E-Learning Today: Strategies That Work

by

Associate Professor Dr. Toh Seong Chong Centre for Instructional Technology and Multimedia Universiti Sains Malaysia

Abstract E-learning, Cyber Learning, online learning whatever jargon you call it, the ubiquitous marriage of the World Wide Web and education has permanently altered the way we learn, live and work today. Yet to date, only a handful of papers or literature has addressed the new challenges or attempted to guide the interested professionals in how to formulate strategies that work. This is written to address the need, that is: to help those involved in paper the design and development of e-learning to chart a course through the sea of elearning today. It is a crystallization study of six critical strategies that will e-learning work today and in the foreseeable future. The paper is help based authors personal and professional experience in conducting on the numerous the industry and in designing various e-learning courses in projects in the university. It focuses on various successful strategies to overcome issues like learners preference; good design; rapid prototyping ; management cultural issues and successful participation; partnership. Introduction With the advent of e-learning methodologies and technologies, many educational are beginning to view the world as their market. John Chambers, institutions Cisco Systems CEO, states that two great equalizers in life are the Internet and education. economic potential of marrying Internet and education, a variety of sites Sensing the have recently sprung up offering training in everything from end-user computer skills to engineering expertise. In spite of all the hype, are the proliferating cyber courses harbingers of a new age in learning or just another overstatement of the expectations that nearly everything associated with the Word Wide Web? Does ehave surrounded learning offer a potential opportunity to cost-effectively build the skills required for the knowledge-based economy of this century? Part of the answer depends on the quality of the instruction delivered in e-learning products that are designed, built and selected today. e-learning? What is Perhaps the most comprehensive definition of e-learning comes from Clark and Mayer They define e-learning as instruction delivered on a computer by way of (2003). CD- Internet or intranet with the following features:ROM, 1

Includes content relevant to the learning objective Uses instructional methods such as examples and practice to help learning Uses media elements such as words and pictures to deliver the content and methods Builds new knowledge and skills linked to individual learning goals or to improved organizational performance. This definition is comprehensive because it has several elements concerning the how, and why of e-learning. what, What. e-Learning courses include both content (that is, information) and instructional methods (that is techniques) that help people learn the content. How. e-Learning courses are delivered via computer using words in the form of spoken or printed text and pictures such as illustrations, photos, animation or video. Why. e-Learning courses are intended to help learners reach personal learning or perform jobs in ways that improve the bottom line goals of objectives the organization. In short, the e in e-learning refers to the how - the course is digitized so it can be in electronic form. The learning in e-learning refers to the what - the stored course content and ways to help people learn it and the why that the purpose includes is to individuals achieve educational goals or to help organizations build skills help related to job performance. improved
The primary justification for e-learning is that it can, with great efficiency, help organizations achieve success by enabling people to do the right thing at the right time. The purpose of the is to bring both management and e-learning application designers to a common paper point of understanding about good e-learningits attributes and development processes that can work any organization succeed. The author weeded out the hype, the fads and the to help maybes seven core strategies that will help e-learning work today and in the to distill foreseeable future. Strategy 1: Cater to the Learner. The success of e-learning depends on the learner using the learning and improving from it; all else is secondary. If good user interface

design is everywhere, it is critically important in e-learning. Why? It is a important daunting to get people to change their behavior, values as well as acquiring challenge knowledge and developing new skills. To succeed, it is important to gain a high percentage of the users attention. One important strategy is to ask ourselves whether in developing elearning courseware, are we focusing on content-centric design or learner-centric design? Content-Centric Design: Content-centric design typifies many e-learning applications. Here, the focus is on the delivery of content (informationbased definition) and to judge training applications by how thoroughly they present information. It is not surprising that they do because logically it seems more important to convey to learners all the things they need to learn. The problem is, however, that building skills and changing behavior is rarely wellachieved 2

through presenting content; even being very thorough, doesnt necessarily achieve the desired learning outcomes as much as it creates a dreadful boring marathon. Content-centric design risks giving too little running critical attention to essential attributes of the learners experience. It often looks at structuring and sequencing from the subject-matters experts content point of view, rather than from the learners point of view. Content-centric designs can real turn-ff for anyone. Consider the following example in teaching be a a hemistry Lesson on The Periodic Table using this approach. It will have C pretest, menu, glossary and navigation buttons. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Content-centric Menu Learner-Centric Design: Learner-centric designs focus on creating events that continuously intrigue learners as the content unfolds. By providing tasks of approachable difficulty, you challenge learners to figure out on their own. they do, they are rewarded. When they cant, aids are available. When The diagram below shows an interactive screen on this design when teaching the Periodic Table. When the learner clicks on the interactive buttons, the properties of the elements are displayed on the side. See Figure 2.

Fig. 2: Learner-centric Design in the teaching of the Periodic Table. After they complete tasks, learners are asked to put new skills and understandings in perspective. This might be done through a subsequent task requiring integration of multiple skills or tasks in which learners must choose appropriate procedures. Repeatedly, learners are shown how each advance is a step towards realization of an important and attractive they make goal. Allen (2003), suggested a simple approach to build leaner-centric design:Determine the learners initial competencies and then build on them. Chunk content into a map of meaningful, performance-related events. Advance in steps meaningful to the learner, but not so gradually as to present no challenge or sense of reasonable progress. Allow learners to attempt almost any task at their request, including are probably too difficult; this can help to those that identify undeveloped abilities that learners can pursue. Allow learner-controlled review at almost any time. Strategy 2: Orchestrate Good Design Excellent e-learning is a treasure that pays for itself over and over again. Each positive experience energizes, focuses and enables yet another learner to be both more individually successful and more able to contribute to the organization. Unfortunately, many traditional instructional design principles are either misapplied or used in justification of designs that simply do not work. They should be abandoned.

Horsepower approach versus God Design Approach Excellence in e-learning does not come from the fact that it employs advance or powerful technology for delivery, but rather from how e-learning uses available the purposes to which it applies them. In other words, it media and is instructional design that determines the excellence of any instructional experience, of delivery technologies. not the use Good design, not the latest delivery technology, is essential to success. Good elearning design is good because it effectively uses available technologies to make learning happen. As Allen (2003) puts it aptly, It is the design that will make the experience boring or inspirational, exhausting or energizing, meaningful or meaningless. It is the design that creates value from the potential it offers. technology Based on our experience at the Center for Instructional Technology and Multimedia, USM, in designing numerous multimedia courseware, designing successful and effective courseware comes from doing the following three things and doing them well: Set the Scenario to Ensure that Learners are Highly Motivated to Learn Provide Guidance to Learners to Appropriate Content Provide Learners with Meaningful and Memorable Learning Experiences

Set the Scenario to ensure that Learners are highly motivated to Learn The concept of motivation is certainly not new to the literature of learning and instructional design (Keller and Suzuki 1988; Malone 1981), but, unfortunately, explicit treatment of motivation into e-learning design is and far in between. Motivation is critical for learning. If motivation few to learn is low, very little learning will occur. If motivation to learn is high, learning will occur even if instructional materials are poor. Towards Allen (2003), offers seven magic keys to motivating ethis end, learning. of this paper has used several of these keys implicitly The author in designing numerous coursewares, but is grateful to Dr. Allen for articulating them so well. The seven magic keys are:1. Build on anticipated outcomes. Rationale: This helps learner see how their involvement in the e-learning will produce outcomes about. they care

Example of a More Motivating Objective Statement:Instead of Saying After you have completed this chapter, given a list of possible e-learning components, you will be able to list three essential components of high-impact e-learning. You Could Say.. In a very short time, say about two hours, you will learn to spot the flows in typical designs that make e-learning deathly boring and you will know some ways to fix them. Ready?

2. Put the learner at risk. Rationale: Put learners in decisionmaking scenarios immediately. Once learners have something to lose, they pay attention. 3. Select the right content for EACH learner. Rationale: If the content is meaningless or learners already know it, it's not going to an enjoyable learning experience. be 4. Use an appealing context: novelty, suspense, fascinating graphics, humor, sound, music, animation. Rationale: Adding humor to e-learning tends to alarm human resource professionals. does not mean humor need be abandoned. Do However, that what you would do with other content: establish appropriate workplace humor, write it carefully, review it, put it before users, ask for feedback, and modify as necessary. 5. Have the learner perform multi-step tasks. Rationale: In the real world, who validates you for doing one small part of a process? Nobody congratulates you on opening up Microsoft Word. Nobody. Most times you don't get validation until you finish a series of tasks and then show someone else. 6. Provide intrinsic feedback. Rationale: Seeing the positive consequences of good performance is valuable; feedback stating "Yes, that was good," doesn't tell you why it was good or what was about it. It doesn't help you learn the criteria for good good performance. 7. Delay judgment. Rationale: If learners have to wait for confirmation, they will typically reevaluate themselves while the tension mounts - essentially reviewing and rehearsing! And what's the downside to reviewing and rehearsing? None. Guiding Learners to Appropriate Content Highly motivated learners are eager to get hands on anything that will help them In response to this motivation, it is important to provide learn. appropriatea timely manner, before the motivation material in wanes.

Providing Meaningful and Memorable Learning Experiences Motivation and good materials are sometimes not enough to enable people to the necessary level or to ready them fast perform at enough. Meaningful Experience If a learner doesnt understand, then that learner will not gain from the experience. This is instructional failure. Designers of single-channel deliveries for multiple learners, such as classroom presentations, must whether to speak to the least able learners or target the decide average The approach often results in many learning learner. casualties. Furthermore, if learners dont see the meaningful implications of learning prescribed tasks, such as the tasks applicability to work they do the advantages of new processes over the ones they currently use, or the learning experience is also likely to be of little avail. Well-designed e-learning has the means to be continuously meaningful for each learner. It can be sensitive to learner performance, identify need and readiness, select appropriate activities, and levels of engage in experiences that are likely to be learners meaningful. Memorable Experience Time spent in training is expensive to employers. It is not usually the of training to simply give workers some enjoyable time off, only goal to return to the job with no improved abilities. They following are strategies to make e-learning memorable: Interesting contexts and novel situations Real-world or authentic environments Problem-solving scenarios Simulations Risk and consequences Engaging themes Engaging media and interface elements Humor

Strategy 3: Adopt Rapid Prototyping of Courseware Method The traditional instructional systems design (ISD) is sometimes referred to as ADDIE method for its five phases, namely, analysis, design, the development, and evaluation. It is also classified as a waterfall implementation methodology, is no backing up through its five sequential phases or steps. because there See Figure 3.

Figure 3: the ADDIE method The experience of the author in the course of developing numerous elearning applications is that this method has been far from satisfactory. The problems experienced included:Teachers do not have the luxury of time to develop useful courseware from scratch. Experience shows us to develop a 20 minutes courseware, we need at least 300 hours of development time. Considerable rework and overruns. Often times, subject-matter experts could not agree on the instructional application in any meaningful way until after implementation had been completed. Contention among team members because each would be visualizing something the process moved along, only to discover this fact when it was different as too to make any changes. late Boring applications results. This could be due to constraint of not being able to explore alternative designs, because the execution of ADDIE steps requires some of finalization if any. degree Fortunately, a viable alternative to ISD exist. David Merrill called it the ID2 method Instructional Design and Development Method, Allen (2003), called it (1993) the Successive approximation method. The author called it the Rapid Prototyping method. in this method, a prototype is first developed. Then through a process Basically, of iteration, improvements are being made in the creation, design and evaluation of the prototype until the courseware becomes very compelling and motivating. Using this method, the author has successfully assisted numerous teachers to create someinteresting and effective e-learning applications. Functional prototypes are very first to the teachers, and they are encouraged to expand and further improve on given them through the iteration process. The author also used this method to create commercial elearning applications for several multi-national electronics corporations in Malaysia. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: A three-iteration application of Rapid prototyping method (used with permission from Allen ,2003). Strategy 4: Management participation According to Allen (2003), organizational leaders can provide the financing for training development and assume that their involvement is done, but this is often a handicapping mistake. Management needs to provide not only the financial support but also continuing help to clarify the vision, define success criteria and provide a performancecentric environment. He succinctly describes the management team as one of the two main in the bridge of a successful e-learning program. See Figure pillars 5.

Figure 5: Successful e-learning paradigm The design teams challenge is to provide a strong matching pillar. After defining appropriate behaviors to enable designers begin by creating ways to ensure high levels of motivation. They then make sure that the enabling instructional content is learning clear and accurate, as a base on which to evolve meaning and memorable learning experiences. Both pillars are needed to achieve success in e-learning, although designers often struggle for success without much support from management. 9

Shea-Schultz (2002), provides very useful tips on how to get top-down commitment towards e-learning initiatives. She crystallized them as follows: 1. Make the business case for e-learning. 2. Weave online learning throughout the enterprise. 3. Publicize/communicate the new opportunities. 4. Foster a learning-friendly environment. 5. Focus on business results.

Strategy 5: Think Globally; Learn Locally When designing or delivering e-learning to international audiences, be sure you are familiar with every nuance of their language, culture and customs. According to Badrul Khan (1997), with respect to the interface design and cultural issues related to designing for a cross-cultural population, consider these e-learning questions: 1. To improve cross-cultural verbal communication and avoid misunderstanding, does the course make an effort to reduce or avoid the use of idioms, ambiguous or cute humor, and acronyms? We should jargon, avoid jokes or comments that might be misinterpreted by some. For using example, in we use the thumbs-up sign to challenge people, but to Bangladesh, other cultures, that means you did well. 2. To improve visual communication, is the course sensitive to the use of navigational icons or images? For example, a pointing hand icon to indicate would violate a cultural taboo in certain African cultures direction by representing a dismembered body part. Right arrow for the next page may mean previous page for Arabic and Hebrew language speakers, as they read from to left. right 3. Does the course use terms or words that may not be used by worldwide For example, people use the term "sidewalk" in the US audiences? and "pavement/footpath" in the UK. When such a term is needed, we should include both forms for a diverse audience (e.g., Students should use the sidewalk [or pavement] rather than trample the grass.). 4. Is the course offered in a multilingual format? Since text found in buttons or icons is harder to change, it is better not to include text within graphics when the e-learning content may be translated into other languages. Unless we exercise awareness and care, our e-learning offerings may be misconstrued, or otherwise missed altogether. For example, consider a few misinterpreted, recent missteps that some big-name American companies have made in crosscultural communications.

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The Coca-cola name in China was first read as Ke-kou-ke-la, means Bite the wax tadpoleor Female horse stuffed with wax, depending on the dialect. Coke had to research over forty thousand characters before they found a equivalent ko-kou-ko-lemeaning happiness in the mouth. phonetic Pepsis Come alive with Pepsi Generation translated in China Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave Frank Perdues chicken slogan, It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken, into Spanish as It takes an aroused man to make a translated chicken affectionate. Here are five guidelines for achieving success with global learning: 1. You must see everything through global lens. Examine your global participant base by carrying out needs assessment. 2. Get someone with expertise in maximizing learning across multiple cultures. 3. Maximize participation of diverse peoples as much as possible by way of accelerated learning techniques. Bear in mind that 75 percent of the audience on the Net is from non-dominant and/or hierarchical cultures; that is, they tend to shy away from dominating conversations or speaking out individually. To overcome this barrier, we can use written communications (whiteboard) rather than verbal, and break larger online into smaller ones. groups 4. Speak to people in their real-world situation, and be careful not to do it all toward any one cultures norms. One example is the communication breakdown around slang, acronyms, jargons and jokes. They hinder in any environment but absolutely put the brakes on learning learning in e-environment. an Strategy 6: Partner with Purpose and Passion A strategic alliance means that the two partnering organization are involved in something that is of deep importance to both. It is an on-going operating relationship. Strategic alliance has to create a situation where both parties gain something; otherwise, theyre not partnerships. Too often, an entrepreneur asks the potential partner for an endorsement in return for putting the partners logo on the companys Web site. Thats not strategic. The following are tips for successful partnerships:Build on trust. Strategic alliances are all about relationships because they are on trust, dedication and common interests. built Ensure involvement at the top leadership. If the top management teams in both organizations just pay lip service and arent supporting the goal, then it is not strategic. The point of any strategic alliance should be to make an impact, and you do that without the active engagement of the top people of the cant organizations involved.

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Make a promise. Each party has to be prepared to dedicate resources to each other. For example, each party should devote staff positions to work with the party. Partners should assign skilled and competent people to ensure other success of the partnership. Be patient. Strategic alliances take time to develop and time to maintain (Rogers, 1995). According to Rogers (1995), a typical innovation takes about 5 years to mature. Passion. Above all else, the solid, bedrock foundation of a successful partnership is passion. This comes soaring from the heart and spark passion in others; it is reciprocal. Once partnership has a shared vision whether it is content author or guru real passion for perfection can result. multimedia Porcupine Partnerships that you should avoid According to Hea-Schultz (1995), porcupine partnerships are those alliances that are all and quills. They often begin with great promise only to become needles prickly, problematic and just plain painful. Although the product or service supplied may be needed, nevertheless the agony of dealing with the vendor or people involved outweighs or profit. To avoid these painful partnerships, here are a few the pleasure checklist that you can ask before entering into a positive questions partnership: Can I call a customer with the letter T at the start of their name for a reference? you get comments from average customers, not just the fan This will help club. How long is the half-life of this technology or product? In other words, how will there be an upgrade, revision or change? If so, what will happen to soon my investment then? What are other developments that might impact the use of the technology? Ask to be honest about other emerging technologies and how they might them replace the product under consideration. or impact What is the learning philosophy of this product? What are the primary competitors of this product? We should see whether the potential partner can articulate the difference between his products and his competitors. If he says there arent any competitors, use the old eyebrow raise. Conclusion E-learning has already begun and will continue to alter dramatically all institutions, including universities and colleges. Are we ready for it? As institutions successfully stages of e-learning from presence to integration to transformation navigate the and, to convergence substantial opportunities will become available for finally, students, faculty, staff and other constituents. Benefits will include improved and expedited services, reduced cycle time, increased process efficiencies and expanded access forBut threats will loom large, because failure to provide competent and students. efficient functionality will result in competitive disadvantages for institutions. e-learning If institutions are unable to connect key constituents and provide on-line services efficiently, someone else will be ready, able and eager to do so. Towards this end, a judicious usage

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of effective and efficient e-learning strategies by designers and managers is critical of success to the institution.

References
Allen, M. W., (2003). Michael Allens Guide to E-Learning . NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Clark, R. C., and Mayer, R. E., (2003). E-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning. CA: Proven Pfeiffer. Everett M. Rogers, 1995, Diffusion of Innovations (Fourth Edition), NY: Free Press. Keller, J.M., and Suzuki, K., (1988). Use of the ARCS Motivation Model in Courseware Design. In D. H. Jonassen (ed.), Instructional Designs for Microcomputer Courseware, pp. 401-424. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Khan, B. H. (Ed.). (1997). Web-based instruction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Malone, T. W. (1981). Towards a Theory of Intrinsically Motivating Instruction. Cognitive Science, 5:333-369. Merrill, M. D & ID2 Research Team (1993). Instructional Transaction Theory: Knowledge Relationships among Processes, Entities, and Activities. Educational Technology, 33(4), 5-16. Shea-Schultz, H., & Fogarty, J., 1995. Online Learning today: strategies that work. CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

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