What is e-learning good for?

Continuing my series of posts that answer the questions I most get asked by learning professionals, I turn to one that's always difficult to answer: what is e-learning good for?

There's nearly always an agenda behind this question or at least a great deal of scepticism about the potential of e-learning. What people really want to know is whether e-learning has any relevance beyond the obviously restricted domain of regulatory/compliance training. In particular they want to know whether it has the potential to challenge what they are currently doing in the classroom.

As with all of these posts, the question is complicated by the fact that the questioner very rarely states what type of e-learning they are thinking about. Every type of e-learning - self-study tutorials, games and simulations, virtual classrooms, digital online content, collaborative distance learning - has its own unique advantages and disadvantages and therefore very different potential applications. However, it is possible to answer the question without qualifying further:

E-learning, in its many and varied forms, is suitable for any learning activity which does not have to be conducted face-to-face (or, more rarely, using an alternative medium such as print).

This is a bold statement but not over-stating the case. E-learning provides an equivalent to all learning activities that would previously have been conducted by other means. It also provides opportunities that have no precedent in traditional media. It cannot be used in any situation, however, because of some obvious limitations:

• Without sophisticated add-ons, computers work with only two senses - sight and sound - and can only display so much on a screen at one time (even with a retina display!).
• Access to fast networks is still not ubiquitous, particularly on the move.
• Not everyone has the necessary hardware and software, or the ability to use them.

So what do these limitations preclude? Assuming that access to the right computers and the right networks is not an issue, then you can definitely rule out all those learning activities that demand a rich sensory experience, i.e. the ability to clearly see body language (i.e. more than you can with a webcam), to touch or manipulate equipment and other objects, or to physically interact with other people or the wider environment. In these scenarios (which only constitute a minority of the situations with which most learning professionals are confronted) e-learning can still usually play a minority role as part of a blend, even if it cannot do the whole job.

I suspect that this answer is not going to satisfy most questioners, so next time I'll be more specific about the potential applications for each of the main types of e-learning. 

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