Confessions of an elearning skeptic

In the spirit of my own continuous learning I attended the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) national conference in Sydney today.  Given this I thought I would dedicare a couple of posts to sharing my learning with you all.

Given my study of elearning, and my desire to introduce it into my workplace, my selection of workshops for today was focussed on elearning and its effective use and introduction.  Here is a summary of the key things that I learned today:

• It is important to distinguish between elearning as a product and learning as a process and to not confuse the two.  Good elearning creates learning but not all elearning does this.
• The importance of informal learning cannot be downplayed and we, as learning and development professionals, must learn how to harness it.  This requires us to move from being learning deliverers to being learning enablers (hence the title of this post).
• Elearning can assit us to be learning enablers when it is used to make knowledge accessible and encourage the creation of knowledge.  Many web 2.0 technologies are directed towards these aims.

Thanks to conference presenters Martyn Wild and Cheryle Walker for sharing their knowledge and expertise in relation to the above points.

A couple of interesting resources were also used during the conference that I thought would be worth sharing.  The first is an excellent presentation about change and preparing people for the world of the future.  The presentation is called Shift Happens and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it:

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The second resource comes from Jane McGonigal a games designer and researcher who has defined the “10 collaborative Superpowers“.  This is an interesting set of new skills that will be vital in the world of the learning enabler:

That’s enough food for thought for one day. The conference is on again tomorrow so I’ll post again then.  I better make sure I give an accurate account as my lecturer is one of the workshop presenters (g’day Anne ).

One of the posts that I made to my on-line community, The Content Wrangler has led to real benefits for me. As part of one of my posts I mentioned that I was in the process of introducing elearning and looking for some ideas about good elearning design. Almost immediately I got a reply from a community member, Jenise Cook, with a number of fantastic links.  Chief amongst these was a link to a fantastic blog about elearning designed by Cathy Moore called Making Change. If you haven’t seem this blog, and you want to learn more about elearning design, then its something you need to check out.

I was particulalry taken with one of her posts, “5 ways to make linear navigation more interesting“.  The included PowerPoint show is fantastic and I will be using it in my workplace to demonstrate best practice in elearning design.

Thanks Jenise for sharing this excellent resource!

I’m sure a big part of the reason why I am such a skeptic when it comes to elearning is the poor design I have seen used time after time.  My journey though the internet today took me into areas concerning good instructional and interface design which I found invaluable in ensuring I don’t make the same mistakes others have made.

A great starting point for looking at instructional design is the Content Wrangler Community.  Its only new but its already got links to some good resources on the effective design of learning content.  I like this site so much I think I am going to use it as the focus for my first assignment.

On the lighter side I also found a great movie on how not to design a PowerPoint that, apart from being very funny, has some key design messages for elearning content makers: