History of E-learning

The word “E-learning” seems so general and common today, especially the speed with which it is becoming a learning norm nowadays, labels it as one of the widely practiced concept all over the world. But, till 1999, no one could even imagine that learning would be possible without meeting at a physical location and there had never been a term like “E-learning” till then. The word “E-learning” and its concept first emerged in October 1999, in a seminar at Los Angeles, organized by CBT systems. In this seminar, the origin and usage of this word in a professional field, was never thought to be the most admiring and adopted idea in just few coming years. It implies that the concept of E-learning is not that old.

The world “E-learning” is also associated with the expressions like “virtual learning” or “online learning”. Experts define E-learning as a mean to gain learning that is based on the utilization of new advanced technologies that permit access to interactive, online and sometime tailored training via Internet and other media like interactive TV, Intranet, CD-ROM, extranet etc so as to expand competencies while the course of learning is self-determining from place and time.

The growth of the e-Learning concept has derived from so many other ‘educational revolutions’. Some of such revolutions are quoted by Billings and Moursund (1988) as:

• The development of writing and reading
• The emergence of the teacher/scholar profession
• The development of portable technology
• The advancement of electronic technology

It seems that the basic ideas, didactical grounds and methodologies are not so new!

The history of E-learning has been a gradual evolution since long.

In the beginning of 1960s, Psychology professors from Stanford University, named Richard C. Atkinson and Patrick Suppes tested computers to be used to teach math to kids in elementary schools in East Palo Alto, California. These experiments gave birth to Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth.

In the year 1963, Bernard Luskin set up the earliest computer in a community college for teaching. At that time he was working with Stanford along with others and made progress in computer assisted training. Luskin finished his milestone UCLA thesis while working with the Rand Corporation in examining the problems to computer assisted education in 1970.

Initially the e-learning systems, that are based on Computer-Based Training frequently tried to replicate conventional teaching methods whereby the function of the e-learning system was assumed to be for conveying knowledge, as contrasting to systems that were developed afterward. These were designed on the basis of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), which initiated the idea of shared growth of knowledge.

In 1993, William D. Graziadei introduced an online computer-conveyed lecture, seminar and evaluation project via electronic mail. The first most online high school was founded by 1994. Till now the e-learning has become the hot norm of societies at large, all over the world. The global e-learning industry is anticipated to have value over $48 billion as per some conservative estimates.(Nagy, A., 2005, pp. 79-96). From 1994 till 2006 i.e. just within 12 years, over 3.5 million students had been reported to participate in on-line learning environment at various higher education institutions in US.

E-Learning is now being adopted widely and used by a number of companies to update and educate both their customers and employees. Companies with big and spread out division chains employ it to teach their staff even for the newest product advancements without the requirement of arranging physical courses.

Reference:

1. Nagy, A. (2005). The Impact of E-Learning, in: Bruck, P.A.; Buchholz, A.; Karssen, Z.; Zerfass, A. (Eds). E-Content: Technologies and Perspectives for the European Market. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 79–96

-Jay Chun

Jay is an elearning developer and instructional designer, as well as a valuable contributor to the Collabor8 Learning team.  He has worked on eLearning projects for fortune 500 companies and in industries ranging from Healthcare, Military, and Education and Scholastic.  

To read more about his past work and experience, click here.  Jay can be reached at 949-407-6460, or at jay@jpchun.com. 

Correctly Attributing Creative Commons Photos in your E-learning Projects

One consideration when working on any e-learning project that both instructional designers and the subject matter expert (or client) have to decide early on is what look & feel to give a project.  By look and feel, were not just talking about the user interface for the course.  The imagery you use should follow similar design influences to avoid giving the project an amateurish or incoherent look.  For example, when building an e-learning solution for a bank, they made clear to our team that clip art or “anything that looked cartoon-ish” was unacceptable in their culture and should be avoided in the project.  They felt it would diminish the serious of the compliance topic we were going to teach. 

Couple this design consideration with a very little to nonexistent budget for the purchase of stock photography or a dedicated graphic designer and your new project can quickly turn into a nightmare.  One thing you can do to alleviate this constraint is to use imagery distributed under a creative commons license.  In order to do this however, it is important for you to properly follow any attribution guidelines requested by the provider of the image.  This infographic can give you some pretty good best practices to follow when using this type of image. 

Where can you find these images you ask?  Two of my favorite sources are Wikimediacommons.org and creativecommons.org.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

E-learning standards and consistency―Don’t leave home without ‘em

As an instructional designer, it is critical to the success of any e-learning project to nail down some basic design standards prior to your beginning any development work.  A well written and thorough document takes time however, and you will find many clients unwilling to invest in this necessary step.  Whether working solo- and more importantly when designing and developing e-learning in a team environment―I encourage you to fight for the time at the very least to nail down some basics.  Skip this step at your own risk.  Done right, you can literally shave days off the project plan by investing this time up front.  Or, as I tell our clients, “I understand you don’t have the budget to allow us to develop a design document Mr. Client, I believe you will have the time later on to come back and fix all of the inconsistencies in the course that will pop-up.”

There are simply too many variables, interface options, fonts, colors, and other user interface tweaks available in today’s authoring tools to forego this critical step.  You wouldn’t pressure your homebuilder to lay the foundation to your new home before the architect has completed the plans for your home, would you?

Don’t allow yourself to be pressured into skipping this all important step.  To read more about what’s in a solid design document, click here.  

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

How much is this e-learning going to cost me?

There is a great lesson here for instructional designers, and one that took me awhile to master.  The single largest cost in the development of e-learning is the design and development of rich media assets like custom-animation, music or video.  It’s always challenging working with a new client who is jumping ahead and asking me to “ballpark estimate” the cost of the project. 

About halfway down this article, you’ll find the following:

"Unlike some other online-education services, which offer back-of-the-auditorium access to university lectures, Craftsy spends upward of $15,000 to develop and film each class."

The way to handle this with your clients is to give them options.  I tell our clients, “I am going to let you drive the costs of this project based on your choice of instructional strategy.”  In other words, on the low side- you can have this very basic way of communicating your content with some degree of interactivity, little to no voice-over, and plenty of iStock photography and imagery.  On the medium-budget range, our graphics department will develop most if not all of the look and feel of the course; you’ll get a custom UI, the entire course voiced over by a professional voice actor, and a good degree of interactivity.  And finally, on the high-side, we will go with all of the bells and whistles including the development of custom graphics, animation and video, and a very high degree of learner engagement and interactivity.  The key is to give them the option of how much to spend, to achieve the quality of courseware they desire without sacrificing the instructional design. 

In my opinion, the advancement of tools like Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate has brought down the time and expense of authoring to the point where course authoring is no longer the largest expense in a project.  While I certainly do not compromise on the integrity of the instructional materials, many clients come into projects with very unrealistic expectations of what cost drivers are for their training projects. 

I ask you, how many clients afford you the luxury of a $15,000 multimedia development budget?  Please comment. 

3 questions for adding a social perspective to your performance analysis

Where exactly do social media technologies fit into current instructional design models?  My answer might surprise you, but it goes back to the performance analysis even before the decision to develop any instruction was made.  Even before determining if there is a skill deficiency in the performer, instructional designers, human resources leaders, and IT leaders should consider the potential for social media tools to improve collaboration and find the information employees need in order to perform. You see, in Mager & Pipe's Performance Analysis Flow diagram under the heading "Can we apply fast fixes?", there is already a decision box for "Are resources for the performer adequate?"  When thinking of solving performance problems and preventing them from occurring in the future, its useful for designers to realize the potential for social media tools to serve as a resource for performers.  Social media tools can serve as repositories of information for the performers, and not just learning assets maintained by the designers or the training department.  Tools such as wikis, forums, collaborative work spaces, and blogs can be implemented and "moderated" or "maintained" by an instructional designer or other resource for accuracy.

Assuming learners require more resources to perform, you should be asking yourself three key questions upon reaching this decision point in the flow diagram:

1. Where are the resources required by the performers located?
2. Can social media technology enable performer(s) to acquire the resources?
3. Is this a "fast fix" my corporate culture would embrace?

- Alex Santos
Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.