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 Training & Consulting > A Revolution In Learning
A Revolution in Learning
What makes E-Learning powerful is more than technology — it is the social dynamic of networking. The revolutionary power of E-Learning is not simply having a multimedia platform on a single desktop. It is the combined power of a world-wide network of such computers — connecting authors, instructors and learners globally — with the immediacy of text, graphics, audio and video, as well as interactivity and collaborative sharing.
Technology-based instruction offers leverage to make both the planning/development process and the delivery/learning process more efficient. Instructors and curriculum developers can now share resources more easily and together build learning-object repositories. Multimedia and expanded resources from the network can enhance the traditional classroom experience dramatically. Online synchronous tools create a new kind of cyber-classroom, connecting distance learners from many locals ("any where") in peer-to-peer engagement. Online self-paced tutorials create enriched interactive and exploratory learning experiences that are accessible on-demand ("any time") when a learner is ready.
Obviously, E-Learning represents an education and training revolution in terms of technological capability. But more importantly, it represents revolutionary access and availability to a world-wide educational audience. "Equal access" as never before — with a range of choices and opportunities for learning not dreamed possible even thirty years ago. It allows global reach for educational institutions and businesses, as well as for individual authors, teachers, and instructional designers.
Quality education is essential to our success as a society and our future achievements as a civilization. The emerging instructional and learning capabilities delivered via the Internet and other technology-based teaching tools are vital responses to the needs in education today.
In many ways, education is at a crossroads. The industrial-era model of schools and classrooms as "learning factories" is clearly inadequate to deal with the diverse and continually changing learning needs of modern society. Our basic institutions of family, public schools and workplace are over-burdened by the financial pressures and learning demands of the 21st Century economy. The rate of change is so accelerated that is now estimated that the average worker must adapt to at least three major career shifts during his working life. Being a "life-long learner" is not just a luxury, for knowledge-workers it is an economic necessity. (Peter Drucker, "Beyond the Information Revolution," Atlantic Monthly, October 1999).
Fortunately, the emergence of the Internet and technology-based instruction has provided new tools and channels to respond to these learning needs. We require information-era communication media, teaching and learning methods to deal with the demands of the Information Age. The immense hunger for information and communication is why the Internet was built so rapidly. It took less than two decades to establish the vast interconnected global network of communications, commerce and knowledge sharing that we now experience as the World Wide Web. It was the fastest adoption of any mass communications media to date.
The amazing phenomena is that the web was build by individuals, teams, and corporations across the globe working independently, yet simply conforming to the publishing standards provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Rapid progress also occurred in improved developer tools, increased speed of broad-band data flow, and significantly higher quality of streaming audio and video to make the user experience much more enjoyable and effective. It is estimated that as of January 2006 that are now over a billion users of the Internet world-wide (Wikipedia).
Ideally, these new and emerging educational options will be "learner-centered." They will be concerned with the needs of the whole person and not driven by an arbitrarily imposed curriculum or by the artificial constraints of a particular technology. E-Learning enables individual learners to have more choice, to be more responsible and self-directed in their learning paths — both in social development as well as career development.
Educational technology, as an economic sector in its own right, is also asserting choice by adopting industry-wide technology standards — so that the marketplace will remain open and free, not excessively controlled by monopolies or its growth fragmented by warring proprietary technologies. As such, E-Learning is providing important changes to the existing learning structures throughout our culture:
- First, E-Learning is allowing our traditional educational institutions to be more effective — to redefine the classroom in terms of cyber-space logistics, access, multimedia presentation, and interactive learning methods.
- Second, E-Learning is enabling corporate training in business, both small to large, to be more efficient (save time and money) — to accelerate training delivery and learning, while containing costs.
- Third, E-Learning is playing an integral role in the emergence of a "Knowledge-based economy." We now live in a global network of mass communication, transportation, and commerce — the Internet shrinks time and distance. With E-Learning, the needed learning can be accessed "anytime, anywhere" — enabling an individual worker's capability and productivity to be exponentially increased.
The realization that, "the Internet changes everything," has been translated into the "e-everything" world we are now living in: e-education, e-business, e-commerce, e-government, e-communications, e-entertainment (games and video-on-demand), e-logistics (transportation and shipping coordination), e-customer service, and more. The "e" does not mean a separate technological structure unrelated to its predecessor, but rather an extension of the existing institution to make use of the Internet as an essential new tool. In each one of these domains of activity, E-Learning has a contribution to make — learning (as well as information access, communication and commerce) is essential to the success of each of these endeavors. The values of increased effectiveness, efficiency and productivity are fundamental benefits that E-Learning seeks to provide.
Higher education, as well as corporate training, is also focused on deriving new effectiveness and efficiencies promised by E-Learning.
If there is one major boon resulting from the advent of online learning in colleges and universities, it is the renewed focus on pedagogy and instructional design. Higher education faculty, who are hired and trained for expertise in a discipline, are not trained in these matters, and often adopt a teaching style that is either modeled on how they were taught or how they prefer to learn. In any case, introducing the Web into college teaching has generated an enormous up-swell of attention on the aims and various methods for achieving student learning.
"The Web's Impact on Student Learning," Katrina Meyer, Ph.D., University of North Dakota, T.H.E. Journal, May 2003, p. 20
What makes E-Learning powerful is more than technology — it is the social dynamics of networking. The revolutionary power of E-Learning is not simply having a multimedia platform on a single desktop. It is the combined power of a world-wide network of such computers — connecting authors, instructors and learners globally — with the immediacy of text, graphics, audio and video, as well as interactivity and collaborative sharing.
Technology-based instruction offers leverage to make both the planning/ development process and the delivery/ learning process more efficient. Instructors and curriculum developers can now share resources more easily and together build learning-object repositories. Multimedia and expanded resources from the network can enhance the traditional classroom experience dramatically. Online synchronous tools create a new kind of cyber-classroom, connecting distance learners from many locals ("any where") in peer-to-peer engagement. Online self-paced tutorials create enriched interactive and exploratory learning experiences that are accessible on-demand ("any time") when a learner is ready.
Obviously, E-Learning represents an education and training revolution in terms of technological capability. But more importantly, it represents revolutionary access and availability to a world-wide educational audience. "Equal access" as never before — with a range of choices and opportunities for learning not dreamed possible even thirty years ago. It allows global reach for educational institutions and businesses, as well as for individual authors, teachers, and instructional designers.
It has been noted by many that the Internet is a powerful force in the democratization of education. The goal of "anytime, anywhere" E-Learning depends upon a technology infrastructure and its availability. However, it is the emerging "Knowledge-based economy" that provides both "push and pull" drivers of the continuing E-Learning revolution. The need for effectiveness and efficiency in learning has never been greater.
E-Learning — in education and business — serves the dynamic needs of a "Knowledge-based economy." It is this emerging economy that requires a powerful culture of open communication, increasing demands for workforce development and a growing necessity of life-long learning. The "survival of the fittest" in this new era will be those who respond to the demands of a Knowledge-based economy with an accelerated learning curve.
We believe that this is the reason that U.S. spending for online training (an admittedly narrowly definition of E-Learning) is expected to escalate from the current $20 billion to over $220 billion by 2010. This projection was developed by Brandon-Hall based on the escalating role of on-line learning in all educational institutions (including teacher training), government, business, health-care delivery, and home computing.
The projection of an accelerating market position of online learning is based on the following historical realities: (a) the astonishing rate of intranet installation across corporate networks, and (b) increasing sales for home computers due to the desire to become internet connected. It is this projection that led John Chambers to make his often quoted vision statements:
"The biggest growth in the Internet, and the area that will prove to be one of the biggest agents of change, will be in online training or E-Learning."
"The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error."
John Chambers, CEO, Cisco
"The Newest Member of Tech's Ruling Elite,"
Fortune Magazine, Nov. 24, 1997
In the United States, access and availability to the Internet exists for most learners — whether at work, school, home or public library. A lot of work must still be done to minimize the "digital divide," so that these new education and training opportunities are available for all. After more than two decades of serious technical evolution, the minimum PC now being sold is finally an extremely capable multimedia platform. The technical standard for web browser software is now sufficiently evolved, adopted and distributed, that the basic technical infrastructure — the minimum toolset — for communication, instruction and learning has been established.
The next step is for the quality of E-Learning content to be expanded, improved, and made widely available to all who seek it. What has not yet been achieved is the emergence of instructional value as a quality standard. There are too few examples of quality E-Learning content, and even fewer examples of effective instructional delivery. We are only now at the beginning of this phase of the E-Learning revolution.
Cognitive Design Solutions, Inc. is dedicated to the advancement of the E-Learning revolution. Our goal is to promote individual and team learning solutions by providing consulting and training services in the areas of Knowledge Management, E-Learning and Performance Support.
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Revolution in Learning
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