eLearning Rebel

I personally think that teaching as a process to facilitate learning is highly over-rated. Experiential learning seems to be the key. However, can simulated experience stimulate learning in the same way that a real life experience could?

For seven years I taught courses to adult factory maintenance technicians and machinery operators. For most of my students, the motivation to learn was driven by extrinsic mandates by their managers. Their managers sent them to the training course. Some of the technicians were motivated by the joy of learning about some new piece of industrial equipment but for most it was mandatory. The students who came to the courses with intrinsic motivations were more engaged in the learning. The courses were self paced with a live facilitator. Participants were placed in front of machine with a workbook and told to start learning. You had to see the looks on their faces but once they started working, they realized that they had the knowledge and experience needed to complete the work and they learned in this environment with minimal coaching and demonstration.

We are learning all the time as we pass through life’s experience. Teacher, mentors, coaches, parents, and anyone or anything in our external environmental, shapes and directs our life experiences and in turn our learning. A teacher is nothing more then an entity in the external environment redirecting our experience. “An experience is always what it is because of transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment. (Dewey, 1938)”

Bandura’s (1986) reciprocal determinism points out the relationship between environment, personality and behavioral actions. A classroom is an environment where we are mandated to reside for 12 – 18 years of our lives and told that this is the best environment to learn. However, we all know instinctively, without reading Dewey (1938), that we learn as we do.

Let me conclude with an example. My father in law was raised in El Salvador. His formal classroom education ended in the 6th grade. His education occurred on the job between the ages of 12 and 20. As a young man in his twenties he was working as an assistant to an engineer, performing simple menial tasks. A job came up to build the cones for the bottom of a silo. My father in law explained that he could build them. He had no engineering training on how to build silos. In fact, I do not believe he had ever attempted this task before. He had no EXPERIENCE building silo cones. Despite his lack of education he built the silo cones to specification. The engineering manager, congratulated the engineer who then pointed to my father in law as the one who should be congratulated. My father in law was promptly promoted to a manager position. Between the ages of 12 and 20, he LEARNED how to solve this complex mechanical engineering problem. His environment and his intrinsic desire to learn, provided all he needed to know about mechanical engineering.

What does this tell us about formal teaching environments?

Poor e-learning design is a result of several factors. Core to poor e-learning design is a lack of the necessary competencies for e-learning design which are distinct from instructional design. Tools that now allow people to rapidly deploy information in the form of slides or screen shots, are at risk for creating poor e-learning.

I equate it with someone purchasing power tools from Sears while receiving no formal training in wood working. You can cut the wood, glue and hammer it together, but I need some training to design a piece of furniture and then build it. My cousin designs and builds furniture for a living. I have seen him working. I have seen many pieces of beautiful furniture, but I would never attempt to build one.

Trainers and instructional designers jump into building elearning courses only having seen some mediocre elearning courses, taken some courses and with experience designing and developing classroom experiences. Utilizing technology to design a learning experience that applies the science of learning is very unique competency.

I just posted a very long article on this topic on the e-learning guild.

http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/474/overcoming-obstacles-to-avoid-shovelware-e-learning-strategies

The field of learning and training is always in need of repositioning itself within an organization in order to validate it’s own value. Other professionals do not always view learning or training roles, within an organization, as legitimate professionals despite their education, unique skills and experience. Other professionals believe that training is something that anyone can do. An expert, using a presentation tool, can develop a training class and deliver it. The surveys come back positive and enforce this behavior.

The use of online learning has been growing since 1998 and continues to grow around the world. New technologies such as application driven mobile devices, social networking portals, 3D virtual environments, lowering costs of learning management systems, and rapid elearning development tools continue to impact growth of technology supported learning. As companies become more globally distributed, online learning becomes key to achieving corporate learning objectives. However, like classroom training, many experts are now asked to create e-learning with no formal training. New tools that do not require programming make if very easy for anyone to create an e-learning course. Most people know that e-learning built without design will probably be a bit boring but the practice is normal. It follows the strategy of “just get it done” and meet the minimum requirements for content distribution.

At an e-learning conference last week, I helped facilitate a panel to discuss challenges related to scaling up e-learning in an organization. No one believes that giving everyone a copy of a slide conversion tool is the right solution. Everyone in the room agreed that by doing this we enable the development of poor learning content. However, on the other hand, hasn’t Power Point enabled the development of millions of poorly designed slide decks? Go out to the site “SlideShare” and you will see that people will post just about anything. Slides are assembled with no consideration for design. One read of Nancy Duarte’s book, “Slideology” will improve slide presentations by 200% after reading the first chapter. However, very few people invest the time to improve their slide presentations.

The sad conclusion we came to is that people are developing e-learning so quickly that “good is good enough”. Captivate can now create very robust software instruction. Their latest version has introduced variables to make the simulations a bit more realistic. Very little concern for the science of learning and instruction has gone into this tool, however it creates something that is good and for most good is the goal. If you go to Lynda.com and look at the learning that they offer, they are simple narrated animated demonstrations. Lynda is making money. The business is successful and the learning applies very little in terms of the science of learning. (Mayer, 2011) Tools used to convert slide decks to slide based e-learning are extremely popular despite their inability to create highly effective learning applications.

As tools continue to advance, allowing the masses to develop more complex learning applications, more effective learning applications will begin to show up in our learning management systems.

Reference

Mayer, R.E.(2011), Applying the Science of Learning, Pearson Education

I am attending a session called “Brain Based Learning: Creating Engaging Learning Design.” I didn’t know that there was any type of learning that was not brain based. The sub-title of the presentation is “strategies to support brain-based learning and thinking style preferences.” Now that’s a bit more interesting and very challenging to have a learning application adapt to different thinking style preferences. I am not even sure what a different thinking style preference is. I am not sure if what Joe Fornier said is true but he is explaining that dopamine is released when we are learning.

We have been asked to write down the word, “Score Card”. There I did it. I’ve been asked what I would like to get out of this session. Well in fact, I don’t know yet what I want to get out of the session. I will not know until I hear it.

Joe is covering the following topics in this session …

• Scaffolding
• Learning Events
• Engaging Learning. What are some of things we inject into our e-learning to create engagement? The presentation of a problem can help a person focus. A simple image that engages emotion. In fact we still do know how people learn. As a result what we currently think about what good learning design is, may not be correct. Marketing and advertising knows how to engage people’s emotions to get you attention. When we are laughing and happy, we will remember more effectively. So does this mean that we should make our learning silly? I wonder if this is why Sesame Street works so well.
• Learning Styles
• Autonomous e-Learning. This is a principle presented by Malcolm Knowles as something needed by adults to learn. We also need respect, and the ability to grow. Our ability to make choices, influence learning, has an impact on the learning.

There are different type of theories of learning which include topics regarding short and long term memory, primacy and recency effects, types of memory and the effects of prior knowledge. Joe is discussing that old school is related to dumping facts into a brain as if it were a sponge. I have discussed this in several discussion. This is the old story that information is not instruction. When we all we get is facts or dumps of information, we are not connecting this information to developing strategy pathways.

We go through phases of learning which include:

1. Attention, for me this is when I recognize that something is important or relevant. We become focused on the particular topic.  This is the opposite of distraction. The brain can only do one thing at a time. We can see one thing or hear one thing at a time. As a result it is important to appreciate that there are many things that are competing for our attention and a key piece is emotional distraction. In fact, emotion is more important then any other distraction. So they can either enhance attention or pull people away from learning.
2. Inquiry, we start to break down the information
3. Construct Meaning
4. Construct Understanding which is deeper then meaning
5. Develop mastery by applying the knowledge, building strategies for using information
6. Refine the mastery if the knowledge is important until the integration becomes permanent
7. If we learn something, and we are totally jazzed about, we then go out and share it

Whole Brain Dominance Theory (the Herman guy)
These styles are very much aligned to the context, meaning the task being performed.

• Analyzer (logical/rational)
• Visualizer (big picture / creative)
• Personalize (interpersonal / feeling)
• Organizer (organized /planning)

Five Parts to a Learning Object that allows for the facilitation of learning
This is a nice way of considering what is valuable to facilitate the learning process with an emphasis on the word “process.”

• Assess (provide autonomy) give learners choices
• Introspect (ask people to connect learning to themselves or the task at hand, “how can you use this today, right now?”)
• Engage (create experience based activities)
• Reflect (promote reflection, ok disregard what’s not important and keep what’s important)
• Share (now that you have learned, go ahead and share it with your peers, what were the take aways?)

Social Media, Nick Floro from Sealworks

I am sitting in a session from Nick Floro (I think) on social media in learning. Nick is talking about rating scales on products such as Amazon. So this is an example of the old discussion forum if you really think about. A person searches for a topic, in this case a product in Amazon. They then enter some comments of their own or respond to what other’s have said. Again, I ask the question, is this learning or knowledge management?

The next level of two way communications is the classic chat room session. A tool mentioned is Camp Fire and Google Wave. Google Wave has not exactly caught a wave just yet. Both of these are live exchanges of information. This is all about the creation and distribution of content. Here’s a tool that I’ve never heard of … Drupal in the category of Moodle as open source learning and content management systems. For an open source social network company is called Ning. You can create a social network for a low subscription fee. It looks and feels like other social communities like FaceBook and LinkedIn? Someone just asked the question, what’s the difference between Ning and FB, LinkedIn. In theory there aren’t anything different other then the application of the technology. In fact groups in FB and LinkedIn follow the same logic as Ning. Want to learn a bit more, www.whatissocialmedia.org. In twitter you can monitor at hashtags.org/<the hashmark> to monitor activity. For example for this elearning DevCon you can go to hashtags.org/#EDC10 to see the activity at this conference. Since the elearning guild mobile conference is going on at the same time, I can also follow the m-learning conference. Well, other then a few links, didn’t learn much in this social media session. Here’s a cool side for posting and sharing content, posterous.com which is still free. This one looks like a winner and did I mention it’s free.

I just took a quick look at a new e-learning tool, at least new to me, called “Quick Lessons“. It looks very similar to Rapid Intake’s Unison tool although it looks like the interface is bit easier to use. It’s a very nice interface design. The developers at Quick Lessons score high on a nice user friendly interface. But are all these rapid and quick development tools helping or hurting our goal as an industry to improve the quality of online learning?

In an online discussion forum, a developer from the Quick Lessons mentioned some of the attributes of the tool as, “superior visual quality”, and “facilitates the creation of interactive content without requiring knowledge of programming or design.” This is a great feature but what it means is that the user can NOT DESIGN nor PROGRAM instructional strategies.

I believe that e-learning tools should not REQUIRE programming or design but ALLOW for programming and design. This is a major distinction. It seems that many of the latest e-learning development tools advertise no need for design or programming. Compare this to creating a set of tools for construction firms that require no architectural design or engineering. You just pick the colors and build it. Come to think of it many housing developments in the U.S. look like they follow this template model. The outcome has “superior visual quality”.

ProForm and Unison from Rapid Intake (and by the way I am not an employee of Rapid Intake nor am I a partner) allows a user to download the templates in native Flash and Actionscript so that an instructional technology designer can work with a Flash developer to design and build solutions to enable new instructional strategies. For example, I worked for a company that did use the ProForm and Unison product. Our internal team designed a game board interface to walk learners through a lengthy process, stopping along the game board to be faced with various challenges. No template in ProForm looked or acted like our design. That wasn’t a problem. A Flash Developer picked up the Rapid Intake manuals and converted the Game Board design into a ProFrom template. Now we have a new template based on our design.

What’s your vision for e-learning? Do you have a vision of cutting and pasting text into frames and pop-ups so that learners can read, listen and test memorization or comprehension of the text, OR do you have a vision of e3 learning (Merrill, 2009) and learning that is “meaningful and memorable” (Allen, M. 2009, p. 58-61).

If you have a vision of posting globs of content onto the web by chunking information into 5-7 parts per slide and then adding a test at the end, then rapid development tools will get you to your vision. However, if your vision is a bit closer to the research and best practices provided by the experts in the field such as Dr. Michael Allen and Dr. David Merrill (and there are many others .. check out my list of expert links in the right hand column of this blog), then you need to incorporate competencies of DESIGN and PROGRAMMING into your elearning development strategy.

Allen, M. W. (2003). Michael Allen’s guide to e-learning building interactive, fun, and effective learning programs for any company. New York: John Wiley.

Merrill, M. D. (2009). Finding e3 (effective, efficient and engaging) Instruction. Educational Technology, 49(3), 15-26.

A wild hyper scientist explains, I believe, that it is much better to learn through hands-on experience then with computers. This is a fun video to watch. Dr. Stoll runs around the stage jumping from one topic to another but he makes his point. Learning should be fun and experiential. He demonstrates how to quickly calculate the speed of sound with very crude instruments including a tape measure and  a slide rule.  Many of the you who are under 40 probably don’t even know what a slide rule is. I would love to see a Clifford Stoll converted into an avatar. Any 3D artists out there willing to give it a go?