e-Learning: pass or fail?
Many e-learning tools struggling to pass test, but slowly improving.
Garrett Wasny, CMC | September, 2000Distance education. E-learning. Virtual classrooms. All make the same bold promise: learn anything, anytime, anywhere. Simply turn on your computer or hand-held device, the theory goes, and you’ll be instantly connected to countless courses on almost any subject imaginable. The classes are no longer mere tutorials: they’re rich multimedia productions. The professors – the best in the world, from everywhere in the world – deliver expert and engaging online lectures. Video-clips, professionally-shot and edited, appear on cue, and perfectly illustrate the lessons. Your fellow classmates, from Seattle to Shanghai, pose questions to the teacher and each other, and engage in spirited discussions in real-time. The experience combines the best elements of Nova, the NBC Nightly News, and Larry King Live into one knockout, totally personalized, infotainment e-package. What a vision. What a future. What a crock.
Sorry, friends, this isn’t going to happen. Not anytime soon at least. Web technology is nowhere near ready for this kind of Jetson University scenario. Neither are teachers and students.
Let’s start with the technology. Even using the latest Pentium III computer and the fastest ADSL connection, most webcasts and video streams online today are jerky, postage-stamp-size annoyances which cut out frequently, and crash without warning. I recently viewed a webcast from PC Expo, a New York personal computing trade show. You’d figure if anyone could get the technology right, it would be these folks – the cutting-edge gurus of web and computing technology. How wrong I was. Only two minutes long, the clip I viewed was a disaster. After taking nearly 20 seconds to load, the tiny picture was fuzzy and pixelated, the audio hollow and hissy, and the sound and picture out of sync. Even the most pathetic local cable channel, on its worst day, would provide better audio and video than this. The prospect of watching this all day -- every day – as part of some online training course would make me sick. Literally. Until the quality of these streaming webcasts is exponentially improved and every office and home around the world has lightning-quick computers and Internet connections, at least 10 times the speed of the fastest ones today, the streaming of online courses will be an eye-squinting, stomach-churning garblefest.
Even if this webcasting technology could be somehow revolutionized overnight, exactly who would develop and deliver this online learning? College professors? High school teachers? Elementary school teachers? All of them? A select few? If so, when would they have time to do it, and who would pay for it? Take your average high school teacher. Already underpaid and overworked, they’re in front of a class at least four hours a day, some 200 days a year. This excludes prep time, extracurricular activities like coaching basketball or the chess club, and other supervisory duties. Now imagine that beleaguered teacher getting a memo one day from the local school board. The memo reads “Welcome to the Interent millennium, educators. In our ceaseless quest for positive spin and good press, you are hereby instructed to join the digital age. Effective immediately, you will be responsible for delivering all the courses you currently teach in not one, but two modes: traditional classroom and on the web. More modes will mean greater reach, and greater reach will mean more students. Think you have big classes now? Ha! Expect at least triple the number of students when you go global online. You’ve already prepared your lessons for the traditional classroom, so adapting to the web should be a snap. To do this, you’ll need to master at least a dozen software programs used in online distance learning. These include Powerpoint, Macromedia Flash, RealAudio/RealVideo, QuickTime, PhotoShop, and SoundForge, to name a few. You’ll also need to study graphic design, video production, sound editing, script-writing, and webcasting. That’s not all. As part of your online teaching duties, you will be barraged with electronic messages, perhaps several hundred or more a day. No problem. Respond to each one within 15 minutes – the new e-mail response time limit – and you will meet the minimum standards. Just remember: the quality and speed of your e-mails may be monitored for quality assurance. Another tip: if you’ve been putting off that facelift, hair restoration, or weight loss program, you might want to reconsider. On the web, looks count, and the younger and more attractive your appearance, the bigger your online audience will be. If your e-ratings should happen to slip down too far, some unfortunate things may happen which I can’t go into detail here. And oh, by the way, the whole time you’re transforming yourself into a web e-learning expert, you’ll be expected to carry your full load in the traditional classroom mode, and keep up to date on the latest developments in your subject areas, whatever they may be. Forever digital, Wally ‘the Web’ Wabooski, School Administrator.” Sound far-fetched? Think again.
And what of the students, the ultimate end users of this much-hyped e-technology? How will they be better or worse served by learning from a machine? The things I remember and cherish most from my university and school days were not in the scripted curriculum. They were the high drama of face-to-face contact: the non-verbal communication, from gleaming eyes to derisive snorts to stern looks, and the verbal cues -- the sarcastic tone, the question in the voice, and the shrieking reprimand. These cannot now, and perhaps never will, be fully replicated or transmitted by a computer, no matter how fast the connection, or powerful the processor.
What to do? Despite some overwhelming technology limitations, resource contraints, and ethical questions, e-learning offers many new exciting opportunities for both academic teaching and corporate training. A number of software programs and online services, although still in their infancy, are worth exploring, if only to experiment with interacting and sharing information in an online medium with others who may be scattered over thousands of miles and several time zones. For teachers, two must-see sites are Blackboard at http://www.blackboard.com and WebCT at http://www.webct.com. Designed especially for Internet novices, Blackboard allows you to deliver learning materials, class discussions, and tests online, and share information and tips from other teachers and students continent-wide and from around the world. A similar resource is WebCT which provides ready-made online course content and modules in some 40 categories including accounting, earth science, and theater. For students of all ages, a valuable resource is World Wide Learn at http://www.worldwidelearn.com. The site is a directory of hundreds of online courses – many of which are free – in some 30 areas including advertising, cooking, marketing, web design, and writing. Information technology specialists would also be wise to visit FreeSkills at http://www.freeskills.com. Free to use, the e-education service offers no-charge access to Microsoft, Novell, and many other authorized certification courses which would normally cost you hundreds, even thousands, of dollars from a university or technical training institute.
Based in Vancouver, Canada, Garrett Wasny, CMC, is an e-commerce trainer and author. His latest book is World Business Resources.com. Mr. Wasny may be reached at gwasny@direct.ca or Tel: 604/878-4555.
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