A blistering critique of corporate e-learning today...
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Perhaps Godfrey Parkin didn't intend it that way, but his recent Parkin Space column at the UK TrainingZONE site is a gently-worded, but very strong dissection of some of the problems with the field of e-learning. His focus is on corporate e-learning, but, the criticisms can probably be applied to the academic arena as well.
He posits (perhaps as a straw-man, but it agrees with much of my experience) that "[the] view that e-learning is just 'classes online' still holds sway..." and that "[in] a world of real-time micro-transactions, we are still batch processing our e-learners." He contrasts that with the progress made by other corporate departments, such as Marketing, which have also been faced with the challenges of our new internet-accelerated, interconnected world:
The ultimate marketing goals may be the same, but they are achieved with a different set of tools and a number of processes inconceivable a decade ago. Search engine marketing, deep data mining, dynamic environments, rapid product creation, contextual advertising, cross-media strategies and real-time personalization of customer experiences, are simply par for the course. Marketers have seized the opportunities, imposed their will on the technology, and forged new processes that get them to their goals.
And then he asks the "gotcha" question: "What have trainers done?"
Well... umm... what have we done? Why is it that so many of the courses I see and work on -- courses developed by highly-skilled, highly-educated, creative instructional designers -- are in essence, nothing more than textbook chapters with punched-up McText bites, mindless rollovers, failure-proofed simulations and canned interactions? Why do we consider our courseware to be customized or individualized when we merely allow a learner to shut the audio or skip back and forth through a linear text? Where are the community aspects of the Internet in such solitary activities as leaving a learner alone with a "learning object" that has no connection to any other learning object or any other learner, nor does the buzzword-compliant courseware allow the learner to link to anything outside of itself, as if the rest of the Internet doesn't even exist?
After tossing out the possibilities that our inability to leverage technology as well as our colleague departments may be due to money woes or to a lack of demonstrable ROI, Parkin tells us what he believes -- and what I believe -- is the actual reason: "I suspect it's because we allow vendors of software to invent our future for us - we are going with the flow instead of dictating it." Or, as he titles the article: "The Tail is Wagging the Dog."
Was it the Instructional Designers who demanded the rigidity of the LMS with its mechanical binary focus on pass/fail, complete/incomplete, attempted/not attempted? Was it the Instructional Designers who insisted on the continuation of the Industrial Age paradigm of individual students as "learning subjects" who are to be processed along with mass-produced "learning objects"? Was it Instructional Designers who demanded to spend oodles of money to develop brain-dead simulations rather than giving the learner the opportunity to experiment, perhaps, in a live-but-protected sandbox system? Was it Instructional Designers who insisted that, in order to facilitate the atomization of course material for easy distribution, we must remove the material from any context, from any connection to pre-requisite or enrichment material? I don't think so.
Instead of being liberated by the advances in communication and the wealth of information available from all corners of the globe, we are being weighted down by the technology imposed upon us and thereby failing to accomplish our goals of creating lifelong learners and "learning organizations."
Parkin ends his short article very powerfully and inspirationally:
The basic ways in which training and learning have taken place over the centuries should be just as subject to accelerated improvement as the processes in any other field. Those improvements should be driven by those best equipped to conceive them. If anyone should be actively seeking better ways to accomplish their task, it should be those engaged in training – after all, our generic goal is to prepare people for the future, not to shackle them to the past.
So, let's start talking about -- and implementing -- methods of wagging our own tails.
