A Revolution for E-learning?

E-learning remains a concept yet to reach its full potential. Still, while there have been incredible strides made within the industry in the last few years the revolution is still to come. I believe that once e-learning is implemented beyond the creation of Content Management Systems (CMS) into the higher education market then the real revolution will begin.

Many may argue the revolution is already here, pointing at more students participating in on-line courses because of the abilities of the CMS. An incredible amount of time and money has been spent developing the CMS and its capabilities to improve the administration and communication process between instructor and student.

A CMS does an incredible job of improving the administration aspect of delivering a course on-line, but e-learning is more than administration. At its heart, e-learning is learning. Do students learn purely from a well-orchestrated roll attendance, test delivery, or group think? E-learning should be centered on the delivery of solid content. Where is the content in CMS? Content Management Systems are crucial, but unfortunately, in some areas the publishers of textbooks are driving them.

Typically, the higher education market has depended upon the creation and organization of content from textbook publishers. A publisher seeks out authors from among the higher education market, primarily to secure adoption rates, and only secondarily to delivery content. Textbook publishers have one goal -- sell textbooks. With the recent trend of declining individual textbook sales the industry is seeking new avenues to increase the sale of the products. Each year the prices of textbooks increase as the individual unit sales decrease.

E-learning from a publisher’s point of view is another avenue to increase the sale of textbooks. The tools and content they are providing to instructors for use in the CMS systems are developed to support the textbook and make teaching easier for the instructor. Most of the tools are PowerPoint slides, quizzes, or digital copies of the book, with a few linear-based content presentations. None of these are truly new or innovative in their approach, or are focused on using the full capabilities of the medium to delivery quality content targeting the actual user - “Students.” It is time to move away from e-learning content produced for the purpose of increasing the sale of textbooks and produce true interactive e-learning modules that empower instructors and students.

The instructors are still key to the classroom. They are the administrators of ideas, concepts, theories, questions, and thought processes for students. E-learning ought to be designed and produced to allow an instructor to custom design their approach to teaching a course. It also should allow for students to access specific learning modules when they need it, without working through a course. It is through the creation of College-Cram.com and the library of learning modules, “cramlets,” that I have been able to explore the concepts of e-learning for the higher education market.

The approach of College-Cram.com has been to identify the core concepts of a subject and build a small Flash™ learning module only on an individual concept. The library consists of individual learning modules organized by concept. This allows students to seek out what they need to learn and gives instructors the tools to customize their course. By concentrating on the core concepts, a library of generic content is created empowering the user to build their own knowledge base.

There are some limitations to this approach as generic content creation only works with those courses that are built upon an agreed foundation of principles, theorems, and laws. Subject matters within science, math, business, and languages provide the best opportunity for this approach.

Revolution will occur for e-learning when the approach for higher education is not based upon the sale of textbooks but in providing access to viable, and desired content. The content must be interactive, customizable, and granular in design and administered using advance technologies of the 21st century in place of digital page turning programs.