New directions in self-study e-learning: social interactions

Over the past week I�ve been heavily involved in helping to judge this year�s E-Learning Awards. I used to have a role in administrating them, but I never got to see any of the entries. Last year and this I�ve been on the panels for several of the categories and it�s been a real eye-opener.

First and foremost, the experience has lifted my spirits. I get so much flack from trainers about boring e-learning that nobody wants to do, that sometimes I despair that we�ll ever get it right. While there clearly is a lot of rubbish, poorly designed and implemented, the awards show me that there�s also some absolutely fantastic stuff that learners love and which is making a fundamental impact on organisations. I�d go so far as to say we�ve finally come of age.

There are many reasons why the current crop of e-learning projects is proving more successful, not least the following:

• An acknowledgement that resources matter as much as courses.
• A much more modular approach, with content presented in small chunks.
• A shift in emphasis from knowledge exposition to skill-building using challenging scenarios.
• Better art direction and much more use of video.
• Deployment through much friendlier and more usable platforms than your traditional LMS.

I�m also beginning to see some changes to the way that your good old e-learning tutorial is presented. One of those is the inclusion of interactions that break out of the constraints of isolated self-study. The evidence I saw was in work by the innovative developer Nelson Croom, but I�ve seen similar things before.

The idea is that you present a question to the learner and then, once they have provided an answer, allow them to compare their response to those of other learners. This could work with a simple MCQ:

• 'Which of the following actions would you take in this situation?'
• The learner selects a response and perhaps gets some expert feedback.
• �Here�s what others decided. 80% went for option A ��

It would also be possible for learners to leave comments to explain their selections, and these could form the basis for a more in-depth comparison of perspectives.

What Nelson Croom showed, which I hadn�t seen before, was the application of this technique to open input questions, where the learner is required to enter a textual response (a sort of short essay).

• �What do you think was the cause of this situation?�
• The learner types in their response
• The responses of other learners to the same question are then presented

My understanding from Nelson Croom is that response rates to short essay questions in which student answers are compared and contrasted is much greater than when the learner�s response sits alone (and is not submitted to a tutor for grading). This is hardly surprising, because it takes an iron will to type in lots of text when you are the only one who will see it. I also understand that learners have responded very well to this form of interaction. You could achieve a similar effect by sending learners to a forum, but that�s a bit clunky and certainly wouldn�t work if you had a large number of questions.

There is a practical implication to these new forms of �social interaction� in that, if you want to use them, you�ll have to develop them yourselves, because no off-the-shelf authoring tool will do it for you. You need to set up a database and use this to store user responses question by question, so they can be drawn down later for future students to view. This isn�t complicated web programming, but it�s not trivial either. Hopefully, one of the tools vendors will see the potential and provide this service for you.

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