Back-to-front eLearning: scaling your jackasses

. . . the thing that we all do at some point: talk expertly about something we don't actually know anything about. It's so common, explains This American Life contributing editor Nancy Updike, that some friends of hers invented an imaginary magazine devoted to such blathering. It's called "Modern Jackass."

So goes the introduction to an episode of This American Life, unquestionably the greatest radio show/podcast on the planet. (Disagree? I'd like to hear your suggestions in the comments!)

In the radio programme, there's a segment on an electrician named Bob Berenz. Who thinks he's found a way to disprove Newton and Einstein. Apparently, this is much more common than you would imagine. It's nice to give in to your inner jackass once in a while.

So, in the same spirit, let me ask a question: what if all eLearning has got it wrong?

To answer this question, I'll have to resort to a bit of conflation, the creation of a straw man or two and, frankly, some outright speculation. (Bonus points for people who manage to spot my logical fallacies and point them out in the comments. And, by the way, not all the logical fallacies will be mine.)

Still, I think I am right. And all you eLearning designers have got it wrong.

Danger: accidental instructional designers!
Karl Kapp thinks that unqualified instructional designers should Just Say No:

Perhaps when people find themselves in the situation of accidentally becoming an instructional designer, they should back off. They should refuse to design instruction without proper training! (rather than jump into unknown territory with both feet).

He reasons that training is necessary because:

. . . instructional designers are required to make content scalable to large numbers of people and to make the material more "digestible" by applying instructional strategies to aid retention, reinforce transfer and assist in recall.

Scalability
And this seems to be a big part of eLearning's appeal. It's scalable because its digital and there's not that much difference between having one learner or one thousand.

So, qualified ISDs (instructional designers) produce eLearning roughly like this:

They put in all their training in theory (cognitivist or constructivist) and methodology (eg ADDIE or other defined workflow). And the output is effective and/or efficient learning, evidence-based evaluation and scale.

Ubiquitous Rationalisation
There is a problem with all this scale, though. It comes at a price:

Students need to know how to approach and problem solve messy problems.

Good questions should have information missing, so students can learn to figure out what else they need to know.

Intuition can be an excellent tool in the problem-solving toolbox, if you can learn how use it well.

These problems don’t necessarily have a single, tidy, correct answer.

This is Julie Dirksen's summary of a presentation by Dan Myer on how (and why) to be 'less helpful' in teaching. The world's a messy place and efforts to try to control it will always come back to haunt you. Simply put, you can't reduce the complexity of a task. You can only shift the burden.
The price of scalable eLearning is that you leave all the complex stuff out.

Julie runs through five different ways to add in complexity or ambiguity to eLearning. But, as she puts it, they all kind of suck. For ambiguity, you need people.

Enter the Jackass
To fix this, you need to turn eLearning on its head. You need to have a quiet word with your qualified Instructional Designers and point out that they've got their model completely back-to-front.

• Scale is not a benefit. It's a cost.
• Scale is not something you get out of eLearning. It's not a happy accident that people built the internet and then suddenly noticed that, hey, we can fit everybody in here! Scale is something you put in.

To develop eLearning that goes beyond basic rule-based procedural instructions (ie for jobs that have been or soon will be outsourced) you have to start with scale. Instead of asking, "Will this work for a group of people?" You should start by assuming that you'll have to work with groups of people. You have no choice. ISDs should be producing eLearning that looks like this:

What should the content look like?
Web pages. Wiki pages. Google Waves. Reddit-style comment threads. Media from meetings and workshops. Links to blogs and micro-blogs. The eLearning should protrude onto and overlap with the real world. The form follows the function.

Two massive, major, erm, problems
You don't need qualified ISDs for this. It's nice if you have them. They'll always be useful. But you don't need them.
You don't need a Learning Management System (or a VLE) for this. You need the web or a good intranet.

Scale is a critical success factor not a side-effect. Digital solutions, by definition, require scale.

[Classroom image: imgur]