The Blended Learner

The Fourth Quality of E-Learning

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.

The Third Quality of E-Learning

Vision is the first quality of e-learning. Surprise is the second. Level is the third.

Levels are discrete topics, degrees of difficulty, aesthetic treatments, affordances and attainments. Levels of whatever kind may be designed into e-learning. If learning is a kind of journey, then levels are features of an imaginary landscape and opportunities for enrichment that students encounter along the way.

Each level may have intrinsic logic and value and not contribute to a larger narrative. Alternatively each level may link to others, enabling an easier progression of experience, acquisition and achievement throughout a course.

In multi-level e-learning the whole is normally greater than the sum of its parts. As students journey to a summit of mastery, coordinated levels prepare them for unbridled growth. The levels are transparent levers that fuel and reward learning.

In contrast rapid e-learning ignores levels in favor of an atlas of invariable content. This atlas is also known as information architecture or a menu system or site map. A series of topics forms a flat line from beginning to end of a subject. This is the structure and flow of a PowerPoint deck. Wikis also employ a chock a block approach to levels, but because wikis are more flexible and adaptive than decks, wikis deliver more affordances.

The most robust use of levels turns up in simulations and serious games. There is often no discernible series of topics in this kind of e-learning, just a network of stimuli, evidence and clues that may be used for problem solving and competitive play. Students are tested for their ability to synthesize and apply what they've learned, but generally not for recall.

Sims and games offer a greater variety of levels tailored to individual learning styles and needs. Rather than presenting an atlas of invariable content cooked up by an instructional designer or subject-matter expert, sims and games tend to become metaphors of work experience or life itself. They yield control of learning to the learner and make the instructor seem to disappear.

Myriad levels in sims or games can feel like the cross currents in white water. Learners are boaters on this river of knowledge, studying the water's behavior, choosing and updating their route, overcoming difficulties and in the end learning far more than an ID or SME could have taught.

Myriad levels are the truest manifestation of “self-paced” training, a term that has signified the greater promise of e-learning since its inception 30 years ago.

For an epitome of levels in learning theory, have a glance at the classic Bloom’s Taxonomy. Dive into Daniel Kahneman’s new book about Thinking Fast and Slow.

If you’re more of a creative than a scientist, read Abbott’s disruptive Victorian novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. But more than anything, determine to contemplate and implement levels when you want to increase the quality of your e-learning.

Vision, surprise and level are three qualities of e-learning, but there are others as well. More about this tomorrow.

The Second Quality of E-Learning

Volcanic lightning above Mount Shinmoedake in Japan as it erupts

Vision is the first quality of e-learning. Surprise is the second. 

This statement may shock some developers, but that wouldn't make it false. Their shock would merely demonstrate the importance and value of surprise in e-learning. 

This is what I mean. If my concept of quality surprises you, then you are far more likely to continue reading than if I mutter some truism of instructional design. After all, you've studied and tested all the theories by now. Your mind is wrapped around them like a hard protective shell. 

Surprise triggers an urge to keep reading. Beyond that surprise opens the mind to something new. You may quarrel with the new point of view, kick rhetorical dust in its face, stamp out of the room all full of yourself. But in a little while that deep sensation of surprise may lead you to reconsider everything you previously took for granted.

Only then is a mind ready to learn. In that condition of openness it can appreciate quality over stultifying mechanics.

By surprising some developers, I may have interrupted a pattern they expected: a comfortable narrative about e-learning that conforms with their past experience, their general familiarity with the subject, and their professional authority. They may have expected the second quality of e-learning to be something like “measurable learning objectives” or “level three interactions” or even the holy grail of "performance."

Such attributes are consequences rather than drivers. They are manifestations rather than causes of quality in e-learning.

Why is surprise the second quality of e-learning? Because boredom is the serial killer of attention and engagement in many programs. Boredom is a built-in tendency of Daniel Kahneman's "System 2" cognition. Boredom doesn't just randomly occur. Students are programmed to be bored by the innate laziness of their rational minds. Surprise confronts the mind's lazy tendency and defeats it.

Instructional technologists who follow the ISD method like a roadmap, who mind the Ps and Qs of textbooks and user manuals, typically bore their students to cognitive death. Though e-learning has the potential to be the most exciting method of instruction since the Academy and Lyceum, under the thumbs of many developers it is a kind of empty shell that washed up on the beach.

Many developers are making e-learning that is 99% mechanics and 1% inspiration. Precisely the reverse of what it should be - and what it becomes when surprise is present.

Surprise in e-learning occurs when instructional narrative takes unexpected turns, is momentarily enchanted by dazzling topics, offers insights that are rich and challenging and counterintuitive.

Surprise occurs when metaphors explain and enlarge meaning that first seems erudite or obscure, but then crystallizes into something the student always knew to be true but never thought that way about it.

Surprise occurs when narrative is flipped by a teacher to a student like a tool hot from the forge: here, you take it, see what you can do with it.

Surprise occurs when there is no obvious path forward, when courage, passion, exploration and discovery are needed to find the way out. When there are no signposts, nothing telling you to press next to continue.

Is the quality of surprise unruly and unpredictable? No, it is highly structured and scripted. Surprise in e-learning doesn’t bloom like flowers in the spring. It erupts like volcanic fissures that have been crackling for eons, and then suddenly unsettle and reshape and renew the earth. 

Vision and surprise are the first and second qualities of e-learning, but there are others as well. More about this tomorrow.

 

Zen and the Art of E-Learning Design

Ralph Steadman's perception of George Orwell's Animal Farm

Every so often a new book changes the way I think about my work and life. Just now I am reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It is one of those books.

It reminds me of another game-changing testament, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig in 1974 (the year I spent on a bicycle). 

So far Kahneman hasn’t uttered the word "quality" even once. But Thinking Fast and Slow seems nonetheless to be about quality of the intellectual and cultural kind that led Pirsig on his quest. Kahneman is helping me understand the interplay between perceptions and cognition. Like Pirsig but in his own fashion, he is explaining what constitutes the quality of ideas and the potential of ideas to effect desirable behavior and cultural change.

This got me musing about Zen and the art of e-learning design. I made up the title. I had to because much of the e-learning produced today is not designed and doesn’t rise to the condition of art. E-learning today resembles a kind of slops thrown into an industrial trough to maintain Orewellian farm animals.

However this may be at present, the grand purpose of e-learning - historically and technically - is concerned with the transmission of ideas. The purpose is to educate and train people by imparting knowledge and bestowing competence. The concept of quality therefore belongs at the core of e-learning, though I don’t think this is generally acknowledged by learning professionals.

Instead of designing for quality, e-learning is developed for metrics and performance. Developers may have little understanding of perception and cognition. They may not be able to translate ideas into competencies - or even know what the difference is between a competency and a behavior. This kind of developer is an “instructional technologist” rather than a thinker and a teacher.

I believe that philosophy and science will free e-learning from the suffocating grip of technology. Epic transformations already underway in the education industry will force this to happen. As e-learning becomes a core rather than a perirpheral modality, it will become imperative for e-learning to fulfill its higher purpose rather than maintain farm animals. More about this tomorrow.

Readiness - a Motto for Learning

The quote is from Hamlet, the drawing from the New Yorker Magazine.

One of the best things about a classic liberal arts education is that it prepares students for life, for being as it were. After they graduate they may navigate challenges that are very different from what they expected or desired. If their education sound though, their readiness is all that is needed to prevail.

Training on the other hand prepares employees to do a job, for working rather than being. The aim of most training is compliant behavior. If you are trained to do something, then you'd better produce anticipated results. They are what matter, not the knowledge and abilities you acquired.

But what if you were trained to do something that is different from what your job actually requires? This happens all the time, because employees are trained to perform normative behaviors and there are just too many exceptions. With training limited to what they do versus who and what kind of people they are, their performance may turn out to be both compliant and wholly inadquate. You experienced this when you received "bad customer service" from a worker who is assiduously following the rules.

Being trained just to follow the rules was a factor in the meltdowns on Wall Street and Fukushima. When minimally trained workers come up against the unknown and unexpected, they lose their bearings and control. They are more likely to go with the flow than stand ready to correct it.

On the other hand, when well educated human beings confront the unexpected, they may be guided by wisdom. Doesn't mean they'll succeed every time, but they are much less likely to cave and be swept away.

I have said that my favorite book about training is Lone Survivor, which describes the school for Navy SEALs. Sailors are trained not just to do things, but to do anything that may conceivably become their objective. Not by following patterns, but by recognizing and understanding patterns of experience and mastering them with the aid of core values and innate strengths.

Imagine a training curriculum that endows students with "wisdom" and makes them "ready" rather than just capable. You experienced one in college, if you attended a good school, and that made you a more desirable job candidate. But ironically you haven't experienced it at work - and you haven't created the experience for others. 

Why? Or more aptly, why not?

The Fitness of Content

Criminal phone hacking was a tabloid hiccup in 2006. Five years later it’s a malignant tumor in the head of the mighty News Corporation. Now It threatens to derange an octogenarian king of kings along with his princely successor. 

The phone hacking scandal is tarnishing brands and destroying shareholder value, but it does have a silver lining for learning pros. It reveals how the commingling of information and entertainment - the secret sauce of all Murdoch properties - makes content irresistible. 

The “information” I’m speaking of is the daily news. We seek it online, in newspapers and magazines, on the television and radio. Entertainment shares all of these broadcast channels but until recently news and entertainment were separate and distinct categories of content. No more.

Before King Rupert stretched the meaning of “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” you might say that William S. Paley (CBS) and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (NYT) ruled the empire. Not that they controlled it or ran the most profitable enterprises, but they published and broadcast the daily news with something that was once known as journalistic integrity. To them the news was factual, accurate, objective and important content - vital for understanding the world and for successfully living and working in it. 

In the Paley-Sulzberger view the news is educational. You read or watch to become informed, to enlarge your acumen, to grow into a more skillful and capable member of your community. Can you imagine a more preposterous value proposition than this in the 21st Century? Yes, of course you can. Those other educational enterprises - schools and colleges - package content for precisely the same reasons. And like much of the news media, many of them are failing miserably. We’ll see why in a moment.

Entertainment always coexisted with the news in rags and on the boob tube, but separately and for very different reasons. Entertainment was just for fun, to be easily enjoyed and forgotten. Entertainment didn’t promise to develop you or even challenge you to “think different.” On the contrary it invited you to sit back on the couch and pretend you are a potato.

Long before the phone hacking scandal, way back in the 1970s when living in England, I saw the writing on the wall for news media (and for education). The “wall” was a News Corporation tabloid named The Sun - a daily sibling of the weekly News of the World - yes, the very same journal that was shuttered recently during the phone hacking scandal. King Rupert borrowed a page from Hugh Hefner’s playbook, the magazine Playboy, and coated page 3 of News of the World with pornography. My puritanical American sensibilities were amazed - naked ladies in newspapers! How can this be? Why is this happening?

Well you probably know why naked ladies were pictured in the News of the World. For the same reason that Hefner put them among interviews of statesmen and articles about evolution: to sell print. But why did pornography help to sell the news? Has anybody bothered to ask?

The News Corporation so liked the answer that they made it into their global brand. Pornography is just a low form of entertainment. Lift up your head a little bit and you’ll find a wider variety of entertainment clogging the news arteries these days - not all of it dirty, but most of it mindless. Higher and lower styles of entertainment all have this in common: they’re fun to consume. People want to be entertained and have fun. Given the choice, they vastly prefer entertainment to information and education. They must be forced to attend school (work), but they willingly and gratefully pay to attend the theater (play).

The phone hacking scandal is not a case of journalists aggressively reporting news. It’s just a zealous impresario preparing our entertainment. We like stories that shock and amaze and titillate. We used to rely on novels and movies and sports for our entertainment fix and we still do, only now we also get it on Fox News and CNN.

As learning professionals we may be offended by the commingling of news and entertainment. News for most of us is serious whereas entertainment is frivolous. News is factual, entertainment is free to imagine. News is constant, entertainment is protean and subversive. At least you may think so, but I don’t buy it.

News - and more broadly speaking education - has run its course. To the extent that it edifies without entertaining, it fails. That is not a truth for all times and places, but it is true for American civilization in 2011. Did you get that? Let me just repeat it for the benefit of speed readers: To the extent that education edifies without entertaining, it fails. Period.

Before you imagine a future in which text books have centerfolds and lectures are performed on a trapeze, let me recommend a different vision. It is a vision of education that both edifies and entertains. I have argued elsewhere and I sincerely believe that there is no useful contradistinction to be made between the two. The arts have been edifying and entertaining for millennia and they are doing so today. The most celebrated and enduring works of art are as complex and subtle and insightful as the best lecture or seminar you ever attended in college - maybe more. And yet they are also ravishing entertainments. 

The problem we face now - the one brought into clear focus by News Corporation - is not structural (the recipe of information + entertainment) but qualitative (the editorial chef). For the moment at least, our news impresarios are so lacking in integrity that they pander to an audience that they imagine is too stupid and lazy to be cognitively challenged. They pander because they lack the talent to come up with better content.

When News Corporation inevitably drifts away from its immoral and unethical founder it may stop behaving illegally, but it can’t and shouldn’t betray its brand. It must continue to blend education with entertainment or consumers will abandon its networks and journals. Same goes for the rest of the fourth estate. The “fitness” of news has been redefined.

We on the side of education and training are meantime arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We stand by the ponderous, the pedantic, the hopelessly obscure, the impossibly erudite and the shamelessly monotonous as we compete with mobile devices for the attention of students - and generally finish second. Because we are smart and not moronic, most teachers and trainers have not sullied their content with pornography and ideology, but neither have we made it fun. We ignore the writing on the wall as our huge bureaucratic learning industry steams into the ice flow.

Those on the cutting edge of education are heading for the lifeboats by experimenting with serious games - mortar and pestle for grinding information and entertainment into amazing new forms. That is a hopeful sign. Those on the cutting edge of entertainment are doing the same on Comedy Central. Over a cold dark sea of educational futility that most of us can’t bear to face, there are courageous and engaging ways forward. Feeling brave? Grab an oar!

Homage to Steve Jobs

Apple is not perfect of course, but everything they do, they do so much better. We know that about networks, operating systems, application software, computers, music players, smartphones and tablets. We know that about design, manufacturing, distribution, retail sales, customer service and technical support.

Now what could be next? It doesn't take a genius to figure that out - or maybe it does and that's why we'll be surprised when the iTV arrives as the next paradigm shifter. 

Say what? Don't we already have the Apple TV? Yes of course, but the iTV that's coming will totally rock our world. Emotionally, it will take us back to the 1950s when television was exciting and full of promise. Functionally it will shoot us forward into an unprecendented medium for entertainment and learning.

Just you watch.

DIPLOMA MILLS

Ellen S. O'Connor of Los Altos, Calif. writes in The New Yorker of July 11-18:

Louis Menand, in his article on the purpose of college in today's society, argues that "possibly the most important reform ever made in American higher education" occurred when law schools and medical schools made the bachelor's degree a prerequisite (A Critic at Large, June 6th). But this move also weakened the college, because the institution no longer conferred a terminal degree, as it had always done; it even became negatively defined as an "undergraduate school." The college - regardless of how elite, liberal, or humanistic it was - became a "pre-professional school." More substantively, "liberal" education came to be defined not as an end in itself but as a means to achieving professional status. No matter how vehement the defense of collegiate and liberal-arts education, including Menand's theories, the fact remains that in the university and the professions the reform brought an end to the idea that the college had intrinsic value. It kept the college alive institutionally but killed it spiritually.

Academically Adrift

In a press release dated January 18, the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) observed:

A combination of factors has created an unprecedented crisis in undergraduate education in the United States. Our nation has 47 million high school dropouts, equaling one-sixth of the U.S. population. Forty percent of students entering college do not read, write or perform math at a college-ready level. Only 57% of enrolled students graduate within six years. All of these statistics reflect enormous challenges that face postsecondary education. Rising costs, now combined with declining revenues, make it much more difficult to reverse this troubling situation.

The press release coincides with publication of Academically Adrift, a scholarly indictment of higher education in the United States. Everything I've read about this new book rings true to my experience - not just of higher education today, but for the past 25 years (as mirrored in the Frontline documentary, Declining By Degrees). This cancer has been a long time growing.

Higher education is part of a larger system and an ecology. It is not an industry unto itself. If higher education is failing, then we may safely presume that its feeders - the public schools - are failing too, and of course they are just as miserably.

What about workplace learning? Given the corporate propensity to objectify employees as assets, measuring learning by the numbers, it should come as no surprise that training is in an equally sordid state: almost universally marginalized, underfunded, unprofessional.

All of this is arguably true, yet we live in an age of almost limitless access to knowledge, an age whose tone of youthful exuberance even William Blake could have admired. How can we be so smart and at the same time so stupid?

The question sounds like an oxymoron, but it is more like an anthropological finding about our culture. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert ask the same question night after night, during the most intelligent and yet silly hour in broadcasting. How can we be so smart and at the same time so stupid?

 

Management Reeducation

  

Over the past three years we’ve witnessed the demise of the Imperial CEO, whose irrelevance and wealth exceeded even the Windsors. Now in the Harvard Business Review, columnist Lynda Gratton signals “the end of the middle manager.” As a professor of management practice at the London Business School, she knows whereof she speaks.

How did the pointy-haired boss die? Gratton believes that educational technology killed him, and might yet bring him back in a new form.

She explains that middle managers - though ubiquitous - are not intrinsic to business organization. They are products of a bleak evolution: the de-skilling of the workforce that began with the Industrial Revolution and continued for about 200 years.

Over time, she explains, workers became less knowledgable, less skillful, less proud - and more commodified. They evolved from human beings into human resources, human assets, human capital. Use any term you like, they all have the same objective meaning. In one of my favorite movies they are dubbed replicants.

Thus arose a need for resource, asset or capital management of those former beings - by middle managers whose role is to organize, observe, measure and supervise. By standardizing this hierarchical model, industry adopted the ant colony as its organizational paradigm.

Have a look at E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler's The Superorganism. Would that people were ants!

From time to time great managers have sprung from the lingering master craftsman class - consider Steve Jobs and Jim Dyson among boomers. But most middle managers are not masters of the crafts they steer. They were or aspired to become executives: masters of money whose precise contribution to the value chain has been increasingly hard to fathom. Pointy-haired bosses.

Gratton believes pointy hair will die out because technology is enabling the re-skilling of the workforce and empowerment of workers to become masterful human beings, as they were for most of history. As online laborers in modern times become smarter, more capable, more independent and autonomous - and younger people at least are doing just that - they will not suffer fools as gladly as their parents or grandparents did. 

Gratton knows that her requiem for pointy hair will not be welcomed by real middle managers doomed to extinction, so she sugarcoats her prediction in two bright colors:

1. Invest in acquiring more personal knowledge or competencies in your area

2. Invest in developing personal proficiencies in other, more valuable areas

By learning how to become a modern master craftsman - or just by learning how to do something useful for a change - the pointy-haired boss can reemerge as an expert individual contributor. A far different aspiration than becoming an executive, but given what passes for corporate leadership these days, a far nobler one as well.