Standards - heaven or hell

By Donald Clark, Epic

Learning Circuits, in conjunction with E-Learning Network News, ran a short survey in July 2005. The results are based on 248 responses and it makes interesting reading. Standards, far from having led to a tipping point in the e-learning industry have been accepted by some and ignored by others. It's a messy and mixed story.

The questions they asked were:

1. Do you care about e-learning standards? The majority see them as critical (57%) but the rest see them as pointless (22%), confusing (12%) have never heard of them (9%).
2. Does your organization use e-learning standards when purchasing or developing programs? Less than half use standards (45%) with not always (30%) and not ever at (25%).
3. How many years has your organization been using e-learning standards? 5 years (12.9%) but less than a year up to (41.8%)
4. On a scale of 1-5, how influential are e-learning standards on your purchasing decisions? Nearly 90% see them as important.
5. Which products used by your organization support e-learning standards? Courseware at number one with LMSs/LCMs secondand authoring languages third.
6. How do you decide which standards to follow? Infrastructure and products are leading the way (55%).
7. Are you getting value out of following standards? Yes (58%), not sure (35%) and no (7%)
8. How do you stay up-to-date on new standard releases and documentation? Industry publications, conferences and websites at (50.4%) and in second place standards organisations (32.6%).
9. What best describes you? About 60% private sector, the rest not for profit or education.
10. In what industry is your organization primarily functioning? Reasonable spread across sectors.

OK, so although standards are taking root, are they providing real value for money? 42% are not sure or think not.

Object-ions

There are many in the development community who are somewhat sceptical of standards and learning object theory. One dissenter, reported by Mori Lorimer in Learning Circuits says "Reusable learning objects are incredibly over-hyped." John Hartnett, CEO of BlueMissile, a Minneapolis-based developer claims his clients aren't using learning objects. "The only people talking about them regularly are people who have large systems to sell you."

Reusability itself is a flawed concept, according to Hartnett. "I'm not against the idea of an RLO," Hartnett asserts. "What I am saying is that there are almost none of them out there. Anyone who has the power and budget to generate their own training generally wants what they want, so they don't have to use what someone else built."

On the portability of RLOs, he says, "[It's] just another one of those myths." Despite the standards, system integration is more difficult than vendors let on, he insists. "The reality is that each LMS vendor has its own internal procedures for how to upload, download, virus check, whatever. They are entirely different from each other. Those [system integration] procedures take just as much time to do as it would to just recreate the code. It's not an insignificant amount of work," he says.

As for standards, Hartnett adds, "from the view of the man on the street, they're a big pain in the butt. Most of my clients are doing their best to dodge the issue, so that they can just get on with the business of creating training."

Hartnett understands the arguments that support RLOs. He just doesn't think his typical customer will benefit from them "for several years." He tells his clients that they're far better served by spending money on the front end, on instructional and graphic design, and waiting for the standards to shake out before investing in an enterprise LMS or LCMS.

Hartnett has a point. In fact he has several points. Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) have turned out to be as rare as UFOs. Lots written on the subject, oft discussed, but rarely sighted.

Cognitus interruptus

What's missing from all of this is a serious discussion about the cognitive and learning demand of standards and sequencing, namely 'flow'. E-learning works best when the delivery technology is invisible. This is true of all media. TV wouldn't work if the viewers saw just a box and screen in the corner. Movies demand the immediate suspension of disbelief so that you're unaware of your surroundings in the cinema. The mind must be in a flow of ideas and meaning, not constantly interrupted by a series of odd, mismatched and intrusive events. E-learning works, not when you're aware of the technology and the crudeness of the navigation and the delivery system. The learner must be at one with the content. But far from being invisible, learning object repositories make the mechanics of delivery and learning all too visible.

If you're interested in some of the theoretical underpinnings of this concept read Mihaly Csikentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991). This book and others written by the same author is based on 25 years of research into mental states. It builds on observations of artists, programmers and others who became so involved in the process of painting or programming that they literally forget that time is passing. He claims that it is this feeling of absorption in a task that matters, not fragmented, compartmentalised, formal behaviour.

Csikentmihalyi's calls this state of consciousness 'flow' which is not a form of relaxation but being actively and passionately involved in difficult work. It's a process of being stretched as a learner, programmer, games player, sports person or manager. We like to rise to challenges and it is the narrowing of attention towards a specific goal that gets us both excited and absorbed. It is when we forget ourselves and get lost in activity that we become truly productive. This could also be true in learning.

We would do well to take Einstein advice here, 'What counts can't always be counted and what can be counted doesn't always count.' We become so enamoured with making the structure calculable, concrete and definable that we forgot the original purpose. Learning professionals are not in the business of building massive structural edifices from learning bricks. Their aim is cognitive improvement.

Most experienced instructional designers take great care in making sure that there's no discordance in the experience. They build, highlight, repeat and move through content with great care. There's structure in their design. Nass and Reeves, in The Media Equation, looked at some key qualities in the screen presentation of content. They studied politeness, interpersonal distance, flattery, personality, arousal, voices, image size and synchronicity among many other topics. In study after study they showed that the careful design of content around continuity must match real people and places. We posit social meaning into all of these experiences and when this is constantly interrupted and the mechanics of object presentation appears, the learning suffers.

Alternative views

Google learning

There is actually one great exemplar in learning by accessing objects from disparate sources and that's Google learning. We increasingly find ourselves researching, gathering knowledge and learning through a simple search engine. In fact the Google home page is easily the most successful e-learning interface in existence.

Interesting here is that the learning objects exist in a knowledge base that is dynamically searched, not on the basis of metatagging by learning theorists, but by numbers of hits, embedded text and so on. The knowledge exists in an open system where the standards are not prescribed or even described. They are the subject to the dynamic efficiency of the search engine.

All the internet needed in terms of prescribed standards were URLs, HTTP and HTML. A few extras such as Acrobat reader and some plug-ins and we're off. Do we really need the complexities of the learning standards world when the technology is working with relatively simple, open standards that work on all computers?

P2P learning

In P2P systems, if objects are to be used they must appeal to users. It must therefore be apparent before the object appears that it is of some use and attraction to you as a learner. The naming of the object is therefore vital. The branding and marketing of objects and their presentation will be important.

The objects themselves need to be designed with some care as motivation matters. They must be seen as strong, relevant and well designed. Simply filling up a repository with the detritus of classroom courses - notes, unfinished papers, poor slides, tinny sound files, unedited video and amateurish e-learning content will not do.

Some would argue that we could take this further through viral learning, where the objects themselves become desirable, collectible and spread through word of mouth and word of mouse. This already happens on the web with cool video clips, animations, web sites and pieces of content.

Open resources

Various efforts and manifestos have been published to encourage the development and distribution of free learning resources

Wikipedia is just one of many reosurces now available on the web. MIT's OpenCourseWare project is another. The NSF, DARPA, NASA, and other agencies in the US have, for some time put money and effort into creating such resources. Others include the BBC's online learning resources, Connexions, the Math Forum, the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse (ENC), the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM), the National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Digital Library (NSDL), SMETE.ORG, the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives (NVLM), the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), and the list goes on. We are now entering an age where the drift towards the free is actually happening.

(See Epic White Paper on Open Source and e-learning)

Conclusion

In short, there's little or nothing on the need for learning objects, and therefore much of the standards, as driven by learning theory.

While suitable for knowledge objects, when it comes to more sophisticated forms of learning such as attitudinal, psychomotor and skills, the model becomes at best a launch and track mechanism. This is fine in education and academic learning where knowledge dominates, and the teacher remains the primary form of delivery. It is far more difficult in training, where skills dominate.

One worry, is not the absent debate, but the very real danger that all of this time and effort is being put into driving us up a cul-de-sac. We may be heading in the wrong direction, driven by our search for a learning objects world, an El Dorado that may turn out to be illusory.

Even worse, the learning objects obsession may actually be destroying fruitful progress in the real delivery of real e-learning to real learners. The endless debate around specifications, standards, structures often slows projects down to a snail's pace. Months and years go by while 'digital repositories' are supposedly constructed. At the end of the process a complex navigational system reveals a poorly populated repository with little meaningful content.

The repository ideal promotes the idea that people can just fill it up with their existing notes, slides, images or whatever. You get home grown dumps of information that are often of little actual use to real learners. The DIY dumping of poor content is already apparent in several of the early attempts at digital repositories.

We need to recapture the ground for learning. Learning objects must be, at their core, useful objects of 'learning', entirely fit for purpose. This means identifying a taxonomy of learning objects before you simply deposit every last piece of junk into your repository.