What's wrong with E-Learning

Here is a white paper that is going to be published February/March and will have to be "toned down". This is what it looks like before being toned down.

Show after show, newsletter after newsletter, conversation after conversation with the industry’s leading organizations to the independent consultant the e-learning consumer gets bombarded with the latest catch phrases, latest trends and most importantly, the industry’s leading misinformation. As an e-learning practitioner that services a wide array of interests and projects I am always stunned at how some of the industry’s leading misconceptions continue to get propagated with no intervention from knowledgeable and capable professionals. I think that both vendors and consumers can do more to help one another out, vendors by responsible marketing and consumers by doing more to educate themselves about what they hear and see. In this article I would like to explore what I consider to be the top ten misconceptions or areas of confusion in the e-learning industry. If you’re reading between the lines, I suppose the article would read ‘Reuben’s top ten pet peeves’.

1) SCORM Compliant Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS)

Let’s be clear about what ‘compliance’ actually means versus its abundant use by vendors across the board. The current ADL organization will certify two things for SCORM compliance. Those being Learning Management Systems (LMS) and content packages. They do not certify vendors (Only their products), nor do they certify LCMS systems. So what then do vendors mean when they market that their LCMS platform is SCORM compliant? Most vendors who claim that their LCMS system is SCORM compliant fall into two categories:

#1 – The developer of the LCMS system has certified content with the ADL that was created using their tool.
#2 – The developer of the LCMS system has incorporated some elements of SCORM standards into their content packages but do not comply with everything.

In either case, ‘compliance’ is misleading for something can only be compliant if it is certified as such. Non-certified products are also non-compliant.

Would an LCMS system that is capable of outputting a SCORM package be considered as a SCORM compliant system? In looking through the ADL website we find no particular classification called SCORM compliant systems. There are SCORM adopters and then there are certified products. So to answer the question, No. An LCMS system that can output a SCORM package is not compliant as there is no such classification from the body that governs SCORM. To verify if a system is SCORM certified or if a content package is SCORM certified go to www.adlnet.gov. They are the sole body that can certify a product as being SCORM compliant. If your vendor isn’t there, they are not compliant!


2) Merged LMS and LCMS Systems

There are systems that include both authoring capabilities and tracking capabilities, this is true. When these two systems are integrated into one system with no separation between them the fallout to the consumer is huge. The reason for this is simple. When you create one system that does both, the content created in the system must stay within the system to work. More often than not, the integrated system has proprietary means of tracking and the content becomes locked in a proprietary format that only the integrated tool can modify. This solution might be good for short term ease of use, but the long term financial impact to an organization who wants to move content to a new system, or change how they track courses is huge, especially if time and effort went into creating content within the system to begin with.

If you are considering the purchase of an LMS and LCMS from the same vendor ensure that they are two different systems and that you can buy one without the other.

3) An LMS is a Content Management System

An LMS is not a content management system. I get the question all the time about how will learners access content that is in an LCMS. The answer is they won’t. A content Management System (CMS) or Learning Content Management System (LCMS) is where content authors (not consumers) organize and store content for later use or re-use. It is a library of content that provides tools and applications that help organizations store information so that it can be bundled or packaged at a later time in a variety of ways. An LMS or Learning Management System manages the learning for students and administrators. It is where the finished learning products are stored and where a student accesses the learning. An LMS will provide tools and applications that help administer and track learning within an organization.

4) Instructional Designers are Courseware Developers

A recent trend that I see more and more of is the synonymous use of the terms instructional designers and courseware developers. A quick scan of Monster.com™ database of resumes confirms this as more and more developers (programming backgrounds) are applying for instructional design jobs and instructional designers who tout their programming skills with various applications are applying for courseware developer jobs. There is nothing wrong with people who have the sort of diverse background that enables them to do one job or the other. However, to use the terms interchangeably and expect that developers in an e-learning company will also do instructional design and instructional designers will be courseware developers would be to devalue the strengths each of those roles might bring to a production process.

5) Customized courseware

With the industry’s obsession over buying the right tools and making the production process faster and easier a breed of custom courseware developers have emerged capable of wielding the latest and greatest course building tool. What most people fail to realize is the limitations of custom courseware builders who fall into this category. In almost all cases, what makes the tool so easy and quick to use, is its database of templates that you can customize. What is really meant by customization however, is the ability to add logos and change colors of the template. The exercise types and functionality in a templated environment are static, which means there will be times when you will have to put a square peg in a round hole. Do not confuse this sort of customization with organizations who build courses on spec. These organizations will build exercises and applications that speak to a defined set of needs and requirements. The price difference between the two types of custom work is significant. However, they both suit different needs and should never be compared against one another. Let the requirements of your project dictate what sort and level of customization you need.

6) Building Engaging E-Learning

We must as an industry admit that the years and years that we have all spoken of truly interactive courseware and engaging e-learning has resulted for the most part in glorified e-books with animations and true/false questions. Every conference that one could potentially attend in our industry has at least one topic on “Developing Engaging E-Learning”. The word engaging is completely elusive as it doesn’t really say much. If I were to try and define engaging for an e-learning context I would build on the word “interactivity”, which is in itself a misunderstood term for our industry. The word “interactivity’ means the ability to act on one another, to influence one another. In other words, true interactivity, true engagement in e-learning would ideally point to a program that would dynamically adapt its presentation to the learner taking the course at the time; i.e. Artificial Intelligence. The time and money required for this level of sophistication is well beyond the budget of most organizations who are implementing e-learning. In its place we substitute a tricked out PowerPoint presentation delivered through Flash. The point here is not to denounce web based PowerPoint presentations but to find alternate ways of describing a product. PowerPoint is still PowerPoint even when it’s delivered through Flash.

7) E-Learning Seat Time

A common benchmark that content development vendors like to use for quoting on projects is ‘seat time’. E-Learning costs ‘x’ amount of dollars per student seat time. The problems with measuring and benchmarking against student seat time include:

a. Difficult to compare what different vendors are offering. An hour of student seat time with one vendor might cost a lot more than another because of the types of screens and interactivity that is being built out.

b. Difficult to manage projects if the benchmark is seat time. When is something out of scope if it can be accommodated within the parameters of the agreed upon seat time?

c. Student seat time is impossible to calculate.

Instead of benchmarking against student seat time, why not use number of screens and number of screens per screen type. You can also try benchmarking against agreed upon performance objectives covered in a course.

8) Video and Audio accommodate the Visual and Auditory Learner

One of the myths that have propagated itself since the days of CBT is the notion that what makes e-learning so effective is its ability to present the same content in a multimedia format including audio and video, which accommodates a variety of learning styles. Based on this I assume that people can choose to watch a video instead of reading the text or listening to the audio track which is really good for what we like to call “visual learners”. The same would be true for people that were “auditory learners” who would listen to the audio track and forego everything else. The problem with this idea is that a well designed course doesn’t put audio and video into a course to mimic exactly what is there in some other format. It is meant to provide a cohesive environment where all pieces play off of each other. So looking at only a video would provide someone with a fragmented view of the whole. Which means that to learn the whole, even the visual learner would need to listen to the audio and read the text. The use of multimedia has little to do with accommodating different learning styles and is instead used to compliment a specific type of content for all learners.

9) Repurposing Content Doesn’t Work- SCORM is a Failed Standard

The mistake people make when they claim that repurposing content doesn’t work and therefore SCORM is a failed standard is based on a misunderstanding of what SCORM is as a standard. SCORM provides a standard for packaging content that facilitates its re-use if the content itself was designed for reuse. SCORM doesn’t dictate the design of content. To assume SCORM is a failed standard because repurposing content hasn’t worked in an organization is to miss a critical piece. The missing piece is whether or not the content was created for reuse to begin with. If it has been, then SCORM facilitates the technical end of it, so that reusable pieces of content (that are inherently reusable due to their design) can be merged together. If you believe content that was not designed together can not be merged at a later date then that remains a separate issue which SCORM has nothing to do with. That is a question of instructional design and other development technologies.

10) We Use a Blended Learning Approach

Who doesn’t? I can’t imagine a single organization that doesn’t use a multi faceted approach to training employees. Blended learning isn’t a science unto itself that can be studied. There is no magic sauce for any one thing. Blended Learning is a reality, not a topic for a conference.