdForce two of the largest Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) producers of e-learning content have posted profits for the last quarter and the year, respectively.

According to ENN,

e-learning firm SkillSoft posted another great set of quarterly results with revenues up by 34 percent and profits nearly quadrupling. Coming off the back of a third quarter where profits nearly trebled SkillSoft managed to perform even better in the fourth quarter as it posted profits of USD34.3 million, up from USD8.2 million for the same quarter the previous year.

SkillSoft say that the increase in revenue was down to:

• higher-than-planned rates of contract retention and renewal
• incremental revenues of USD4.6 million related to the amortisation of deferred revenue acquired by SkillSoft in the acquisition of NETg
• incremental revenues from NETg customer contracts which were renewed after acquisition

ThirdForce has seen its operating profit up by 160 per cent for 2007, while revenue increased by 35 per cent for the same period. Since acquiring MindLeaders, the US has become a key market for ThirdForce, and the company says it is targeting US companies in the sub-Fortune 1,000 sector. In the UK, ThirdForce is continuing to see growth in its core hospitality market, adding a number of multi-year contracts with major clients during 2007.

Analysis
At face value, these results look very positive, but these revenue reports are now a matter of history. Certainly in the case of ThirdForce, the results are based on performance before the current downturn really began to bite, and as such I don't know if the results can be interpreted in terms of how the organization is performing in 08H1. It will be interesting to see how their strategy of growing their presence in the sub-Fortune 1,000 marketspace, given the fact that both SkillSoft and ThirdForce are headquartered in the Euro Zone, and given the current Dollar weakness against the Euro.

Similarly, a presence in the UK market would have at one time been viewed as a triple-bound low-risk revenue generator, but again, the current Sterling to Euro differential may mitigate against growth in that territory.

Dilemma
Consider the dilemma for both organizations: they both have substantial interests in territories with weakening currencies. Their sales and revenue numbers for 2008 - say arbitrarily $10M or €7.7M (at December 2007 exchange rates) - would have been agreed in 2007Q3, and strategies would have been put in place to meet those objectives. Now, even if the sales teams hit their targets numerically, they are struggling in a weakened Dollar situation where their $10M is now worth €6.3M - a substantial shortfall in revenue.

However, what's more interesting to me is that both organizations' customers intend to either renew or extend their current contracts with the two content providers. In my view, this indicates the increasingly positive reaction to and growing reliance upon e-learning as means of meeting employee training and development requirements. Is it trend that will be reflected across markets generally?

We'll see.

It's still early days, and no doubt I will be returning to this topic presently.

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Recession and the challenge to e-learning

A colleague in an area of business other than the learning industry asked me a few days ago; "Do you think that e-learning will survive a recession?"

My initial response to her was "there's no recession... yet!" Later, I reflected on the implications of the current economic slowdown (whether or not it turns into a recession) for the e-learning industry.

The dialectic I am presenting here can be summarised in the following manner: will the positive economic, organisational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses to recessionary times? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

So what's changed in the e-learning industry since the last recession in 2001? I've outlined some discussion points below:

1. First of all: Traditional business practise
2. Developments in Infrastructure & Hardware
3. The E-learning Hype curve
4. Refinements in Content Development Methodologies
5. The Rise if the Read/Write Web
6. The Playstation Generation - Digital Natives in the workplace
   

Scroll down to find out more about each of these points.

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Traditional business practise
Historically, when a slowdown or company rationalisation occurs, the first against the wall are the folks in the PR, marketing, and training departments. Typically, individuals and organisations revert to previously-learned behaviours in tough times; this usually means going through the process of carrying out tried-and-tested, though not necessarily logical responses to the problems put in front of them. The rationale is as follows:

• Profits are down
• Revenue projections aren't great for the next 12/18 months
• We need to cut our costs
• We need to keep the guys that make the widgets (we need to have product to sell)
• We need to keep the managers of these people (or productivity will go down)
• We need to keep Human Resources in place to manage everyone obviously (it's just a coincidence that I - that is the decision-maker - work in HR!)
• What about those training people? High travel costs for the ILT guys, they pull people out of work for 3 days to go on courses. Large budgets spent on implementing and maintaining an LMS/LCMS, third-party e-learning libraries, custom courseware etc, but they do seem to add value to the organisation. And let's face it, they don't really improve the quality of our product, because they never convince us with their ROI metrics...

• Outcome: tea and sympathetic chat, and the Training team get their pink slips / P45s.

Sadly, I reckon that this will be strategy undertaken by a significant number of organisations over the next year or so. However....

...and it's a big however.

Let's look at the evidence for factors that have changed in the e-learning industry since 2001 and the recession following the Dot-Com crash.

Infrastructure & Hardware
More-or-less general availability of high-speed internet access just wasn't there in 2001. To take the example of the company I worked for at the time, our high-quality courseware was developed in Authorware and Director and delivered to customers on CD-ROM for distribution via their intranet or accessed directly from the disk. Our on-line courseware was a 'lite' version of the CD material - not out of choice, but because of the limited functionality that could be provided to a user via a 56k connection.

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio - hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn't find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colours, 800x600 pixel displays. And so on.

In short, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

The e-learning hype curve
This brings me neatly to the e-learning hype curve (see Figure 1). Kevin Kruse described 2001 as the year that

...brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of "blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

I would suggest through familiarisation and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery). Given this environment, organisations are now more willing to invest in e-learning as part of their overall training strategy. But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

I can't answer that question right now. I suspect that I will be able to answer it 12 months from now, because there will be evidence as to whether decision makers consider e-learning to be a core requirement that effectively meets organisations' training needs.

Content development methodologies
This kind of ties in with this month's Learning Circuits Big Question about instructional design. Without going into the history of this too much, the development of (relatively) easy-to-use authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate (and a whole raft of others), Rapid E-Learning development methodology and the disintermediation principle means that e-learning has fewer up-front costs associated with it than at the turn of the century.

Similarly, if it's done correctly at the outset, ongoing maintenance and support costs are lower than they ever have been. By developing content with smaller, more flexible teams, the value proposition of e-learning has been enhanced, and the total cost of ownership has been significantly reduced. Outside of e-learning, the take-up of podcasting and streamed media on sites like Blogger and YouTube demonstrates that this ease-of-use of tools and technologies has extended into the community at large.

The Read/Write Web
Who would have thought in 2000 that blogging, social networking, wikis and podcasts would be as big a part of life as they are now? At the start of the century, the Web (and e-learning) could at best be described as a half-duplex medium; it was pretty much all one-way traffic. The development of information platforms has facilitated knowledge-sharing, folksonomies, social interaction, and, key to all this, reciprocity.

We now live in a multiplex world of many voices and ideas, mediated by the internet. At the forefront in using these web technologies is the e-learning industry. By using these tools to develop content I feel we can demonstrate quite effectively that e-learning has a value now that it did not have a decade ago. I would assert that this is particularly true if you take a social-constructivist approach to learning. By the way, I'm happy to entertain debates about the role of formal as opposed to non-formal and informal learning in this environment.

The Playstation Generation
Concomitant with the read/write web is the Playstation generation that have grown up over the last number of years. In his seminal essay Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Marc Prensky declares:

...students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Extending from this, there is a generation of workers who are comfortable with and practised in the concepts and use of e-learning - take a look at the resources available on www.skoool.ie, an initiative for second-level students in Ireland. I was involved in the development of the first iteration of this site, and it's changed a lot (for the better) since we took those first steps creating it 8 years ago. Similarly in third-level education, there have been significant developments in on-line learning, and I think that it's fair to say that it has become quite embedded in the pedagogy employed by universities: tools like Moodle enable students to upload coursework, take tests, build their own knowledgebases and wikis, and have on-line discussions through a single point of access.

This generation is in the workplace right now. It will expect to learn new skills as their careers develop using the tools that they have always learned on in the past: that is, by using e-learning.

Conclusion
I've left loads of stuff out here; this is a blog entry, not an essay. But consider other factors including transport costs and training in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment ("e-learning" becomes "eco-learning" anyone?).

I may well return to this topic again. But at this point I want to put the question out there: how do you think e-learning will fare in the next 18 months, particularly if there are tough times ahead?


References:

Kruse, K. (2002) The State of e-Learning: Looking at History with the Technology Hype Cycle. [Internet] Available from: http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/hype1_1.htm [Accessed 12th February 2008]

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrats. [Internet] Available from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/
Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20
Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf [Accessed 14th February 2008]

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