I’m ploughing through my assignment, and pulling up stuff I wrote in the class online discussion. One of my resolutions is to start writing some original things rather than regurgitating stuff from elsewhere. So here goes…
“It’s difficult, timely (and therefore expensive) to, say, interview learners and infer their increased level of expertise – or to develop assessment programs that measure their higher quality of work, or even something as fuzzy as their happiness! Because of this difficulty, I think e-learning often gets delivered in a very unambitious way.
Often education has to justify itself along some form of metric, from something as rudimentary as product knowledge all the way through to the complexity of school exam results. This focus on measurable outputs will actually restrict the freedom of educators to simply develop people on whatever terms works best for the individual.
Would my client be happy if 30% of their staff felt more confident in their job but couldn’t score 75% on product knowledge tests? Would a school employ a English teacher whose kids consistently ‘failed’ exams, but had increasingly sophisticated enjoyment of literature?
The challenge for e-learning is to develop ways to support an infinite number of ways to learn. reflect, dive in and so on, but also, perhaps, to have the bravery to not measure the success of this involvement in such narrow ways….”
Oooh, such pomposity! ; -)