eLearning by Design, day 1

I enrolled myself in a webinar titled eLearning by Design. It's a certificate course that will take up 4 hours of my day, 3 days a week, for the next two weeks. My first session was yesterday and here is what I learned.

Definitions
One of the biggest challenges we face in eLearning is defining it. Those outside the industry need to know what it is so those of us who are in the industry can talk about it. And those of us in the industry need to come up with some simplified definition so we can talk about it - both in our own circles and with those outside of our profession.

Case in point - I started grad school a year ago, pursuing a degree in Information and Learning Technology, with an emphasis on eLearning. A year later, my husband can almost explain to his family what I'm going to school for. :-) Mostly, he just says "training stuff."

I've also learned when I try to tell people what I do for a living, "I'm an instructional designer." I often find if I leave it at that, I'm greeted by that polite-deer-in-the-headlights-whatever-THAT-means look. And so, I tell people I'm in training. The follow up is usually, "Oh really? What do you train on?" or something less enthusiastic, "Oh, I had to go to this useless class for work last week. I hope you're not stuck doing boring stuff."

And so, we see a need to define what we do. What's interesting to me is that the day I started the webinar was also the day our first group assignment for class was due. Guess what the first part of the assignment was? You guessed it! "Define eLearning." Here's what my group came up with:

E-learning is the final outcome of knowledge integration by a student when
education has been delivered via computer or other technologies.

This is similar to William Horton's definition, which we quoted at the beginning of our report:

E-learning is the use of information and computer technologies to create
learning experiences.

I suppose we could have just used Horton's definition, but then again, the assignment was to come up with something on our own.

More than "just" a PowerPoint presentation
Back to the webinar, after defining eLearning, we went on to list forms of eLearning. We came up with a list of over a dozen things that qualify as eLearning, and interestingly enough, none of the forms we came up with was "PowerPoint presentations." I find that interesting.

I've sat through dry lectures accompanied by just-as-dry PowerPoint presentations. I've also been victim to those presentations where it's obvious the creator just took some sort of PowerPoint class and their presentation serves mostly to show what bells and whistles they learned about.

However, I've also been fortunate enough to attend meetings, seminars, classes, lectures, etc ... where PowerPoint was used very effectively. I'm curious to learn more about using PowerPoint effectively. I have the technology background; I know how PowerPoint works. But I don't have the design background, so I don't know how to implement design tips so my presentations don't scream "look what I just learned in my class!!"

Design
From here, we talked about what eLearning design is. eLearning design is the intersection - or sometimes, the collision and conflict - of 4 pieces: instructional design, software engineering, media design, and economics.

Isn't our focus as eLearning developers to create instructional materials that engage our learners? And isn't our focus usually on finding multimedia ways to engage our learners? We do live in an "infotainment" age (a classmate of mine, Sheila, used this term once, though I don't know if it's hers or if she got in from somewhere else) where people are more likely to be interested in information that is also entertaining. Well, duh. That's always been the case, but it seems to be even more important now.

Today's young adults and teenagers spend hours on sites like YouTube, watching videos from other people on a variety of topics. I keep hearing about Photoshop TV and feel like maybe I need to check this out so I'm not missing out!

Why eLearning?
It is interesting to see how many people are interested in eLearning and why, yet the predominant focus for education is still the traditional model of a teacher or instructor lecturing at the front of a room full of 15-30 people furiously scribbling or typing notes.

People are interested in eLearning for a variety of reasons and here are some that we came up with during class:

• It's available 24 x 7. Participants can go through the material at a time that works for them and their schedule.
• It's self-paced. This means that those who are most successful with eLearning are those who are pretty driven and self-motivated.
• It's reviewable. The material is available to review and reread and review until the learner feels satisfied with the content. Often times, taking notes is a hinderance to the class. No one ever gets everything the presenter says, so tape recording lectures became popular years ago. People played the recordings over and over again until things made sense - or until their notes were complete.
• It's easy to link to outside sources. Rather than dealing with a binder full of printed handouts that inevitably get lost or crumpled or left on the bus, the material is all online and external sources are linked. We can click on a link and it will take us to another source for similar information. This can both save and cost time for the learner.
• There is no travel required. An interesting point brought up by our presenter in class was that this has changed from years ago. People used to jump at the chance to travel for training, but people are more interested now in spending time with their families at home. I propose that one of the reasons people are less interested in traveling for work now than they used to be is that travel for personal reasons is more accessible. People travel more often for their vacations than they used to, so travel for work is less appealing that it used to be. There is no looking forward to having the company foot the bill on airfare somewhere if I can find a cheap flight on a travel website to a hot destination for a weekend getaway, especially considering that traveling for work doesn't usually leave much time for play.

I find it interesting to learn about eLearning in an eLearning environment. I'm using the thing that I'm learning about to learn about the thing. I think it's a great opportunity to learn firsthand what works and what doesn't, as long as we keep in mind that different people still learn and synthesize informaiton in different ways.

Learning Activities
Next, the first session of our webinar discussed different kinds of learning activities. I'm sure many people have experienced that training activity that seemed like it was only in the class to have an activity. Those kinds of activities are worse than none at all.

The three types of learning activities we talked about were:

• Absorb activities. These ask the learner to watch, read, and listen. It's just observation.
• Do activities. This is where the learner actually explores, practices, or discovers something.
• Connect activities. This is where the learner is able to synthesize the information to come up with their own "original experience" with the material. This is where parallels are drawn between past and present experiences and knowledge.

What's even more interesting to me is that these types of activities weren't presented in a "good, better, best" way. Each type of activity has its place in learning.

Technology
Finally, we inadvertantly learned the value of having a backup plan for technology. Our webinar was being hosted on a server and site that went down about halfway through our session. Tech support said that those participants who could still see the screen needed to just stay where they were. Because once someone got bumped, there would be no getting back in, at least not that day.

Our next session is Wednesday, but I'll have to attend it via a recording due to a schedule conflict. I'm looking forward to it, though I'll miss the live interaction and ability to contribute to the overall class. I'll attend live again on Friday.