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.
Rapid e-Learning’s Rap
IRC Revisited: #lrnchat on Twitter
Last week I participated in my first twitter chat. #lrnchat happens every Thursday night from 8:30-10pm EST and is very active, started by @marciamarcia. While it has a theme for the week, people talk about a variety of learning topics. Saying the conversation flowed is putting in mildly; I found my heart racing while I tried to keep up with the discussion, especially to responses to my posts. It reminded me of IRC, which I used to teach with online in the 90’s.
I highly recommend it to all learning professionals!
Fun with Mnemonics: Do Elvis and George Bush Deserve Fudge?
What do “Elvis’ guitar broke down Friday”, “even George Bush dances funny”, and “every good boy deserves fudge” have in common? They are mnemonic devices memorized by two 10-year old girls (my daughter and her friend) in music class. A friend, Bill, who is a third grade teacher, mentioned the power of mnemonic devices recently at dinner, and my children chimed in with examples from science, math, and music. I remembered learning them in astronomy, but, as Bill pointed out, with Pluto’s demotion some mnemonics are no longer accurate.
Others are short-term; I made up one for my husband when he had trouble identifying Laura and Lauren on his soccer team (LaureN has No bangs) and it worked immediately. And Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s famous detective, used mnemonics to win memory games.
I still use “Thirty days hath September…” to know the number of days in a particular month (even though my cell phone has a calendar on it). When I looked up mnemonics online, I found countless examples I don’t remember seeing before (did I learn them and forget?) None struck me as useful enough to memorize now, but I did wonder if mnemonics are more easily taught in the classroom than online. Any thoughts?
Play With New Toys and Enhance Your Teaching
Toys are fun by definition, and we tend, alas, to have fewer toys as we get older and more serious in our endeavors. That was one of my thoughts as I read Laurie Rowell’s latest contribution to eLearn Magazine about the uses of Flip video cameras for education. Not only did I want one to play with, but I started to see ways I could use them in my own teaching. As a proponent of storytelling, cameras and video cameras can certainly enhance sharing of stories. I encourage you to read the article and come up with your own ideas – and then try them out both as a way to play with new toys and to enhance your teaching.
Recommender Systems for Online Education
I’ve read a lot recently about recommender systems, which have been defined as “personalization tools that help users to find interesting information and services in complex online shops”. Amazon is one of the best known sites that uses them, and they were smart enough to provide a bypass mechanism so that the present you bought on a topic only of interest to the recipient doesn’t trigger new recommendations to you.
In e-learning, pretty much everything is online, providing massive amounts of data that can be monitored and analyzed. Yet I don’t know of online courses that recommend “since you spent a long time reading that, you might also enjoy this” or even “here are some other courses you might find useful”. Is it that the data is different, or harder to mine, than Netflix data; that students don’t want or need recommendations; or that education is not a commercial venture (at least not in the same way as Amazon or Netflix) and the goals of recommender systems are not applicable here?