After 'Why is e-learning so unpopular?’ and 'Will e-learning put me out of a job?', my focus these days is on another question that I am consistently asked for by l&d people: ‘Is e-learning effective?’ A cost-effective question, because there is no point in using a new strategy if it doesn’t work, however a time or money it might preserve.
Unfortunately - as is so necessary - there is no easy reaction.
E-learning is just a medium
E-learning is a strategy for learning, just like face-to-face relationships, make, the phone many other technology. In simple circumstances, it is a submission path. On balance, the evidence indicate that the strategy, the submission path, is much less essential in determining performance than the coaching strategy you decide to manage the procedure in hand (exposition, coaching, recommended discovering, discovering, etc.), people viewpoint in which the strategy is used (self-study, one-to-one, group) and, indeed, benefit and importance of the subject on which you are focusing. Brown L Russell examined 355 analysis opinions, summaries and records that documented no essential modifications in student outcomes between different ways to learn and learning submission. It is the strategy that problems when it comes to performance, not the strategy.
However, e-learning is an approach which shows up the possibility for techniques that would otherwise be wrong or challenging to give using traditional indicates. Let’s take two examples:
• The Huge Start On the internet Course (MOOC) makes it possible for many a great number of students to comprehend together at the same time. While the particular pedagogy of a MOOC can, in some circumstances, look like that of a normal course, the particular variety of the attempt and the opportunities that this provides for expert relationships make the MOOC something very different from what we have ever been able to encounter face-to-face.
• An immersive and highly-realistic coaching system, such as a trip simulator, has no essential traditional relative other than work out in real.
In both of these circumstances, e-learning is providing something different from what we had before. You cannot create it off as ‘just another medium’ because the method has produced possible the strategy, just as the advancement of the posting press designed it possible for anyone as a whole to comprehend by learning.
E-learning helps many methods
To reaction the issue, we also have to are qualified the type of e-learning that we are talking about about. Do we mean academic books transferred to the individual learner? Stay group sessions in an online classroom? The submission of on the internet material using websites, movie, podcasts, etc? Collaborative, on the internet learning like the MOOC described above? The only feature these techniques have in typical is that they use the same submission path - a pc. In all other factors they are significantly different.
Let’s take the first of these techniques, the self-study information, because that’s what most workplace l&d people online with the term ‘e-learning’. The Towards Maturity Impact Indication released in Objective 2010 and centered on UK outcomes, verified many real advantages of e-learning to organizations. However, most of the symptoms centered on efficiency, i.e. initiatives and cost advantages, convenience and scalability. None of these really indicate the performance of the procedure in regards to influence on individual performance, when in evaluation to alternative techniques.
It relies upon what you use it for
I’m not sure where we’ve got to in replying to the issue. Is e-learning effective? To the level that an approach can make much of something different to outcomes, it would seem that much depends on the type of e-learning and the use to which it is put. And that’s an issue to which I will come back next event.
Is e-learning effective?
in
Education
on August 12, 2017
0 comments: