Norman Foster's Millau Viaduct in France - the tallest bridge in the world
Vision, surprise and level are the first three qualities of e-learning. Practice is the fourth.
What is practice? Just what you remember when you learned to play a sport or a musical instrument competitively. Practice is diligent, frequent, repetitive, monitored activity requiring the exercise of competencies acquired through study.
Practice in e-learning may compel memorization, drill, rehearsal, problem-solving, role-play and creative pretense. Practice is tough. It may require doing the same difficult things over and over again until they are done perfectly; then practicing even more to prevent any erosion of proficiency. On the other hand practice may stipulate a long series of unfamiliar, dissimilar activities that ultimately expand and ignite proficiency, going beyond perfect to the zenith of adaptive.
Practice is thus a bridge between competence and performance. For purposes of this discussion, competence is the potential to do something well whereas performance is the achievement.
So practice is a bridge, but not all bridges are the same. The strongest and most flexible span wide and frightening gaps under extreme circumstances. They attach to mission-critical training and produce outstanding performers known as experts, masters, virtuosos and leaders. Lesser bridges are shorter, lower, easier to build and traverse. They develop steady performers.
The aim of practice is to strengthen and improve performance.
Prominent actors in the e-learning industry claim to value performance above all, but their work doesn’t support the claim. Almost all workaday e-learning ends with a partial verification of competence and rarely has any discernible impact on performance. This is a fact and it’s not really surprising, because such e-learning gives students little if any time to practice what they studied. If there’s a bridge to be found in such online learning, it’s a bridge to nowhere.
Some of those same puffy actors argue that ample practice cannot be put into e-learning for practical reasons. Rigorous practice adds time and cost to development and complexity to learning management. With this rationalization, some educators turn practice into a can and kick it down the road until it mingles with work experience and may be dubbed “learning by doing.” This phrase is a mere sophism.
Is practice the same as on-the-job training or learning from experience? OJT and bootstrapping may be examples of practice, but they generally don’t warrant optimal performance. That’s because they expose trainees to random problem sets, unqualified learning objectives and uneven or uncoordinated challenges. Performance standards may or may not be apparent, but in any case are only retroactively considered. Coaches and proctors are nowhere to be found. This kind of practice is haphazard.
If trainees have already attained proficiency, then on-the-job practice can add nuanced discrimination, understanding and skill to their performance. On the other hand, it is likely to warp or impede performance when competencies are still weak. It’s a bridge to somewhere, but not necessarily where you intended to go.
For practice to bridge the gap between competence and optimal performance, it must be integrated with the training and tutored or supervised by an agent with mastery-level acumen. In classroom education that agent is a teacher or coach. Practice is personal and labor intensive, slow and expensive. It’s a suitable model for training the 1% whose performance may have life or death consequences.
With e-learning continuing to grow as a preferred method of instruction, the default agent for the 99% is artificial or machine rather than human intelligence. We already have this kind of virtual practice in training simulations and games. It can also be implemented in tutorial styles of e-learning, though not within barren pedagogies of rapid-e-learning that seem to have no concern with competence or performance other than to dismiss them with lip service.
To learn more about the epic journey from competence via practice to performance, see the research of K. Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University. For a real world example that borders on surreal, read Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer - an Ericsson disciple.
Vision, surprise, level and practice are primary qualities of e-learning. Of course there are subordinate qualities that explain how efficacy is achieved. I’ll leave them for another time when I am done with fundamentals. Tomorrow my attention turns to the mechanics of e-learning.

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