Why Elearning Systems Will Never Rule the World

A great story from James Robertson about how a bunch of airline pilots cheat their way through compulsory home-based elearning – giving their children candy to complete the page turning, downloading automatic pageturning software, and resetting the connection during the quiz so they have a chance to skip to the relevant answer.

Elearning pageturners deserve all the cheating they can get. This model of technology-assisted “self” directed learning is at least half a century old.

So it’s a nice coincidence that my mailbox today yielded up the spanking new book from Saul Carliner and Patti Shank, The E-learning Handbook. I’m biased, of course, because I have a chapter on measuring the impact of elearning inside, but that apart I like the way the whole front end of the book comes clean about the overweening hype surrounding the elearning boom of a decade ago, and takes a more critical, measured view – read especially the chapters by Margaret Driscoll, Brent Wilson and Lee Christopher.

There are cognitive functions where machines are better than humans – in calculation, memory and rule-following for example. But human wit far exceeds the machine’s capacity in those large domains of human activity where we shift the rules and simply play. Within its limits, and with intelligent design (the plain English kind, not the creationist kind), elearning can be useful and engaging. But it’s never going to replace the rest of the learning intervention family.

4 Comments so far

Adrienne

It’s not about the technology.  Both advocates *and* naysayers don’t get that.  Your post alludes to it:

“... in those large domains of human activity where we shift the rules and simply play.”

Why would anyone publish an “e-learning” handbook?  It’s not about the “e” in learning.  It’s about learning, period—whether you are talking about in schools or in the real world.  The reason any “e-learning” fails is the same reason the teaching machines failed:  they don’t teach students to THINK.  Skill and drill does very little in the long term—though I imagine it went farther in 1962 than it does now.  One could argue that the cognitive functions you mention “calculating, memory, and rule-following” are really not cognitive at all…

Posted on May 06, 2008 at 08:50 PM | Comment permalink

Patrick Lambe

Thanks Adrienne, some great observations - and I’m enjoying getting acquainted with your blog (though I’m not sure whether I’m part of your commenting audit! wink )

I’m not sure however that I’d agree with your last comment on calculating, memory and rule following - I believe they are very important cognitive operations that support and enable (ie leave space for) problem solving cognitive operations. here’s some good evidence in cognitive science for this, most notably in the work of Gary Klein.

I think the problem arises when (a) machines simulate a very distorted version of how people do this (b) we then try to remodel our natural cognitive functions around how machines simulate them and (c) we abandon the other important cognitive functions - eg problem solving, playful simulation, imagination, forming expectancies, applying intuition

Posted on May 06, 2008 at 09:25 PM | Comment permalink

Adrienne

Hi Patrick,

While calculating, memory, and rule following are important (and, okay, to some degree they are cognitive-based), they are not really higher-order thinking skills and they can be learned in much less time than they could have been in 1962.  And, I would argue that they *have* to be—we have bigger problems to sort out now than we did in 1962. grin

I agree with what you’ve said in (c) about abandoning problem solving, playful simulation, etc.  But those cognitive functions, I would argue, are more important than the “basic” ones of calculation and memorization.  The survival of our race and the planet depend more on problem-solving and innovation than they do on calculating and memorizing.  It’s easy enough now to use a machine or the internet to retrieve information and calculate data—those are skills we almost don’t need to be proficient at any more.  But to reduce global warming and stop the spread of AIDS?  We need more than calculators and memorizers.

I think fundamentally we agree here, but my emphasis is more on the importance of the higher order thinking skills, and how the technology is really not going to make learning better (no more than it did in 1962): it simply is a tool to change the way we think about learning.

(And you aren’t part of my audit.  grin I’m just enjoying reading reading some new blogs outside the scope of my “regular” feeds.)

Posted on May 06, 2008 at 10:38 PM | Comment permalink

Toronto Lofts

Why would anyone publish an “e-learning” handbook?  It’s not about the “e” in learning.  It’s about learning, period—whether you are talking about in schools or in the real world.  The reason any “e-learning” fails is the same reason the teaching machines failed:  they don’t teach students to THINK.

Posted on June 06, 2008 at 09:59 AM | Comment permalink

Page 1 of 1 pages

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (<strong>, <em>, <a>) Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. URLs are automatically converted into links.