In 2002, David Weinberger published a book about the World Wide Web entitled Small Pieces Loosely Joined. This metaphor aptly describes the vision of Web-based e-Learning proposed by those who see the Internet as a learning environment based on personal exploration and discovery, collaboration, and freedom.
Such a vision is not, however, the dominant view of those in educational institutions or in corporate training, who still tend to see the Web as a slick, new medium for delivering instruction based on a set curriculum or on set learning objectives.
Like most dichotomies, the most probable scenario for the near future of e-Learning lies somewhere in the middle. That is, it is likely that there will continue to be a significant demand for learning management systems (LMS) that will register learners, launch courses, track progress and report results. At the same time, there is no question that there is a strong trend (at least in adult education) towards personalized, collaborative, learner-controlled online learning experiences. In this article, we will describe a set of technologies that can unite these two sides of e-Learning, providing a flexible environment that provides a mix of options for each individual learner.
From “page turner” to complexity
Most new technologies are extensions of ideas and concepts of the past. E-Learning using the World Wide Web is no exception, as early versions imitated either the page turning of books, or the instructor-controlled classrooms of modern industrialized schooling. Only now, a decade and a half after the invention of the Web, have new forms of learning and teaching emerged that use the unique possibilities of networked communications — sharing and collaboration. These new forms of education and training are possible because of the qualities of the network, and are likely to change teaching and learning forever.
A quick review of e-Learning history
E-Learning pre-dates the World Wide Web by several decades. This sometimes surprises people whose awareness of computer-mediated instruction is more recent, and a summary of this history may be useful to some readers.
The idea of computer-based education first emerged in the late 1950s with proposals for building “teaching machines.” In the 1960s, Donald L. Bitzer started the PLATO system (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation) for mainframe computers. Control Data Corporation expanded and further developed PLATO between 1976 and 1986.
The Internet started as a way to transfer messages from one computer at a university or research lab to another computer in the network. Email and file transfer were the original educational applications as academics learned that they could distribute their digital documents to others without using paper. Rudimentary discussion forums and list servers based on early email protocols followed.
With desktop computers becoming common in the 1980s, stand-alone educational applications appeared for individual learners on their own computers. By the late 1980s, client-server architecture became common, whereby applications and data could be held on a server and used by many client programs on individual computers.
The invention of the World Wide Web protocols in the early 1990s allowed text strings or graphical objects to be linked through a “universal resource locator” (URL) to online resources from any server that was accessible to the network. Various browsers were then developed as “thin clients” with most of the functionality of applications and the data that they needed residing on designated Web servers.
Early versions of Web-based educational applications were either “page turners” that presented lots of text and graphics, or they were imitations of software applications that had previously been built to run on individual desktops. The problem with this approach is that Web-based educational software has often been a simulation of the worst kind of university or high-school class — a presentation on the material, followed by a test.
As one of the authors of this article (Gary Woodill) noted in a white paper in 2004, “The principal reason why most people have trouble suffering through an e-Learning course is that there is usually nothing to do but read, look, and take a multiple choice test. Most often there are no instructional activities that deeply engage the mind of the learners, and ‘interactivity’ mostly consists of turning from one screen to another. This is especially problematic for the under-40 generation, which has grown up with fast-paced videogames, movies, and television programs. Reading a lot of text on a screen simply doesn’t cut it for them.”
We need to recognize that learning is multidimensional, with multiple sensory inputs and many different sources of experience. Learning is dynamic and complex, as humans, individually and collectively are “complex adaptive systems” and learn in individual ways. The adaptive nature of human learning is the result of feedback loops and external cognitive aids that influence what and how we learn.
The field of e-Learning is now starting to build online educational experiences and tasks that begin to take the complexity of human cognition into account. “Distributed and interconnected systems have become the norm for new development efforts to the extent that the word ‘application’ itself might have to be redefined,” says Gregor Hohpe.
The move to multi-channel distributed learning
Although it is not surprising, the first generation of online learning technologies and content is generally too simplistic to fit the complexities of human learning. Thought leaders in the field recognize this when they speak of moving to Web 2.0 or e-Learning 2.0. In this new view, the “online learning landscape” needs to be highly varied, dynamic, collaborative, responsive, and personalized. Given the many interesting ways to connect people with learning materials and with each other, there is really no reason to continue with the dominant “page-turning” presentation model of e-Learning. As Brent Davis, Dennis Sumara, and Rebecca Luce-Kapler point out:
“... [electronic] media operate at a low information level — one that has been deliberately adjusted to suit what consciousness is able to accommodate. And so, while these technologies give access to immense stores of data, they operate at a very low level of stimulation. Human sense organs, however, function at a capacity that is about one million times greater than conscious perception. As such, abundant use of the so-called ‘information technologies’ may actually result in a starvation of the senses, and information poverty. Traditional teaching strategies might also be criticized on the basis of such information poverty. These practices tend to be adjusted to the limitations of consciousness, but often fail to consider the breadth of human sensation.”
There are many different types of learning, depending on what is being learned, the learning environment, and the characteristics of the learner. Part of the reason we tend to misunderstand the complexity of learning is because we see the results of learning as “knowledge” — which we tend to think of as a commodity that can vary in quantity from one person to the next. We tend to view knowledge as a thing, our ideas about learning center on metaphors of acquisition, processing, absorbing, building, or flowing. But knowledge is usually situated, and is often shared and collectively produced, as Brent Davis and his colleagues also point out.
While the first generation of e-Learning practices and technologies is being swept away by an explosion of new forms of online educational experiences, e-Learning is morphing into multi-channel distributed learning. It is not a case of e-Learning simply being mixed with “face-to-face” learning to form blended learning. Rather, all learning will be multi-channel learning. The “e-” in e-Learning will gradually disappear, as electronic support for learning by any means becomes invisible, ubiquitous, and taken for granted — see Donald Norman’s Things That Make Us Smart for more on this evolution.
E-Learning in the workplace and, to a lesser extent, in schools and universities, has moved from early text-based CBT systems to full scale multimedia presentations. It is about to change again into a highly fragmented “learning landscape” where online presentations will be only one option in a myriad of choices for learners and instructors. Multi-channel distributed learning combines many forms of face-to-face learning with dozens of learning technologies and data sources to produce a rich learning experience that is dynamic, personalized, and relevant to each person’s learning needs and goals. In recent research (2005), Gary Woodill has identified over 50 different content formats, 60 online technologies, and 40 services used in e-Learning offerings today.
For the most part, this developing multi-channel distributed learning environment is a “self-organizing” complex adaptive system, and, because of that, it is difficult to predict exactly how it is all going to turn out in the next five years. But there is no question that a major shift is taking place — a turn from instructor-centric curricula toward learner-centric searches for relevant learning resources as needed. The shift has sometimes been characterized as changing from “push” to “pull” technologies. But the change is actually from instructor-controlled classroom learning and instructor-controlled e-Learning to a mix of approaches that includes instructor control when appropriate (for specific certifications, for example), along with a variety of dynamic multi-directional channels of resources and requirements from which learners can explore, select, and “pull” content. This mix will be different for each person.
Multi-channel distributed learning and its support technologies are developing rapidly, and e-Learning is at the beginning of a new technology innovation curve. As Stephen Downes points out, much of the pioneering work in this area is carried out at various universities and research labs around the world, and is a mix of open source and protected source initiatives.
