Since its spread to the Web in the late twentieth century, e-Learning has grown from a largely experimental educational model into a full-fledged industry. By using existing Web technologies, e-Learning practitioners have been able to disseminate educational content to larger and more distant audiences, more effectively and more efficiently than ever before. However, current production models for the creation and delivery of e-Learning content rely heavily on HyperText Markup Language, or HTML.
In this article, we will present the contrast between HTML-based and XMLbased e-Learning and explain the advantages of the latter. We will also provide an extensive example of the way to develop an XML Schema that will enforce the instructional designer’s pedagogical decisions uniformly across the development team, including the subject matter experts. Finally, we offer two testimonials, if you will, about XML-based e-Learning development, one from higher education and one from the corporate world.
The HTML approach to development
HTML is a scripting language designed for creating documents for display in a Web browser. HTML defines the visual layout of those documents, and enables their connection to other documents by using hypertext links. Using a modest list of formatting options, HTML allows document authors to combine text, multimedia assets, and navigation links and to determine how the documents will appear in a Web browser.
Though effective, HTML has its limitations. By locking the content and the rules for presenting that content together into a single document, HTML makes content reusability difficult. The content formatting in an HTML document provides one specific visual layout, and it works only in a Web browser. Presenting that content in alternate visual layouts or delivery mediums involves re-authoring it for each new layout or medium.
Ideally, you would want to be able to change the visual layout of e-Learning content or the medium via which it is delivered, such as print or PDA, without having to repeatedly revisit the authoring process. To accomplish this requires separating content from both its layout and from delivery mediums. Content then becomes highly reusable, and you can present it more readily in different delivery mediums to a variety of audiences.
This separation also facilitates the assignment of conditions for the presentation of content. In other words, a content management system can automatically identify learners in a given audience, using a certain kind of device, and deliver the content using the most appropriate presentation, via the most appropriate medium.
Unfortunately, because of its rigidity, HTML makes it impossible to effectively separate content from its presentation. If HTML is so limited, why is it so prevalent?
Successful e-Learning production requires a combination of skills. A highly technical team of graphic designers, programmers, and audiovisual specialists could create a visually compelling, interactive Web project, but there is more to e-Learning. It also takes the expertise of subject matter experts (SMEs) and instructional designers to deliver on the educational goals inherent in such an endeavor.
Because their strengths are in educational subject matter knowledge and (perhaps) in copywriting, SMEs may not be highly proficient with the technical components required. As a result, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML authoring tools have become popular. These tools promise that, given the requisite skills to create a PowerPoint presentation, a SME can produce an e-Learning project. This allows SMEs to work without technical resources, and for many organizations eliminates the bottleneck created by a huge base of SMEs and a small technical team.
This is the main reason that HTML-based solutions are so entrenched in the e-Learning community. The biggest question left unanswered by this approach is, “Where is the instructional designer?” Just as the invention of the word processor did not turn every WordPerfect user into a great novelist, skill with PowerPoint and Dreamweaver does not make someone an instructional designer. However, the apparent convenience of PowerPoint and the WYSIWYG HTML editors has encouraged many organizations simply to direct the SMEs to proceed without the technical team and without the instructional designers. This has resulted in a large amount of e-Learning that is not visually compelling, interactive, pedagogically sound or engaging for the learner.
Any solution that is going to raise the quality of e-Learning must also enforce pedagogy — the strategies used to focus instruction and improve learner outcomes — and facilitate good user interface design. It must also include far more energizing content than a long sequence of text slides and bullet points. However, at the same time, the solution must not become a bottleneck to the work of the SMEs or greatly increase the costs or timelines of e-Learning projects. In fact, to be successful, the solution must reduce them.
So, if having SMEs going around the instructional designers and the technical team is one of the drawbacks to HTML-based solutions, what’s the answer? One of the most important contributions that instructional designers make to an e-Learning project is the development of a consistent pedagogy. There are many competing opinions and ideas as to what constitutes good pedagogy. As a result, different organizations will require different pedagogical approaches from their instructional designers.
Some HTML-based tools have tried to incorporate the enforcement of a standard pedagogy. However, the pedagogical requirements of e-Learning projects — whether there will be remediation when a learner responds incorrectly, for example, or the number of quizzes and criterion tests, how to handle simulations and games, and so on — may differ from one organization to another or between instructional designers. As a result, none of the HTML-based tools can deliver a definitive, global, final word on the best pedagogical design.
Ideally, a tool should make it possible for each organization to determine its own pedagogical design and, at the same time, to apply that design consistently, without fail, across all work done by an organization’s SMEs.
