The philosophy of eLearning
November 9, 2020
I haven't worked in learning and development long, but the deeper I dive in, the more I ask myself why.
The simple answer is, of course, because the client requested it.
However, as I expand my network and read posts by fellow L&D practitioners, I see that I am not the only one to get philosophical.
It's great that eLearning is popular (yay, I have a job!), and that you can do so many amazing things in Articulate Storyline and other authoring tools, make it responsive, make it interactive, engaging, fun, gamified, animated, - you get it. So we can create content. So we can make it look appealing.
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Sure, it is possible to track the results of quizzes, measure time spent to complete the module, stalk "learners" up to the point of the answer given or button clicked on any given screen, collect data from within an LMS or by stuffing up your SCORM packages with xAPI statements.
This is going to sound odd coming from a learning designer, but... where is the learning?
The way I see it, the only one who's actually learning is the person designing the eLearning. In fact, our community is constantly upskilling, the variety of tools we use day to day is huge, we are expected to perform needs analysis, map processes, design the experience, develop the module (with or without extra code), and then possibly track and analyze the performance of the module (not the "learner"!).
Before this gets too gloomy, I would like to point out that not all eLearning is useless. People do learn from it. Sometimes, it is the best way to deliver content. It is great for asynchronous training delivery or self-paced learning. We just need to be mindful of the goals we are trying to achieve through it.
Some professionals who have been in the L&D field way longer than me have been enquiring about and studying how people learn for a while now. We know how learning happens, we know it's not the same for everyone, neuroscientists have explored our brains and we can design for just the right cognitive response. L&D is currently headed to great directions: adaptive learning, simulations, AR and VR, performance support. We're shifting from content to performance [EDIT January 2025: Are we really? I seemed to be rather optimistic about the L&D landscape in 2020, and five years later, I think we still haven't done our homework. Gen AI is creating more content now, and we're only scratching the surface of performance support, still, after all this time.].
This doesn't mean eLearning will see its end anytime soon (though I believe it will become a rather cheap resource a few years from now when AI gets better at designing interactive modules than humans). And I hope to be able to design learning with purpose.