Everything I really need to know about designing effective e-learning, I learned in Comp 101

I spent much of last week attending sessions at eLearning DevCon 2007. As with all e-learning conventions/conferences, the schedule was full of interesting sessions, many of which dealt with new technologies, media, and strategies for providing e-learning to learners.

There were several sessions on gaming simulations, one of the up-and-coming approaches to designing interactive courseware; sessions on using iPods to deliver courseware; sessions on Wikis and blogs and tagging and a number of other new web-based approaches to making e-learning more engaging, interactive, and communal. And many of these sessions had a lot of interesting new information for me.

As I listened to all of these sessions (and more), the overwhelming feeling I had was that I had heard the really important parts before, many times before, a long, long time ago in my Composition 101 course. Running as a common thread through all of the sessions that I attended, as well as the sessions I presented, was a core principle that drives effective e-learning, regardless of technology, media, or strategy. And that core principle is exactly what writing instructors teach in their writing classes.

In a nutshell: Understand your learner (I’ve substituted “learner” for “reader” or “audience,” the terms used by my Comp 101 teacher, but I think it still works).

1. What does your learner already know? Wikis and blogs and tagging are good
   examples of forward-looking approaches to e-learning that are really
   focused on what readers already know and what they need to know.
2. What does your learner need to know? Establishing learning objectives
   is the only way to determine whether what you’ve provided the learner,
   regardless of media, technology, or strategy, has been effective. And
   once you’ve figured out what your learner already knows and what they
   need to know, you can make decisions about all of the rest of the issues
   involved in developing effective e-learning.
3. What’s the best way to get my message to my learner? What is it that
   makes the iPod an interesting technology for conveying e-learning? It is a
   tool that many of our learners already have in their hands, that they
   are familiar with, and that can provide content in ways that make
   sense to them in the contexts in which they actually use the content. The
   iPod is, itself, a fascinating piece of technology, but that alone doesn’t
   qualify it as an effective e-learning technology. The iPod (or CBT, or CD,
   or paper, or any number of other technologies) may or may not be the
   best tool to reach a particular learner at a particular time. But that’s exactly
   what the designer needs to assess.
4. Keep your learner engaged. Once a learner tunes out, nothing else will
   matter. This is what drives much of the layout design, interactivity, gaming
   simulations and similar presentations at conferences. Designers have to
   find ways to keep learners involved in the learning, to keep them moving
   through content, to keep their brains focused on getting from what they
   already know to what they need to know.

I could keep going with examples of how this core principle showed up in all of the sessions that I attended, but I don’t want to beat that horse too long. For me, the most important point is that regardless of everything that’s new in e-learning, the path to effective courseware is paved with very old stone.