ETEC 511: ePortfolio

Assignment #2 – Emerging Educational Models in and Age of Exponentially Accelerating Growth

Assignment #1 – Theorizing eLearning Authoring Software

eLearning authoring software is a group of commercial software products used to create eLearning courses, assessments, and presentations for individual self-paced learning often, but not always, for corporate training. Typically this content is published to a learning management system or company intranet and distributed and managed by a learning and development department where data on learner achievement and completion is tracked. Some of the more well-know products in this field are Lectora, Adobe Captivate, and Articulate.

The proliferation of these products in the corporate training market has had a profound impact on the eLearning industry. These authoring tools enable instructional designers and developers to easily construct a flow of information in a generic, slide format that is now recognized as a standard eLearning course. To the delight of those funding online learning, these authoring tools allow developers to construct these courses quickly. The end product typically looks professional as developers can create one standard company template and fit all courses to that template. The content is tightly controlled and developed typically following the ADDIE model (Analyze, Develop, Design, Implement, and Evaluate) still favoured in corporate training development. Learners are then benefited by being able to access their courses individually on a computer without having to attend a physical class.

Courses built with these programs dictate the way students will learn. Students will study the course content in a solitary process. Concepts are spoon-fed one slide at a time and the navigation will encourage students to click through the course in a linear fashion. Although feedback text boxes can be built into the course there is no real opportunity for synchronous discussion or questioning about the content. The assessment structure is based in “one answer only” questions such as multiple choice or true or false.

This description of the learning process with courses built with eLearning authoring tools reflects the dated behaviourism approach to education and is not aligned with contemporary constructivist learning theory that emphasizes the social and humanistic side of learning. Learners of these elearning modules will not engage in critical discourse, problem solving, or the construction of course content – activities so highly valued by educators. Given what we now know about constructivism, why would the corporate eLearning industry come to be dominated by products that completely ignore this learning theory?

Perhaps it is because corporations are not really interested in having their employees actually think about their course content. Paulo Freire (1970) uses a “banking education” metaphor that describes this kind of learning that minimizes creativity and stimulates credulity which would serve a corporation with an interest in avoiding transformation. The automated nature of authoring software products transforms students into mere receiving objects of corporate selected information aimed at controlling thinking and action (Freire, 1970). Thus ensues a style of learning, or in fact indoctrination, that is in opposition to constructivism but so desired for corporate training. The market then steps in by recognizing a need; to enable learning and development departments to quickly and cheaply build eLearning courses that discourage problem-solving, discourse, and human interaction, and in turn, supply an appropriate product.

These software products also remove power and creativity from instructional designers. Designers using these applications are forced to follow a specific format as prescribed by the vendor rather than actual learning needs. The course content adheres to strict navigation rules giving the learner little choice in direction. The software is also complex enough that the learner certainly would not be able to contribute to the development of course content. The material inevitably becomes a series of slides that transmit information piece by piece whether or not each piece is actually relevant to the learner. Learning in this way becomes a lonely endeavor, where the learner is isolated from the real-world context of the content, and isolated from people they may normally work with.

Although these programs can be effectively used for certain situations, corporate learning advisers should use this kind of course content judiciously within a larger learning program, and not rely on these products to define all learning content produced for corporate training.

Reference

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: The Continuum International

Publishing Group Inc.

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