I’ve been thinking a lot about rapid e-learning.
Rapid e-learning is a new concept to me. My experience with and knowledge of e-learning comes more in the form of academic distant learning, and rapid e-learning, from what I gather, has more to do with corporate training.
Because I’m not very experience with rapid e-learning, I might have some naive ideas about what it is, what it means, and what it can or cannot do. On the other hand, because my understanding of it is not colored, I can look at it fairly objectively.
My big question is why is it called “rapid e-learning?”
I spoke with Tom Kuhlman the other day, vice president of communities at Articulate, and writer of the Rapid e-Learning Blog, which is owned by Articulate, but is surprisingly non-partisan.
“Rapid” can be a little bit of a misnomer, he told me. (Funny. I thought “learning” was going to be the culprit!) He even mentioned that the majority of rapid e-learning tools out there do little more than turn a series of PowerPoint slides into a Flash animation. The rapidity, he said, is the time savings of not having to learn Flash.
At the Online Learning Conference at Digital Sandbox two weeks ago in New York, I listened to a number of trainers and instructional designers from major corporations (JetBlue, Adobe, Kaplan) discuss the need to create “engaging” and “compelling” content quickly so it could be rolled out to hundreds of people who needed to learn a procedure, fast.
Some of the “e-learning” comprised nothing more than a few slides containing multiple choice questions. Some were adaptive. Some were not. To me, this screams, “assessment,” not “learning,” and I think it’s important to distinguish one from the other.
I’ll write more thoughts and reflections about rapid e-learning as I continue to learn how it’s used and who uses it.
This is because the training departments of many major organizations are rewarding for “certifying” rather than teaching. Creating compelling learning experiences requires more time and money than throwing together a Powerpoint and a quiz.
I see the “rapid” in rapid e-learning as being the time saved by not having to rely on programmers or multimedia developpers.
In past jobs as an instructional designer I’ve been able to take material developed by SMEs and, using Rapid-e-learning tools such as the Articulate suite, all I had to do was to make this content “pedagogical”, add evaluation tools and publish it. No need of a third person to make it “deliverable”.
This is where, in my mind, the “Rapid” is.
Clearly the rapid pertains not to the learning but the production. I think your perceptions are correct. Mostly what we’ve seen is a way to turn a powerpoint show into a lesson. It might be fast to produce but I’m not sure there’s any “learning” involved.