The Mindful Learner is definitely on to something: how do you separate the hype from the reality when it comes to eLearning? After all, what eLearning provider doesn’t say that their pedagogical approach isn’t “highly interactive,” “real-world-based,” or “richly collaborative?” As a rubric to judge who walks the walk, versus talks the talk, he offers the following:
So, if you are a customer looking for a supplier, I think you should apply this test. Ask the supplier to let you sit in a room with a couple of their programmes and then just work through them. The supplier is not allowed to help you or give you any background to the approach used or anything else. They can’t even sit in the room. Just be alone and use the programmes and ask yourself:
- Would I like to learn from this e-learning course?
- Have I learnt (sic) anything? Does this feel like good learning?
- How does this feel? Dull? interesting? Simplistic? Professional?
- Is it clear, easy to use, even fun?
- Is this much different from PowerPoint?
- Then, make your decision. The proof is in the pudding not the talking…
The questions raised are valid, but miss an important attribute of not just eLearning, but learning writ large: namely, that “learning” is a highly emergent phenomenon, one that results from multiple variables interacting simultaneously. In computational terms, learning is a massively parallel system of autonomous agents.
As a result, you can no more judge the “quality” of an eLearning program by sitting alone and “using” the program than you could judge a restaurant by sitting alone in the dining room room with nothing but an entree in front of you. In the case of the restaurant, the quality of the total dining experience comes from the overall interaction of your state of mind (appetite, mainly) along with ingredients, recipes, master chefs, wait-staff, decor, and the “buzz” provided by your fellow diners. With learning, the quality of the total learning experience depends on a complex interplay of your state of mind (desire to learn) along with learning design, content, instructor/mentor, fellow students, and (in the case of eLearning) enabling technology.
Yet, thanks to its roots in behaviorism, Programmed Instruction and their technological offshoot, computer based training (CBT), the “teacher in a box” mindset continues to permeate the eLearning industry. And this mindset, more than anything else, continues to hinder our efforts to design — and in the case of the Mindful Learner’s post — evaluate, quality eLearning experiences. We must shed our myopic content and design-based views of learning, and as Kathleen Gilroy has said, open our minds and realize that along with the content and the pedagogy, “learning is fundamentally both social and experiential.”
Norbert Weiner, the great mathematician and founder of cybernetics, once quipped “the best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.” If eLearning truly is an emergent phenomenon, it may be the case that the only way to judge the quality of of an eLearning product is to experience in its full, authentic context. This may be overly extreme, but nor should we think we can judge the quality of an eLearning “program” sitting alone in a room “working” through the “program.” When it comes to eLearning, the proof isn’t just in the pudding, it’s in the total dining experience!
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