e-Learning Resolutions for the New Year
Posted by Allen Interactions on Thu, Jan 07, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist
At the arrival of the New Year, everything is focused on change--on giving up bad habits and resolving to do things differently. Habits are hard to break and so often we backslide into doing what is easy and 
comfortable, even when we know better.
Unfortunately, this also seems to be the on-going pattern with the practice of e-learning design and development. We continue to expand ideas of how e-learning and new technologies might transform professional development. Yet, inevitably, e-learning professionals in the field still seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time creating programs in which even they have no confidence. Something has to change, and these are the resolutions I’d like the industry to really embrace. I don’t think these are controversial, nor are they necessarily about adopting cutting-edge technologies.
Rather, like most New Year’s resolutions, they are the obvious things that seem so hard to abandon.
- Stop designing e-learning programs that are just a presentation followed by a memory test. Telling and judging alone do not comprise teaching.
- Stop accepting inadequate software systems as e-learning development tools. Instead, insist on authoring tools that allow the introduction of graphical contexts, flexible branching, robust variables for simulation and delayed feedback, genuine meaningful actions.
- Stop using e-learning exclusively as the place to dump content that no one really wants to teach anyway.
Sadly, there’s nothing much new in these resolutions, but until we finally discard these practices as patently unacceptable, it’s going to be hard to ever really create a true culture of effective e-learning.