Files and folders, drop-boxes, and bulletin boards. Claims by “e-Universities” offering a learning experience that is “active, engaged, and community-based” aside, a close examination of the majority of eLearning designs and their enabling technology platforms belie a sad truth: the eLearning industry has yet to take full advantage of the contexual experiential opportunities afforded by modern day, database-backed, networked technologies. Instead, even the most progressive constructivist-based learning designs are mired in an online collection of feature-based technology buckets. The “bucket-based education” that results falls far short of what could be, and worse, what should be.

To illustrate the features — and shortcomings – of online “bucket based education,” let’s apply a use case incorporating a “sound” learning design against two hypothetical, but canonical, online learning interfaces.

Here’s the learning design that will generate the use case we’ll put to the test: as part of an online course in business negotiation, Sarah is asked to do the following learning activities:

• Prepare for an online, synchronous negotiation with a classmate by first studying and exploring a text-based exposition, one animated tutorial, an interactive simulation, a Wall-Street Journal article from her library’s reference collection, and a post from her instructor relating an analogous situation from the instructor’s previous consulting position;
• Take a machine-graded self assessment in order to gauge her mastery of the material and readiness for the negotiating task;
• Meet synchronously with her classmate, conduct the role-playing negotiation, then exchange debriefs of the experience with her classmate as well as formally hand-in the debrief to the instructor; and
• Receive a grade and feedback from the instructor on the negotiation task.

And here’s the use-case that follows from this scenario:

Act-I
After a long day at the office followed by a quick microwave dinner, Sarah settles down in front of her computer and logs into her online Negotiating in Business 101 course. A class-wide announcement from her instructor reminds her that she should begin Unit-3 in the course, the unit covering how to prepare for a negotiating opportunity. The instructor also mentions that he has constituted the team-based negotiating pairs, and that the teams need to complete their synchronous negotiating activity by Friday.

After reading the announcement, Sarah begins to map out her approach for preparing for the negotiating task. She gets a handle on the task by first reading the task description and its assessment rubrics. Next, she begins working through a collection of learning resources that support the task. She reads a 200 word exposition of the three steps to use in preparing for a negotiation, pausing along the way to look up from the glossary four terms that are new to her. Feeling comfortable with the explanation, she moves on to working through an interactive exercise that puts her in a simulated negotiation opportunity against a (machine) opponent. The activity lets her try different strategies (her first try is a dismal failure, which in turn motivates her to try again!), and gives her pointed feedback for each optimal and sub-optimal choice she makes. While the simulation scored her as a “seasoned” negotiator, Sarah is still not sure how to calculate her opponent’s expected return (one of the steps described in the learning resource), so she decides to ask her classmates if anyone else shared her confusion, or could help her on this point.

Because of her initial failure in the simulated exercise, Sarah decides to read through an optional Wall Street Journal news article that reported how a well-known corporation made a similar negotiating mistake that cost the company millions of dollars. While reading this article, a classmate online at the same time as Sarah posts a question to last week’s Unit activity, asking the class if anyone could help them find the math error in their graded assignment (the instructor pointed out the error, but challenged the student to diagnose and remedy it himself). Thanks to her background in finance, Sarah did well on this unit, so she immediately posts back a short analysis for the student.

Knowing she needs to get up early the next morning, Sarah calls it a night and heads to bed for some much needed rest.

Act-II
The next evening, Sarah logs-back on to the course and finds that two of her classmates along with her instructor responded to her call for help. Each refers to a supporting graphic in the negotiating learning resource, and by referring back and forth between the posts and the graphic, Sarah sees where she overlooked a critical step in the expected return calculation. Sarah is also alerted to a post from her assigned negotiating partner, Jill. Jill’s post asks whether Sarah would be available to do the negotiation tomorrow evening at 8:00. As it so happens, Sarah will be home then, so she replies that the time works fine, and that she’s excited to meet and put what she’s been practicing to a real life test!

Feeling confident that she “gets it,” Sarah does a final check of her readiness to negotiate by taking a machine-graded self-assessment. She nearly aces the assessment, and with the feedback provided on the two questions she missed, she refers back to both the online learning resource materials as well as the suggested passages in the course’s textbook (mailed to her a week before the course start). While she is reading, she notices one of her classmates, Bob comes online. Needing a break, Sarah instant messages Bob, and spends 15 minutes talking with him about the course and last week’s Survivor episode. After saying goodnight to Bob, Sarah logs off and spends another 30 minutes reading her textbook while watching the nightly news.

Act-III
To prepare for the 8:00 negotiation with Jill, Sarah logs on to the course at 7:30, where she spends the half hour leading up to meeting re-trying the simulated negotiating activity and re-reading the task’s description and rubrics. At ten minutes to seven, Sarah sees Jill come online and into their team chat space. After exchanging pleasantries, they spend the next half-hour doing their negotiation. There are some fits and starts, but Sarah’s able to get through the points covered in the task’s rubrics. After debriefing with each other about the activity, Sarah and Jill both decide to make a suggestion to the instructor on how to better organize the activity. Sarah volunteers to post the suggestion, and after doing so, spends another 15 minutes writing up her debrief, posting it to Jill, then handing-it in to the instructor.

Act-IV
After taking a “day off” from the course, Sarah logs in on Saturday morning and finds she has a new grade and feedback from her instructor. Sarah’s excited to see she received an “exemplary,” and finds her instructor feedback valuable. She also sees a response from the instructor to her and Jill’s earlier suggestion about the activity. Since they finished their work a day early, Sarah spends time getting caught up on another discussion that started up around the next unit’s task. After jumping into the discussion with some thoughts of her own, she logs off, promising herself that she’ll spend extra time on the course tomorrow.

eLearning Buckets
The proceeding “learning play” contains a number of interesting attributes. From the learning design perspective, it’s a rich learning experience rooted in socio-constructivist learning theory. The unit’s learning objectives are realized not by marching the student through a set of programmed instruction steps, but rather by situating the learning objectives within a real-world problem supported by a set of scaffolded learning resources. Both the framing problem and the supporting resources are in turn embedded within a community of peers who, along with an active instructor/mentor, are active co-participants in Sarah’s learning experience.

But since we are dealing with an Internet-based course, this progressive learning design is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ensuring a quality learning experience. Because the participants in the above scenario are separated by both distance and time, the enabling technology environment is an equally critical factor. In the example above, translating the use case into a set of requirements generates a technology laundry-list that many commercial course management vendors would claim to support: rich media (text, glossaries, animations, interactive media objects), asynchronous bulletin boards, synchronous chat spaces (both persistent group spaces and instant private messaging), online awareness, and support for sending course assignments and receiving grades and feedback. But as much as the commercial vendors would like us to believe, providing all of the technology requirements demanded of this use case still does not guarantee a quality learning experience.

Why not? Because most commercial course management systems are designed around a modal-based interface and interaction design model: what I call bucket-based education. For example, consider the wireframe interface of the course management system shown below:

This interface is built upon a type-based mental model, where “type” sometimes maps to a course conceptual referent (i.e., “assignments,” “readings”) and other times to a functional referent (“discussion board,” “drop box”). Furthermore, in this design, selecting an interface element modally switches the user out of the current element and into the selected element. For example, in Act-II of the above use case, Sarah’s (non-prescribed) learning path would involve at least eight modal switches (i.e., Discussion Board -> Course Documents -> Discussion Board -> Course Documents -> Groups -> Self Assessments -> Course Documents -> Chat). The “usability costs” of these modal switches are prohibitively high. Worse yet, this is not the way learners “learn.”

A slightly better interface and interaction design is shown in the next interface:

Here, the organizing design — course sequential unit — is (potentially) better matched to the learner’s internal mental model. For example, Act II in the above use case could map to “Unit 2″ in the above course design. However, this consistency is only skin-deep, for below the Unit level organization, this interface devolves into the same type-based organization seen in the previous example. Worse yet, certain course elements (chat, dropbox, gradebook) are orthogonally separated from the Unit-based organization. The net effect? Looking back to our use case, Sarah, along with other learners using this course management system, would find themselves caught up in an dizzying series of modal switches, moving from one element (bucket) to the next, to the next, back again, and so on.

A Learner-Centered Approach: Context Over All, and Overall Context
If modally-rooted and bucket-based technology environments are not appropriate to support a quality learning design, what is? The answer comes not from generating a different technology laundry list, but rather by asking what core learning principles we want a technology environment to seamlessly enable. In other words, it comes from designing technology enabling environments that seamlessly support the interactions embedded in Sarah’s learning experience described above. And this is doable. After all, if my goal is to book a round trip flight from Chicago to New York along with renting a car and making a hotel reservation using Travelocity, I’m not required to think about when to use or where to find the “airline schedule,” the “rental car providers database,” the “hotel booking system,” and the “credit card processing center,” I “just do it” — the interface, and the (multiple) systems behind the interface, are invisible to me. This is the mark of a well-designed contextual interface. And this should also be the mark of an online learning environment.

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