Uneven Progress-We Need to Catch Up
"Money is being spent. Smart classrooms are being built on both campuses
and businesses. Collegiate faculty and corporate trainers are successfully integrating
electronically delivered learning materials into literally thousands of courses
focusing on traditional and non-traditional subjects . . .. [E]-learning is
evolving in ways that few had predicted." (Zemsky & Massy, 2004, p.
60)
That's from the concluding section of Robert Zemsky and William F. Massy's
recent report, Thwarted
Innovation: What Happened to eLearning and Why. If this portion of their
concluding remarks sounds less than enthusiastic, then you're getting their
main point. The authors, as do I, believe that major positive accomplishments
are yet to come in eLearning, but their report is a pragmatic look at what's
really happened in the past ten years.
Zemsky and Massy had set up "weatherstations" on a number of campuses
and in a number of corporations, where groups of faculty, staff, and students
were to be committed to report on a variety of eLearning indices over time.
The plan didn't succeed in the corporate world because the timing coincided
with the economic recession and the training officers who were to be weatherstation
operators "began to disappear-the victims of corporate reorganizations
and downsizings." Participation by students also proved to be peripatetic
and not useful, and the authors note that student opinion and experience remain
variables relatively unmeasured and unaccounted for in anyone's analysis and
research on eLearning.
The staff and faculty participation was excellent, however, and one of the
remarkable sets of information that comes from this study over an 18-month period
is how frequently individual perceptions of the success of eLearning implementation
varied.
I want to address only one limited observation of the report, but I suggest
you to read the entire document. The authors claim their findings invalidate
some implicit assumptions of early eLearning optimism:
· "If we build it they will come-not so": The vast majority
of students taking online courses were already taking traditional courses on
their campuses. There really isn't a good market for eLearning products.
· "The kids will take to e-learning like ducks to water-not quite":
Students are more concerned with the convenience of access to materials but
not captivated by eLearning itself.
· "eLearning will force a change in the way we teach-not by a long
shot": The tools actually in use, course management systems and PowerPoint,
mostly, have just reinforced traditional teaching styles.
· eLearning will create international networks of scholars and learners-well,
scholars, yes: Most eLearning still takes place strictly within national boundaries,
despite a thriving international network of scholars and researchers.
In terms of the IT tools used in eLearning, the authors feel that mostly what
has happened is the adoption of course management systems (which may even tend
to reinforce traditional teaching styles rather than subvert or evolve them)
and the very rapid adoption of PowerPoint slide shows as teaching tools. What
is missing still, they say, is an easy way for educators to create and use learning
objects, the lack of which is severely impeding the promise of improvements
in teaching and learning styles.
Coincidentally, my Syllabus colleague, Howard Strauss, of Princeton
University, recently captured this concern of Zemsky and Massy in a prescient
way in his recent Syllabus article titled What's
Next: Course Creation Systems. Zemsky and Massy put it as "there needs
to emerge a dominant design, particularly for the learning objects that are
eLearning's building blocks. It is not just a matter of making them easier to
create-although that end is important-but also more interchangeable and more
easily linked with one another. Howard calls this a Course Creation System (CCS),
and it fills the bill.
Why did we ever think that faculty, except for a few bleeding-edge folk who
contribute mightily to the MERLOT collection, would ever be able to find the
time and get enough support to create libraries full of learning objects? It's
much easier to learn the ins and outs of a CMS and how to produce a slide show.
When you're young and a student, and if you have time on your hands, you might
just spend the time to learn new things. And young people learn things more
quickly. Zensky and Massy found that students' software purchases reflected
items that do have somewhat steep learning curves-such as Adobe Photoshop, Acrobat,
and various Macromedia products. Students are putting those things to use to
express themselves, in some ways to create reports and papers that are more
like learning objects than the slide shows their professors put on the class
Web sites.
If you're a faculty person, the learning curve to get facile in those programs,
not to mention even more sophisticated programs relating to three-dimensional
stuff and video, is imposing. PowerPoint fills the bill without much of a learning
curve. And course management software lets you think you're doing the latest
thing-a subtle subversion of transformation.
What if the CCS made it as easy to create useful learning objects as to produce
a slide show? Would we then see a transformation in teaching and elearning practice?
As Howard puts it: "Learning management systems are now pretty good at
managing courses. It's time we had software that [easily] creates something
for them to manage." It can be done.
