Clive Shepherd twittered a nice presentation ‘e-Learning Sucks’. It covers the fact that most e-learning design just follows traditional instructional design models (’lectures’). I come across this phenomenon often when subject matter experts use authoring tools to braindump their knowledge into powerpoint like e-learning modules. They call this rapid e-learning, but a good friend of mine tends to call this e-sleeping (in the presentation you see why!).

From the nice design of the slides you can grasp where the critique comes from: media & game design. Although I agree that principles of media & game design can be excellently applied to e-learning this is not the only route. Not all powerfull stuff on Internet looks great. You just have to be creative in using the strengths of internet to support learning. Conclusion: nice work and good points, but there is more to good e-learning design when you ask me.

Business Week published a nice article on how the Indian Tata Group builds a culture of innovation. The word ‘culture’ may suggest that innovation is hard to grasp. Not true in the Tata case. They have implemented very practical formal instruments to foster innovation in the organization. These instruments range from the Tata Group Innovation Forum, an Innovation Competition and Innovation Labs to 5 hours per week for personal projects. The good thing of this example is that it showns that your can build innovation into the DNA of an organization, even with the size of Tata. In my opinion it is about a combination of formal instruments and consistent internal communication. Tata shows that this can be the winning formula!

In a quest to prepare a workshop on the use of social networking technology for business school alumni I stumbled across an interesting tool by Forrester called the Social Technology Profile Tool.

This tool enables you to find out your social technology profile. It is one of the nice spin offs of Forrester research in this domain. For additional information you can view the presentation of the different stereotype profiles.

A New York Times article summarized an interesting research report on Evidence-based practices in Online Learning of the US Department of Education. The research took a longitudinal view spanning from 1996 to 2008 and investigated a sample of 99 comparative, quantitative studies of online versus classroom performance for the same courses. The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. Believers in blended learning will be happy to see that the research found that this form produced the best results. Hence instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction. Other interesting findings include:

• Variations in the way studies implemented online learning did not affect student outcomes significantly.
• The effectiveness of  online learning approaches appears broad across different content and learner types.
• Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.

I would say that the instructional strategy used also plays an important role in the effectiveness of the education programs researched. The researchers admit this aspect by highlighting that in the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the classroom and online learning conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. The research also used some studies with rather small samples. Therefore it is hard to say if online learning really beats conventional education in the end. I think it still depends on the design and conditions, but some evidence for the effectiveness of blended approaches is found. 

My respected former colleague Wilfred Rubens pointed me to an interesting posting on the HBR innovation blog of Scott Anthony. It is about the danger of knowledge blocking innovation. The central issue: people who have deep knowledge about a topic sometimes assume other people have that same knowledge. That in itself can be problematic for innovation, because R&D of companies can have wrong assumptions about level of knowledge of potential customers for their innovations. They assume customers know more then they do, making them blind for opportunities & threats regarding their innovations. Anthony supports this notion with a Gillette example. Although I agree to the expert blindness effect of having a deep body of knowledge in a field, I don’t see it block innovation. Most organisations involve multiple (knowledge) perspectives in their innovation processes, ranging from experts, production, marketing to customers. At least they will have extensive market research and field testing to overcome the issues Anthony is pointing at.

Greater impact of this phenomenon can be perceived  in the field of learning & education and especially in rapid e-learning. When subject matter experts develop (e-)learning programmes the effect Anthony illustrates has direct impact on learners. In my work I come across some quite comprehensive (rapid) e-learning courses that aim too high for novices, are too comprehensive or focus on the exceptions rather that mainstream knowledge. Also for rapid e-learning it is important to counter this effect with professional development approaches. This shown the need for a triangle of involvement of the subject matter expert, instructional design and learners in rapid e-learning development processes