What can be 'blended' in blended learning? Are we blending right?

Working in an e-Learning firm I grew up the ranks hearing paeans about the primacy of the web-based learning. Lower costs, better returns on every learning dollar spent, better retention, spot on accurate tracking of performance and what have you.

The niggling doubt remained gnawingly irritant at the back of my mind. In the last few years of school my skills at harnessing a beast called the BBC Acorn led me to write learning programs to teach math and stuff like that for the juniors. As we moved on to PCs and participated in coding fests my early brush with e-Learning taught me a good lesson. You can't teach someone to ride the bicycle using only a computer based training. The teacher was still indispensable.

Many years later the garden of eLearning eden was soon ruffled by the realization that our clients were STILL rooting for the good old class-room education of yore. However, the monster of budgetary constraints forced the learning groups to web-based training. Instructor led training had to retained for the parts which absolutely needed it.

I learned to 'blend' web-based with the instructor led class room training. Nothing new I mused while doing it. I had been doing it all along when I was teaching people about computer hardware and assembly.

After some great marketing hype and 9/11 people embraced Virtual Classroom training (VCT) like lemmings lured inexplicably to the edge of the cliff. Some of it worked and we now blended VCT into the scheme of things. The likes of WebEx and Interwise rejoiced as we made PPTs which flashed and flickered on shared desktops across continents and oceans.

In India we are taught to toil like ants without looking around too much. Had we looked around a bit we would see a few things changing. The cognitive and constructivist ways of learning and knowledge transfer now seemed to work better than parading everything down the well beaten garden path of Instructional Systems Design (ISD). Of course ISD is proven and easier to churn out in mind numbing page turners. So predictable is the end product that every outsource vendor seems to have built tools which churn these out like steam shovels at a quarry.

Not much blending here. We seem to get excited at the prospect of blending only mediums of delivery. ILT, WBT, VCT are all just mediums. For true blending an instructional designer (in my opinion) would need to blend methodologies as well.

Imagine a curriculum where groups of learners gain initial information through ISD driven means and then are required to play a constructivist game where they need to apply what they learnt to achieve an end objective. Now that would be fun!

The interesting part is that we have already moved to the umbra region of the move towards flexible, just-in-time, collaborative, push learning. The Internet, Web 2.0, and greater bandwidth just lubricated a transfer so smooth that we don't realize that the learner today expects all this as the default blend.

Let's take an example. I need to learn how to store SMS messages on the memory card of my new cell phone. The first reflex is to Google. Not only are mediums blended, as I learn, (You Tube Video tutorials, meet knowledge bases residing in forums), I will also work on new methods of learning such as collaborating with a bunch of others in a forum.

So... Are we blending right when we make the next course-ware? Perhaps not.

The new learning generation is demanding that we blend both medium and methodology. Flexibility , and non-linear complexity borne out of the need of the millennial learner to experience and learn is key. It's time we blended better.

A brief history of Instructional Design

There is a lot that one can read about Instructional Design online. However, there is little that I have found online that is not verbose, full of jargon, and un-pictorial.

I stumbled upon a little website made by the people from the University of Houston which gives a nice chronology of how ID movements and beliefs have grown and changed over the years.

Have a look at http://www.coe.uh.edu/courses/cuin6373/idhistory/index.html

My STC Presentation on 'Using Video Games and Virtual Worlds for Learning'

During the first Society for Technical Communication (STC) Regional conference in Pune (14-15 Jul 2007), I was given the opportunity to conduct a session related to Instructional Design (ID). I thought it would be a good platform to make an interesting presentation on how and why people are more captivated by games (compared to traditional learning processes). During the presentation I also showed examples of a number of 'serious games' are being made to address learning among both the adults and children.

I've uploaded the PPT to Rapidshare along with the videos that I showed during the talk.

You could download the videos from:

	http://rapidshare.com/files/42947771/STC_Session_Video_Games_Jul2007_v1.7.ppt.html

And the presentation from:

http://rapidshare.com/files/42953177/Videos_4_STCPrez_15Jul07.zip.html

The 'Surface'

Just imagine a table that 'feels' :) The new concept work from Microsoft is quite interesting.

It will be even more interesting to think of possibilities of how this can be used to give people knowledge... Imagine a world where students do not have to take books to school... The table teaches them...

http://www.microsoft.com/surface

Another quirk..

I realized that everyday I learn something new that affects how I design and work. Like the boulder in a stream of experiences what I learn today often lingers on like a whiff of memory which tantalizes due the lack of a total recall.

This will be my photo album to rekindle the memories when I look back.