Online Learning – ‘I got it one piece at a time and it didn’t cost me a dime…’

When I was a little kid I loved Johnny Cash.  Recently a latent synapse fired and I started thinking about the song ‘One Piece at a Time’.  This was the story of a man who had a job in a GM plant building Cadillac’s.  He decided that the best way to have a Cadillac was to take a piece home in his lunchbox everyday and build it himself.  He did it and at the end of the song he is asked what year it was.  His response

‘Well, it’s a ’49, ’50, ’51, ’52, ’53, ’54, ’55, ’56
’57, ’58’ 59′ automobile
It’s a ’60, ’61, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’67
’68, ’69, ’70 automobile’

This is a great analogy for facultyware when built by cobbling together mutually exclusive pieces of content found on the web in open source learning object repositories (LOR’s).  Before the hate tweets start, I am not talking about all Open Source – some individuals create good courses but for most, they do not have the time and expertise to develop robust learning experiences for students.  There are also programs like NROC that do a nice job in developing open source courseware but the difference there is that they have fully developed courses that have been developed by teams of experts.

What I am referring to is the belief by some that if we create a bunch of home-grown learning objects and put them up on the web, it will result in wonderful learning experiences for students.  This is just not the case.

If you have ever taught or have had a spouse that has taught, you know how demanding of a job it is.  Educators are focusing on student communication, assessment and evaluation, parent communication (K-12), etc, etc, etc.  In other words, they are focusing on the craft of teaching… a job that does not end at 5 PM.

While the web makes it easy to stitch learning objects together, most instructors/teachers do not have the time nor the professional training to develop robust and rigorous online courses.  The best online and blended courses are made up of TEAMS of Instructional Designers, Subject Matter Experts, Writers (SME’s are not always great writers), Assessment Specialists, Media Experts, Learning Specialists (who understand Bloom, Gagne, Piaget, etc, etc) and Quality Assurance Specialists… and when I say ‘TEAM’s’ I mean multiple people in each of these roles – providing multiple points of view – ensuring a well-rounded experience for the learner.

It is also important to note that developing online courses today is much more like developing software than it is like the facultyware that we all created in the late 90’s and 00’s.  We need to be focusing on schema building, minimizing intrinsic and extrinsic cognitive load, be utilizing rigorous usability testing that is fact-based vs something that ‘looks pretty’.

The other big thing that people forget about when they build online courseware is ‘freshness’.  Many believe that if they build it once they will be done.  Online courses are not a bed – you don’t build them and then sleep in them forever… they are like a ladder – something that is continually progressing to a higher point (iterative development).  You need to fund for this – which means a maintenance and iteration budget every single year for every single course.

If you are reading this blog and have got this far down, online learning is important to you.  The bottom line is that our work in this field has evolved over the past 12 years and what we are able to provide the student of today is a MUCH richer experience than we could in the late 90’s and 00’s. Specialized instructional strategies are required for online learning as are learning technologies and courseware.  From a courseware perspective, learning design is critical to the success of the learner – and that starts with a mindful, holistic approach to design and development along with solid plans for iteration and evolution of all our programs.