Introduction

Since the Internet and multimedia developed in the 1990's, our intellectual practices
have evolved. In particular, we can now observe that people are:

1. Learning alone in online courses, or through apps where they follow a

sequence of theory and exercises;

2. Collaborating at a distance on Wikipedia to write crowd-sourced articles

together on a given topic;

3. Alternating between face-to-face meetings and online interactions with an

instructor or a coach;

4. Reading online tutorials and then practicing by themselves;

5. Searching for answers to their questions by using Google™;

6. Writing blogs and seeking to clarify their vision of things with the help of
comments left for them by others;

7. Practicing guitar by imitating experts who offer teaching videos on

YouTube™;

8. Participating in sophisticated online training scenarios that are being held in

Digital Learning Environments (Learning Management Systems) where a
coach has access to data on their learning progression in the course, and can
then interact with them to provide suitable answers;

9. Playing video games, “serious” games, online games, individually or

collectively;

10. Sending their work output to distant colleagues by email, and receiving
corrections and commentary via the same route, using, for example, the
Track Changes features in MS Word;

11. Using their phones on the train to listen to enterprise management

conference recordings, and also to consult videos, ebooks, etc.

Even though, to varying degrees, each of these activities can be described as

e-learning, because they each constitute a learning experience obtained via
digital media.
Analysing These Further

Let's attempt to analyze all this in closer detail.

(1) reminds us that e-learning is not necessarily an online activity;

(2) shows that it is possible to organize e-learning classes without having training
content available;

(3) specifies that e-learning is not synonymous with an absence of face-to-face

meetings between people;

(4) states that we can organize e-learning experiences in which the theory is
presented online, while the exercises take place live in a room (the reverse is
equally conceivable);

(5) describes something trivial: most of us learn things daily using Google™ without
even noticing or calling this “learning”;

(6) insists on the fact that learning can be particularly effective when the person
doing the learning is invited to ”do” something;

(7) illustrates a fairly primitive form of learning: by imitation. (Did Bach not learn
to compose by copying Vivaldi's works?);

(8) is considered by some to be the most evolved form of e-learning;

(9) touches on the method by which children originally learn, but does not provide
criteria about what is properly “educational” or didactic in the game;

(10) alludes to an intellectual activity which is widespread in most organizations,

and underlines that this is often an occasion for learning;

(11) gives an example of m-learning (where “m” stands for “mobile”), and we can
decide to consider it a form of e-learning.

What E-learning / Digital Learning Is Not

When an activity falls under Digital but not under Learning or vice versa, it cannot
be considered to be e-learning.

“Digital” means digital. Learning activities that use the Internet, CD-ROMs, phones,
and videos can be considered to be e-learning. These days, the majority of these
activities take place on Internet networks and even on the Web (in a browser like
Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.).

“Learning” is a little more difficult to define. What is the difference between

“learning” and “reading,” for example? Do we not say that “John is reading at
Oxford” to indicate that “John is studying at the University of Oxford”?

When I read the news, am I simply collecting information, or am I undertaking

learning? To start from a simple idea, suppose that we are all behaviorists, and
consequently, we believe that to learn must always mean to become capable of
doing something.The basic psychological model of behaviorism proposes that all
information is, directly or indirectly, related to a project of action, and it suggests a
3-step learning process:

1. 1. Information arrives on “how to do something”;

2. An occasion presents itself for practicing this new activity, or activities which
prepare for it;

3. Information about success, or “feedback,” is fed back into the system.

So first we obtain (1), information on “how to do something.” Then we're offered

(2), opportunities to practice and exercise our skills. And then, somebody or
“something automatic” (a machine) validates or invalidates our results (3), giving us
additional information which allows us to correct our mistakes.

This fairly rudimentary and certainly insufficient definition does, however, clarify
things by eliminating from the definition of e-learning activities of simple
information receipt: reading, searching, watching, listening.

But this criterion is difficult to apply insofar as certain dimensions of our intellectual
activity are not directly visible or measurable. One person conducts a Google search
and contents themselves with doing some reading there, while another person,
using the same information, takes notes, synthesizes, draws a mind map of the
relevant concepts, produces a document in their own turn or creates one mentally,
explains the concepts to others, etc.

Another difficulty is that some of us do not consider ourselves behaviorists. I do

however think that saying, “I am not a behaviorist” most often actually means, “I
am more than a behaviorist,” and does not imply a refusal of this minimal
theoretical framework.

A third problem with the behaviorist approach is that it does not assign a clear
status to intellectual competencies such as knowing history, or becoming wise.

E-Learning Plays Out Through Activities and Feedback

But the advantage of the definition known as “behaviorist” is that it emphasizes

activities and feedback, which are the necessary conditions for what the Anglo-
Saxon culture calls “instructional design” and which we may with some risk translate
into French as “scénarisation.” “The truth is rarely simple, but only simple ideas are
useable,” wrote Paul Valéry, more or less.

Seen from the point of view of the producer, e-learning is often all about its various
content: presentations, articles, explanatory diagrams. But knowledge dissemination
does not by itself constitute the substance of e-learning. E-learning starts when I go
from “my course can be found on the internet” to “my training is taking place on the
internet.”

Designing relevant activities that will lead learners from a state of passive reading to
one of dynamic interaction is not an easy thing. I must, in order to arrive there,
start by describing the objectives of my course in terms of action.

If I'm teaching how to chair a meeting, I am not permitted to describe my

objectives for the course with expressions like “they must know what running a
meeting means,” because “to know” is a mental competency: I cannot verify it, I
cannot propose activities to improve it, I cannot give feedback on “how they know”
or “how much they know.”

It would be a better idea for me to describe things this way: “they must be able to
list the main rules for running a meeting,” or better, “they must be able to run a
meeting” (and, off the cuff, to imagine running a role-playing activity, or another
form of simulation).

If I am training an airplane pilot, employing multiple choice testing to do so is not

really an option. Would you go up in the air with a pilot who had been trained solely
using this sort of testing method? The person wouldn't have the skills. The relevant
activity for the pilot is probably spending time in the flight simulator.

And feedback should be given on the commands the learner gives to the simulator,
on their ability to face the situations presented by the device, and why they crashed
should be explained to them along with how to avoid making similar mistakes in the
future.

Instructional Design

A film-loving friend recently described to me what would be the worst film synopsis:
“He is an idealist and she is in love with him.” This is lousy because it doesn't
describe things visually. It would be better to say, “The story opens on a train. He is
gazing at the landscape out the window, and she takes his hand,” because at the
cinema, it's the action that guides us. The same rule applies to instructional
designers.

How would we actively design a relevant sequence of activities for courses like:

1. How to run a meeting;

2. Art History;
3. English as a second language?

We could start by stating that these activities should come as close as possible to
“real” situations:

The first subject puts us onto the track of using a group activity, for example a role-
playing scenario;

The second subject suggests questions of interpretation, categorization, memory

and of matching between groups;

The third set of activities doubtless will need to investigate reading comprehension,
oral comprehension, fill-in-the-blanks texts, etc.

The subject being studied, but also the target audience, their level (which will
progress as the course goes on), and the richness of the learning media already in
existence and of the software available are also parameters to take into account
when designing training scenarios.In the table below, we propose a formal model
divided into 40 possible types of e-learning activities. There certainly exist additional
ones, and the organization of the table could be different. Consider this a first volley
to open the discussion.

The 8 rows of the table progress from the most closed questions (ie., those that
facilitate automatic correction) towards the most open questions (those that can
only be corrected manually).

The 5 columns organize the activities from most simple to most complex
(acknowledging that this classification remains vague and subjective). Our
proposition is that e-learning instructional designers use this table or a table of this
type and pinpoint on it the types of questions which are relevant using the
parameters described above.

A Few Explanations

Alternate choice means multiple choice with 2 options;

Certainty degree means: a multiple choice question or a true/false accompanied by

a subsidiary question of the type “How sure are you of your response?”;

Yes/no with explanation combines two questions into one: “Yes because A”, “Yes
because B”, “No because C”, “No because A”;

Categorizing designates a matching or pairing exercise in which one of the two

groups contains less items than the other;

Sequencing is a matching exercise in which the items in the first group are called
“Firstly”, “Secondly”, “Thirdly” in order to class the items of the second group
chronologically, like in a step-by-step operating plan;

Fill-in-form is similar to Fill-in-blanks, but adds a graphical element so that the

online form is given the appearance of an actual existing form, in order to give it
more “realness”;

Lab simulation can be a Flash animation whose behavior is a function of parameters

the learner can modify, using sliders for example.

Delineate zones on an image is a type of activity that is particularly relevant in

medicine: draw the contour of a tumour, for example. But it can equally be shown to
be relevant in other fields like heavy industry (“Delineate the dangerous areas
around this pylon”).
Conclusion

E-learning is a rich and complex field. The most complex part comes from the
“learning” dimension, because learning is, in and of itself, a complicated thing.

The name e-learning suggests that the person doing the learning is at the center of
the model. If they weren't, we'd speak of “e-teaching.” We can, however, still ask
ourselves how many projects take that point into account.

Furthermore, the most complex (and the most expensive) models are not always
the most effective in terms of learning. Let us ask ourselves just how effective the
simple act of imitating a guitarist on YouTube is, and how to transfer that principle
into our training plans.

The publishing of electronic resources does not form an e-learning model type
unless it is accompanied by the implementation of a practice through which a
certain form of feedback is available. Let us ask ourselves just how effective it can
be for my sister to simply comment on my guitar song interpretation (whether or
not my sister is a recognized guitarist).

Contact

We are at your disposal to help you think through your learning project.

Kindly yours,

Thomas De Praetere, CEO, DOKEOS

http://www.dokeos.com