|
Bryan Chapman
Session Description (Macromedia UCON99, May 25th, 1999) Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the day-to-day creation of interactive learning that we lose sight of where we are going as an industry. In this session, we’ll take a step back and analyze issues of great importance as identified by leaders in the field of instructional development. We’ll explore the results of a survey in which these leaders were asked to identify our biggest problems and areas of greatest potential. We’ll explore issues such as interoperability standards, the effects of the Internet paradigm shift, shortened development cycles, and where we’re going in the near-term and long-term future. Come ready to attack these critical issues and see how they effect what you’re working on today.
Session LeaderDirector of Instructional Design 240 East Morris Ave., Suite 275Salt Lake City, Utah 84115 Phone: 801-303-2100, ext. 2111 FAX: 801-303-2150 Email: bchapman@paybacktraining.com
What we asked
Question: What do you see as the single biggest problem we’re facing as an interactive learning industry? (Where are we failing?)
Poor Instructional Design: “I think one of the things the Web has done is to bring forth a lot of people who [are justifying] what I think is poor instructional design on the basis of the difficulty of making it work over the Web…What’s happening is that more and more on the Net, we’re pushing exploratory learning. If you already know what you want and you just want a little bit of information to update your skills, exploratory is great. But if you’re training a novice who needs to learn something, exploratory learning is a bad way to go.” – David Merrill, Professor, Utah State University (quoted from LearningOnline March, 1999)
“Traditional training is boring and ineffective. [We should be using] training strategies such as story telling, simulations, and role playing that increase learner interactivity and consequently retention.” – Roger Schank, Author, Virtual Learning
“The ‘Interactive Learning’ industry must focus more on two issues: interactive and learning. The interactions need to be more meaningful and the learning (rather than information) aspect must be primary.” – Ann Barron, Director, Florida Center for Instructional Technology
“We are mostly in what I refer to as the ‘square peg in a round hole’ phase of our implementation of the innovative technologies available to us for learning. By this I mean that we are continuing to try to force everything into our traditional understanding and models of learning. Hence we see distance learning that is mostly a replication of the familiar classroom and ILT models, we see online courseware and CBT that largely replicates familiar paper structures.” – Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies, Autodesk
“The lack of collaboration in the development promise. Since authoring tools never fulfilled their promise of empowering non-technical subject matter experts with the ability to drive the development process, those who know do not drive the process. The advent of the web has not changed that. In fact the priority of information access or quality of content has increased this gap.” – Steve Blumberg, Former Editor of CBT Solutions
“The
biggest problem is that INFORMATION is not INSTRUCTION. Too few people
understand appropriate instructional strategies. Too much of so called
instruction fails to include appropriate practice, appropriate knowledge
structure, and appropriate learner guidance. Too much instruction fails
to be experiential. Too much instruction fails to use the capacity of
the computer to interact with the student via experiential learning
environments based on established learning principles.” – David Merrill, Professor, Utah State University
“Clients still believe that they can learn by being told and the developers are all too willing to give them what they ask for.” – Roger Schank, Author, Virtual Learning
Too Much Focus on Technology: “The biggest problem again is as it has always been, is the focus on technology as some sort of panacea. I remember when laserdiscs were going to solve the problems of the world. Certainly, CBT was heralded that way in the late 80's. The focus is and must always be on content. The web holds a great deal of promise, but the context for the use of technology is critical. The use of technology and the classroom should be complementary not competitive.” – Steve Blumberg, Former Editor of CBT Solutions
“Assuming that it is the learning products alone that will make a difference-- insufficient attention to the challenges associated with independent learning and weak, misaligned organizational systems. Problem no. 2: assuming that the technology blinds students and others to the weaknesses in selection of content and learning strategies.” – Allison Rossett, Professor, San Diego State University
“We are focused on product instead of productivity. By 'product' I am referring to technology in general and our excessive focus on this as the subject, objective and goal of the learning, instead of putting the focus where I believe it needs to be, which is on increasing human performance, both individuals and groups.” -- Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies, Autodesk “As usual, we have become intoxicated by the tools and the glitz of today's multimedia, web-based, and distance learning hysteria. In our industry, commercial aviation, we need pilots who can fly these complex tin birds more safely, with excellent crew-resource management skills; and we need mechanics that can increase the revenue stream by keeping the planes in the air with fewer misdiagnosed faults and less spare parts. Excellent, on-target training is part of the answer, supported by very innovative job-aids to improve human performance. However, we spend too much time creating beautiful 3-D animations, shooting cute videos, simulating everything, and wrapping it all up with wonderful ‘user un-friendly’ authoring tools, only to find out the resulting presentation doesn't really teach much, and it's instructional design lineage is very weak, if it exists at all.” – Ben Drinkwater, Senior Principal Engineer/Scientist, Boeing
“Interactive learning systems usually fail to match learner needs to technology. We fail as an industry every time we congratulate ourselves on projects that get built without understanding what motivates users to learn. It's unfortunate that the difficulty of dealing with the challenges of technology, politics, culture and budget results in inadequate attention to tools and processes that support user research, needs analysis and measurable learning objectives.” – Tom McLaren, Independent Writer, Industry Analyst
Lack of Mass Market Content: "The biggest challenge is CONTENT! We need to get to a critical mass of content, with a wide variety of learning models and UI's to create a sense of there being a real market. This will require INVENTION as well as IMPLEMENTATION." – Elliott Masie, Masie Center
"There is still a gap between the buyer's demands for lots of off-the-shelf on-line learning content and the size of the offerings. Only the IT space has emerging competition, while the other content silos are still pretty empty." – Elliott Masie, Masie Center
Lack of Standards: “There is a need for granular or modular content or Learning Objects. However, while there is much talk about this, the transition to Learning Object models will require a holistic and systemic set of changes, standards, technology support and whole new models for learning, training, performance support, testing and certification.” – Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies, Autodesk
“The
single biggest problem that I see is lack of scalability. Right now,
due to the lack of web-based learning standards, implementors are each
creating isolated islands of learning content that cannot be shared
across systems. These incompatible islands are unable to sustain the
exponential growth that the Internet has enjoyed. This limits the ability
to construct knowledge repositories that can grow over time and reduces
the incentives for investment in learning content.” – Philip Dodds, Past President of
the Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA) “Industry agreement to standards for interactive Web-enabled learning is the biggest issue in the industry today. We need a stable, interoperable environment to move from stand alone components to robust server-based learning systems.” – Judy Brown, Emerging Technology Analyst, Wisconsin Technical College System & PC Week Corporate Partner Director
“We really don't have standards. When working with a client we have to address issues such as bandwidth, plug-ins, browser types, screen size, computer speeds, sound cards, corporate guidelines, firewalls and on and on.” – Darryl Sink, Darryl L Sink & Associates
“The single biggest problem is lack of focus on sustainable effectiveness. This includes effective learning outcomes based on scalable technologies incorporated into an organization through appropriate technical and staff development services, Providing an effective learning outcome is difficult and often expensive given the nascent nature of the industry's technical infrastructure. Those companies that deliver content that makes a difference will succeed. Those that simply take old models and approaches and dump them into the new technologies will face difficult times. Scalability and sustainability require attention to both technical and organizational issues. Using online learning is not just a technical change. It also includes organizational and behavioral change that requires that technical solutions be accompanied by appropriate support services. Services are needed to match needs with appropriate technical solutions and to insure that key constituencies have the appropriate support to make and sustain the transition to new technologies and approaches for learning and content development.” – Steve Griffin, Technical Director, IMS & VP/CTO for eduprise.com
Limiting Technologies (Bandwidth, etc.): “The sobering bandwidth problem that confronted us more than a decade ago when we jumped from analog videodisc to digital CD-ROM persists. Even with 32x CD-ROMs there are bottlenecks… The jump to the Internet, with practical bandwidth limitations for most users at 128kbs and below speeds and speed dependent on such issues as network congestion made bandwidth issues even worse. With the need to ‘load’ pages before viewing, users experience branching to be annoying compared to the interactivity of changing channels on the TV. With poor quality video elements and slow branching responses, users unfairly distrust the content as being amateur. People expect a TV-type experience and we answer with technical justifications of why it can't be that way -- but it could.” – Mark Magel, Digital United, Independent Writer
“We find that web-based training works just fine when your are accessing it from corporate, but a sales rep using her laptop in a hotel room is not able to tolerate the download time of a 10 second video. We want to do so much, but we can't ask the user to spend two days figuring out how to configure a computer so that the training runs as designed.” – Darryl Sink, Darryl L Sink & Associates
Ignoring the Web’s Communication Possibilities: “If we think of the Internet as just another medium we’re sunk…We need to think of the Internet as a container for media and a space for collaboration – just like the classroom has always been for us.” – Valorie Beer, E*TRADE
Expectations vs. Perceived Value of Courses: “Some training managers just don't get it. They think that we create a Word file, add some pictures and then save it to a server. There is an expectation that one person or maybe two are all that is needed to create compelling web-based training. We are asking people without the background or skills (instructional designers) to suddenly become experts in an authoring tool and web programming languages and then expect them to produce high-quality training. Web-based training requires a team approach if it is to be done correctly.” – Darryl Sink, Darryl L Sink & Associates The “One Size Fits All” Syndrome: “We're naive. This is too big a market to be amenable to simplistic approaches; actually, it's probably many markets. We keep talking about it as though there's a one-size-fits-all solution out there. The result is that (the vendors and analysts, at least) confuse everybody with their claims and assertions.” – Ian Richmond, Director of Interactive Learning Division, Macromedia
“Even companies that claim that their authoring tools can be learned in a brief amount of time or just require instructional designers to drag and drop icons in a window to create training are doing a disservice to everyone. Good web-based training is expensive to develop and requires the combination of well-designed content with the appropriate use of technology.” – Darryl Sink, Darryl L Sink & Associates
Need for Smarter Development Tools: “Since there is not sufficient instructional design expertise to meet the demand, we must build tools that have instructional design expertise built-in, that empower subject matter experts by providing tools that know how-to-teach if they provide what-to-teach. Our current generation of tools assume that all users know how-to-teach and this is a false assumption.” – David Merrill, Professor, Utah State University
Little Effort Given to Validate Training Effectiveness: “The majority of us are educators who truly believe in learning as a solution. This faith sometimes blinds us to the practical necessity of making a business case for our products. By this I don't mean cases premised upon learners saving more time, passing more certification tests, getting higher post assessment scores, etc. While these are all-important metrics they are means to the real end of having a demonstrable impact on the performance of the learner. In other words, making a link between our products and learner productivity. In other words, true Level 4 ROI data. Our client's are asking for this. If we as individual companies are unable to provide this data our client's will go to companies that will provide it. Providing this data will address what I believe is the biggest problem we face. It also presents the largest opportunity. I have been quoted as saying ‘If our products do not teach they have no value.’ I would go on to say that ‘If we cannot demonstrate the value of our courses they won't get a chance to teach.’" – Jim L'Allier, Vice President of Research & Development, NETg
Trying to Overcome the Complexities of the Process: “What is the best way to produce and manage these projects? We haven't come to terms with the complexities of creating really compelling interactive web-based training. We expect the instructional designer to do it all. There are various skill sets that need to come together to produce quality web-based training. We need instructional designers to focus on the content. This means instructional designers work with subject matter experts to decompose their expertise and then design the content in a way that ensures that novices can learn and transfer their knowledge to the job. Not a small task! We need graphic artists that create the visuals in the right file format so learners can grasp difficult concepts and principals more quickly than just test can convey. We need programmers who can use the authoring tools and web programming languages to create the multimedia elements that enhance the instruction and result in optimal use of the technology. We also need database programmers that work with the team to ensure that the data that needs to be captured, registration systems that must be developed, and feedback to the learner occurs as is needed. In this client/server environment there is a continual need to monitor and maintain these systems. We also need to work with internal information technology specialists to ensure that what we create can reliably run on corporate servers. Finally, when the web-based training is completed, someone must maintain the site and respond to learners' questions.” – Darryl Sink, Darryl L Sink & Associates
“We make solutions too hard. Companies who have a training need want someone to solve it for them, and using technology-based solutions often requires a lot of effort on the client's part. Companies don't want to have to work with a point product company who provides the tools to build an online course (synchronous or asynchronous), another product company who can provide a management solution, another company who can build custom content (services firm) and still another who can provide off-the-shelf content. I believe true, successful enterprise solutions require working with companies who have an enterprise mix of products, services and content.” – Kevin Oakes, President, Asymetrix Question: What are the greatest opportunities in this industry in the near-term future?
Content, Content and More Content “Mass-oriented training products that allow small companies to get high-quality multimedia product.” – Roger Schank, Author, Virtual Learning
“Low hanging fruit-- higher education, computer skills, new product rollout, 3Rs.” – Allison Rossett, Professor, San Diego State University
“Perhaps establishing an ‘amazon.com’ for competitively priced off-the-shelf training for both hard and soft skills. Currently, ‘learning.com’ leads to an Apple reseller in Michigan and ‘training.com’ comes a little closer to the mark with Ziff Davis's on-line course but nearly all courses have to do with computer skills and not ‘How to Close a Sale’, ‘How to Manage a Budget’, ‘How to get the most from outside agencies’, ‘How to, how to, how to….’ If there were ONE place that I could go and know that I could download a course on ‘Conversational French for the Business Traveler’ or ‘How to Manage a Farm’ for $29.99 a pop, I would bookmark that site and use it!” – Mark Magel, Digital United, Independent Writer
“The greatest opportunity, if technology providers can come to agreement on learning technology infrastructure, is to build an on-line learning industry that is based on great learning content. When the economics of the industry shift from tools and back-end technology to learning content, then investment into knowledge and learning material will take off. All of us will benefit from this, and we may well see true life-long learning become a part of our lives.” – Philip Dodds, Past President of the Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA)
“The greatest opportunities are in the creation of reusable, pedagogically-sound, competency-based curricula which can be catalogued, located and shared.” – Judy Brown, Emerging Technology Analyst, Wisconsin Technical College System & PC Week Corporate Partner Director
Build Courses with Better Design: “Building compelling web-based content provides a wealth of opportunities. Too many web-based courses are merely pages of text, or if they are at all engaging they require the user to download and install a plug-in. Even if the plug-in is widely accepted, it is still a plug-in that requires effort, time and risks potential system interrupts. The individuals or companies who build effective, engaging web-based courses based on industry standards, and no changes to the browser, will have a lot of buyers for their products.” – Kevin Oakes, President, Asymetrix
“Get together with our customers (the real doers, not their training department!) and do an old fashioned needs analysis, tempered with some audience profiling, and search diligently for the answer to the question: ‘What is your vision about what learning and training and job aids will look like in 3 - 7 years?’ Help them get out of their box and dream a little. I think we need a whole lot more of Roger Shank's kind of virtual learning environments, peppered with expert testimony, tribal knowledge implants, engaging stories, and case-based reasoning-driven performance support systems.” – Ben Drinkwater, Senior Principal Engineer/Scientist, Boeing
“Distance
education via the Internet will grow at an increasing rate. The economics
of the situation will force most companies to provide a considerable
amount of their training on-line, at a distance, just-in-time, asynchronous,
etc. This provides a tremendous opportunity to provide the best experiential
instruction that has ever been
Develop and Use Standards: I truly believe that we have a window of opportunity before us for a LITTLE longer, to agree as a community or ‘industry’ to adopt these emerging, accredited IEEE LTSC standards as the foundation standards for all our learning related activities. These standards provide the critical foundation that will be required if we are to every realize our long held visions for reusability, interoperability, manageability, durability, affordability and many other key ‘abilities’ in the world of learning and working. The opportunity/risk is that unless the learning ‘industry’ adopts these emerging standards, the growth curve of the learning economy will continue to grow at its current linear and slow rates instead of the exponential growth that would otherwise occur.” – Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies, Autodesk
“Metadata: the addition of information about the information that is out there and available. Without this availability of these attributes that describe, define and categorize all content we will remain at the very low levels of success in finding and discovering the right information to perform our tasks, acquire and create new knowledge, etc.” – Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies, Autodesk
“The development of standards offers the potential to remove some of the technical impediments that are constraining the growth of the industry. However, we as an industry need to be realistic about the difficulty of developing standards in this area. The learning process is vastly more complicated than describing the layout of a web page (ie. the HTML standard).” – Steve Griffin, Technical Director, IMS & VP/CTO for eduprise.com
“If the ADL tools and standards are there, let's use them, and create an e-commerce environment for developing, and not duplicating, important, instructionally-sound learning objects we can share.” – Ben Drinkwater, Senior Principal Engineer/Scientist, Boeing
“A longer term opportunity is to continue to work on ‘objectizing’ training and using emerging industry standards for defining the metadata structures of these ‘learning objects.’ Creating learning products with this type of architecture and associated editing tools will allow clients to achieve what is now an oxymoron—‘generic customizability.’ In the longer term this architectural movement has the potential to have the greatest impact on the industry as it has the potential for forming the basis of a set of standards that can do for the training industry what IEEE did for the electronics industry.” – Jim L'Allier, Vice President of Research & Development, NETg
Integrated Solution: “Toss out the ‘silver bullet’ theory that presents interactive multimedia as the killer app that will save the planet. This needs to be replaced with an integrated solution that contains both multimedia and instructor led and/or ‘virtual classroom’ components. There is not a lot of multimedia out there that can get you to Bloom levels 5 and 6.” – Jim L'Allier, Vice President of Research & Development, NETg
Ubiquitous Learning Applications: "I see three big opportunities: 1) Technical sales training around product launches, 2) support for learning during e-commerce (for instance, learning about cell phones as part of the purchase process), and, 3) interactive learning that is integrated with knowledge management systems." – Tom McLaren, Independent Writer, Industry Analyst “Do you know that it took over 30 years for the overhead projector to make it from the bowling alley to the classroom?!! Have you been to a bowling alley lately? If not GO SOON if you would like to see some true ‘performance support’ in action. Not only do the systems in the lanes look after all the scoring automatically and display them above you, you also get cheered on by animations and sound with your name, advice on how to make that tough spare, strategies for maximizing your current situation, and so on.” – Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies, Autodesk
Focus on What You do Best: “Focus on specific, solvable, problems. In our case it's what we call ‘mission critical learning’. Our products (especially Pathware) are good at dealing with problems that involve training large numbers of people using self-paced on-line techniques over the web, with fine-grained control over who knows/learns what. We don't have a soup-to-nuts system to deal with any and all on-line learning needs (and even if we did, it wouldn't effectively address all the requirements of all the different markets).” – Ian Richmond, Director of Interactive Learning Division, Macromedia
Customizable Courseware: “Added to that, it would be convenient if the site also offered uncompiled training courses (in Authorware, Director, ToolBook, Quest, etc. native format) which could then be downloaded and tweaked with customization -- ‘XYZ Guide to Employee Relations’ could be made into ‘Magel Manufacturing Guide to Employee Relations.’ In other words, a range of generic training topics that could be customized to look like it was custom made would be well worth the ‘premium’ price of $99 or $199.” – Mark Magel, Digital United, Independent Writer
Dynamic-Adaptive Learning: “Increased profiling of students to provide appropriate content, interactions, and resources on an ‘as needed’ basis via the Web.” – Ann Barron, Director, Florida Center for Instructional Technology
Build a Case for ROI: “Since new lines of business are driving the development process, (biggest increase in titles are in the soft skills area), there will be more accountability in organization for ROI. No sales director or marketing VP will tolerate, bad, late, over-budget stuff.” – Steve Blumberg, Former Editor of CBT Solutions
Performance Support: “Web-based training is but one of many different types of web sites that should be included in a corporate intranet. We are building a knowledge network. As we forge ahead in the 21st century, the focus will be on capturing expertise and corporate intellectual capital and making it available to all. Instructional designers will find themselves working in the area of cognitive task analysis to understand the internal processes that experts use to solve both routine and novel problems. This analysis will lead to high-quality performance support that allows users to access and use the expertise of their experienced colleagues without having to learn by a trial and error approach over extended periods of time. Organizations that understand this potential are already capturing expertise in the form of stories, questions, cognitive mapping, videos etc. especially as they come to realize that this expertise is retiring. The opportunity to build these knowledge networks and the potential for these networks to significantly impact the learning of an organization is tremendous.” – Darryl Sink, Darryl L Sink & Associates
“C - a few great projects, but far from the potential possible”
“I'm a professor. I know how hard it is to grade. Oh, I'd say A- for energy and optimism, C for delivery and impact thus far.”
“First the comment, we don't give 5th grade kids an F just because they can't do postgraduate physics. For where we ultimately want to be we will always be at a D-, but for our ‘grade level’ (the end of the second decade of interactive technology) we are at a B.”
“The technology itself is still complex and expensive, but it is not incomprehensible nor prohibitive and has kept up with Moore's law in terms of performance and should get a B. The tools to create interactive learning are, considering all that they do and the amount of guidance they provide, worthy of an A or A-. The marketing of interactive communication as well as the use and availability of interactive learning is at best a commendable C. Standardization has recently moved up to a C+ with many turf battles still to be fought out in the marketplace. There are thousands of good and bad programs but on the whole I would say that the effectiveness and timeliness and convenience of the learning content should get a B+.”
“From an effort standpoint, I give it a solid B. People in this industry work hard at trying to provide solutions they think their customers want (I say as I type this on a Sunday). There is a lot of effort put in by the employees of companies you and I work and compete with.”
“I don't believe in grades”
“From an impact standpoint, I give us a C. We all thought by now that the use of technology to deliver learning would be much more widespread (it is getting there, but more slowly than anyone would have guessed), and I think the fragmentation of the market has been the major reason for the slowness.”
“EFFORTS = B- as an overall ‘industry.’ Many are indeed making A+ efforts, however overall many efforts are misdirected and many others are taking the ‘wait and see’ approach.”
“IMPACT = C- There is lots of promise and potential, and even some point solutions and case studies that show great impact. However overall, and if measured by the degree of improvement to human performance (or Kirkpatrick levels III & IV), most impact has yet to be realized.”
“Efforts: C, Impact: D+”
“As in the old days of ‘multimedia’, it's hard to determine just who is in the ‘industry’ here. This is a layered cake with many participants (and many grades). Today's interactive learning industry is increasingly web/Internet-based. That means Internet technology companies are playing an increasingly important role.” “Internet technology companies: D (Netscape/MS/ISPs) - learning isn't really on their radar screen as a market...yet.”
“Authoring Tools Companies: B- (Macromedia, Asymetrix, Allen, etc.) - These get a better grade for experience and good intentions, but it isn't as high as it should be because they ‘aren't performing to their potential’ on next generation web-based products. This is partly because they all have legacy products that slow the shift to new, highly scalable approaches, and partly because Internet technologies (e.g., browsers) are still primitive. Also, they resist change from their old business models.”
“The consolidation in the business that has made it difficult for tools guys to compete, the fact that off-the-shelf vendors have expanded their libraries through acquisition rather than quality control, and the fact that market share, not quality of products is driving the industry makes me a little skeptical. . . so I would say B.”
“C- but improving”
“Our Efforts have been gallant. We've created some wonderful stuff. I rate the stuff in the Bs and As. Even in the airplane training business. But, our Impact has been marginal, to the extent we have actually measured it. I rate our effectiveness in the Cs and Ds. Sure, we get nice ‘smile sheets’ from our evaluations, but who knows if our pilots, and especially our mechanics can really perform better on their jobs after the training event? Not to worry you frequent flyers, our pilots pass their ‘check rides’ or they don't fly, but I suspect we could do better. We really don't know if our training helps mechanics find problems quicker and return airplanes to service more safely. Lots of research opportunities exist here.”
“I can't give the industry an overall grade. Web-based training is composed of many industries that must come together. Right now the industry is in its infancy.”
“On the results front, I'd say the industry is probably at about D- to D. There's more hype than substantive value.”
“On the innovation front things are much better, with my rating coming in around a B+ or an A-.” “The market is characterized by dozens of small players, with almost as many business models as companies. I think we currently fall short of e-commerce in this regard, but this will change as people catch on to the enormous potential.”
“On ‘Our Efforts’ I would give us a C+. There is still too much ‘edutainment’ (‘tainment’ is winning over ‘edu’), poor instructional design, and the almost cyclical amnesia that our industry seems to have--forgetting what one generation has learned and forcing the next generation re-make products in the image of the latest technology. Too many re-made wheels here--and bad ones at that. As a learning industry, we have learned little from our history and keep repeating the same old mistakes. There are exceptions. I have seen well designed multimedia training with appropriate assessments. I have also seen dynamic virtual classroom environments growing on the Internet. I have also seen training products based upon researched best practices. There is also a growing sophistication in our clients that can see beyond the gluts to the harder issues of good instructional design and psychometric rigor. We are still too enamored by the technology. When we get just as enamored over content we will have arrived. Our clients are going to force us to get a B on this one. We need to take the initiative and go for an A.”
“Effort has been okay C+. Impact has been far less than it should be C-.”
“On ‘Our Impact’ I would give us a C- for ‘face validity’. Much of what I described as the exceptions in my last paragraph ‘looks good’, but, for the most part, they are not supported by any data that says that they impact job performance. It is very difficult to demonstrate industry impact without ROI data--which is lacking. This is the point that I made in the first question and one that we will all be forced to address. Companies that can demonstrate a link between their products and learner productivity will be given an A by their clients--and they will win the business.” For companies pushing closed, proprietary systems, I give them an F for simply not getting it. The marketplace will reward them accordingly. For the vast majority of the rest of the industry, I would give it a solid B. They are faced with a lot of technical challenges that often thwart good intentions. The industry has shown a remarkable degree of pre-competitive collaboration when it comes to recognizing and working on standards. Question: What is your vision for the future of this industry?
Companies will become “Content-centric”: “I see libraries of high quality product that allow companies to customize for themselves; well trained designers inside big companies who have learned to adapt basic multimedia product to their own needs. The real issue is getting people to know how to build this stuff; it is all to easy to say you know how and to learn the vocabulary of simulation-based learning by doing without actually building quality stuff; the clients need to become better educated about education.” – Roger Schank, Author, Virtual Learning
“As performance support truly becomes a reality for the masses and for most of what we do, the focus of learning will be on the highly transferable skills and knowledge such as problem solving, diagnostics, analytical thinking, team work, etc.” – Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies, Autodesk
“Eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, the economic opportunities for a large scale learning industry will become apparent to participants. Many existing technology providers in this space will learn to change their business models to content-based rather than technology-based. Those who don't make this change will probably die. When this transition begins, the market will ignite.” – Philip Dodds, Past President of the Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA)
“Some years down the road, probably five or more, what we now know as the Internet will have changed in ways we can barely imagine now. Today, training and education is a process that is isolated from daily life, and is an activity that is associated with school or specific work tasks. These are always viewed as a ‘time out’ activity. Even on-line learning from higher education communities has this quality; you have to stop your normal daily activity, take a time out and learn something. In the future I see learning as an increasingly continuous process of doing business and living. I can tell you 15 different topics that I would like to learn about right now but can't (or won't) because the material is too hard to find, to hard to take, or requires a major ‘time out’ to pay for it and receive it. This will change, and with the change will come a new content-centric industry.” – Philip Dodds, Past President of the Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA)
“CONTENT, CONTENT and CONTENT: While there is a lot of interest in new tools for creating and delivering learning, the real interest is in CONTENT. Almost every one of our contacts in major organizations has expressed the immediate need for technology delivered CONTENT in a wide range of topics. Remember, most organizations only home-grow a small percentage of their training. They buy the bulk of it. This pattern is placing a high demand on CONTENT COLLECTIONS. Look for the growth of CONTENT libraries in 1999, form existing learning providers and also new players.” – Elliott Masie, Masie Center
“The custom content market will continue to be challenged. Margins on fixed-price content development services will be slim. It will be difficult to survive with this as the (only) core competence” – Ian Richmond, Director of Interactive Learning Division, Macromedia
“The
commercial content market will be transformed with an explosion of niche
players with depth in a variety of topics and a realization that ‘content’
can no longer be static and must incorporate community.” – Ian
Richmond, Director of Interactive Learning Division, Macromedia Standards and Learning Objects “I see standards, if they ever get agreement, playing a big part in the ‘interoperability’ of the necessary components to learning via technology.” – Kevin Oakes, President, Asymetrix
“I have had a long standing vision for an equivalent of ‘LEGO blocks’ in the world of learning content and information. I won't belabor the vision, but an epiphany I had with my own kids as they played with LEGO blocks led to my vision of having their equivalent characteristics of reusability, construct/deconstruct, making new assemblies with no new creation of ‘content’ or blocks, catering to all learning styles, etc. Primary of the ways this occurs is through the absolute adherence to the LEGO standard of their ‘pin size’ which largely makes this all possible.” – Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies, Autodesk
“The days of lengthy ‘courses’ are numbered. The web teaches us that information can be accessible instantly at the moment of need - so the paradigm of the hour-long lecture is shifting to the ‘2-minute infonugget’ approach. You've heard this before, but content is now being chunked into much smaller, reusable pieces that can be accessed just in time, and provide learning that is just enough, not just in case.” – Kevin Oakes, President, Asymetrix
“One
of the primary results of this vision is that everyone would truly have
continuous performance improvement with the ‘right stuff’: having the
right information, in the right amount, at the right time, in the right
way and in the right context.” – Wayne Hodgins, Director of Worldwide Learning
Strategies, Autodesk Live Synchronous Learning: “At some point, price and bandwidth will not be the issues and we'll have to confront more of the ethical questions related to a ubiquitous and constant two-way communication between the individual and ‘the world’ at the other end.” – Mark Magel, Digital United, Independent Writer
“Collaborative online learning - where peer-to-peer as well as instructor facilitated learning exists in a sophisticated distributed computing environment.” – Tom McLaren, Independent Writer, Industry Analyst
“For
K-12, I see engaging, accurate, and up-to-date worldwide learning experiences
for teachers, students, and parents. For Higher Education, I see effective
alternatives and enhancements for traditional classes that utilize the
full capability of multimedia delivery and collaboration.” – Ann
Barron, Director, Florida Center for Instructional Technology Everything will be an EPSS (Electronic Performance Support System): “There
will be no such thing as training . . .certainly no training departments.
A few large vendors will support all the information needs within organizations.
These information objects will be accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Technology will be the driver of new business practices and no one will
have time to be trained. Intrinsic Performance Support systems will
replace the concept of training.” – Steve Blumberg, Former Editor of
CBT Solutions Enterprise-Wide Learning: “It is an enterprise solution approach that weaves products, services and content together seamlessly for the end-user so that adopting a technology-enabled approach to learning is much easier.” – Kevin Oakes, President, Asymetrix
“The industry (a debatable domain) has the potential to revolutionize the way people develop and perform. MBAs are happening online. Teacher training too. General education classes as well. And companies are aware that technology is a great way to rollout new products and ideas in vivid and updateable ways. Thus, our industry makes a compelling business case. But that's in the abstract. In practice, it remains to be seen. Success will be based on all the elements associated with success for any enterprise, not just great learning objects, as fascinating to me (and us) as those objects are.” – Allison Rossett, Professor, San Diego State University
“Training
is still not seen as a strategic tool in most organizations. With the
emergence of large enterprise-wide management systems (PeopleSoft, BAAN,
SAP, Oracle, SABA, etc.) companies are starting to track and keep stock
of their human capital. Likewise, they also see the link between training
and appreciating that capital. What still is missing is the ROI data.
When that link is made training will move from the ‘nice to’ to the
‘need to’ column and become a strategic tool for aiding the organization
in the attainment of its business goals. When this happens our industry
will call the coming era the ‘golden age’ as no company will be able
to survive without the training that will make it learn faster than
its competition (to paraphrase Peter Senge). To meet this challenge
our industry must demonstrate ROI, value and use best practices of instructional
design, provide designed (not design by afterthought) integrated solutions,
provide the flexibility of ‘object’ technology, and adopt metadata standards
that will allow tracking, management, and deployment by a variety of
enterprise management systems. For those companies up to the task it
will indeed by the ‘golden age’, for those who do not, it will be both
their ‘dark age’ and demise.” – Jim L'Allier, Vice President of
Research & Development, NETg Smarter Development Tools: “Learning templates not just interaction templates. Instructional transactions not just programming macros. Parameters that enable a very wide variety of transactions to be configured at the touch of a button.” – David Merrill, Professor, Utah State University
“We need authoring tools that are authoring tools not just packaging tools. We need authoring tools that embed instructional design rather than assume that the user has the necessary design skills. We need tools that enable the development of experiential instruction that is equal to the best that is being experimentally demonstrated in a few research centers. We need tools that will enable this development of highly effective experiential instruction with an order of magnitude less effort than is the case with our current generation of tools. Who will accept the challenge to move beyond "frame-based" programmed instruction and provide the next generation of authoring tools?” – David Merrill, Professor, Utah State University
Cooperative Efforts between Education and Business: “I
think we are also seeing more cooperation between higher ed. and corporations
in this space - starting to leverage the great content and branding
from educational institutions with the infrastructure that businesses
have set up. This cooperation will be more and more visible in the future.”
– Kevin
Oakes, President, Asymetrix Self-Adaptive Learning “I often use the example of a sign I once saw in a print shop -- ‘Quality, Service, Price. Choose any 2’ Today in learning, we have much the same with ‘Content, Mastery, Time. Choose any 2’. With the assistance of technology and individual needs assessment we finally will have individualized learning capabilities. It's not ‘just in time’, but ‘just for you’ learning that gets me excited.” – Judy Brown, Emerging Technology Analyst, Wisconsin Technical College System & PC Week Corporate Partner Director
“Adaptive
instruction that monitors not only student performance but student aptitudes,
learning style, etc, and modifies the instruction to meet the learning
needs of an individual student during the learning, in real time.” – David Merrill, Professor, Utah State University Virtual Reality: “My vision for the future of the training technology industry includes a slow shift toward a virtual world, where learning will be exploring in a safe, interesting, and task specific world. Our stand-up instructors and SMEs will become the tutors and pop-up mentors and wizards in these learning worlds. They will create the exploration experiences, and serve as pointers to events that are important to notice.” – Ben Drinkwater, Senior Principal Engineer/Scientist, Boeing
“A few years down the road, I think that the 80s hype about virtual reality will finally become more of a reality and learning programs will benefit greatly from very realistic synthetic environments and simulations. This will probably involve glove and glasses apparatus but with multiple uses and widespread popularity these could be as inexpensive as a Sony Walkman. Parallel to this, 3-D holographic tabletop presentation may be introduced in addition to the flat 2-D screens.” – Mark Magel, Digital United, Independent Writer
Training will be viewed as just “part of” the total solution: “Web-based training will come to be viewed as part of a training solution -- not the total solution. This means that some of the content of training will be presented over the web, other content may be in a CD-ROM format, print based, classroom based, interactive video, or on-the-job training with mentors. There is a place for web-based training, but I don't believe that web-based training will ever be used exclusively. I believe corporate intranets will include some web-based training, but will use the web more for performance support than for strictly training.” – Darryl Sink, Darryl L Sink & Associates
Easier Access to Online Learning “I
see the continuation and expansion of the turmoil generated
by a new marketplace (online learning) with a lot of new companies coming
to the table, a lot of innovation in best practice, etc. This will be
disconcerting to the user community, but will provide them with a lot
of alternatives. Then, there will be consolidation as we (users and
vendors) get smarter about what and who are the better solutions. All
of this will lead to a fundamental and beneficial transition to a learning
society based on the convenience of online learning. It is an incredible
opportunity and honor that we all have to participate in this transition.
We should all be dedicated to insuring that all of our fellow citizens
have access to the outcomes of our efforts.” – Steve Griffin, Technical Director,
IMS & VP/CTO for eduprise.com The Quality of Learning Improves: “The technology and learner expectations will be driven by the computer gaming and motion picture industries, and the Nintendo/MTV generation. Learning and job performance will be enhanced because excellent instructional systems designers and performance improvement systems engineers will, finally, get their way with content...because their MBA partners have built a clear business case with operations and upper management, showing how these learning events clearly improve the profitability of the enterprise.” – Ben Drinkwater, Senior Principal Engineer/Scientist, Boeing
List of Problems:
· Poor Instructional Design · Too Much Focus on Technology · Lack of Mass-Market Content · Lack of Standards · Limiting Technologies (Bandwidth Limitations) · Not Enough Time to Do Anything · Ignoring the Web as a Communication Media · Expectations vs. Perceived Value · “One Size Fits All” Solutions
List of Opportunities:
· Content, Content and More Content · Courses with Better Design · Develop and Use Standards · Ubiquitous Learning Applications · Focus on What You Do Best · Customizable Courseware · Dynamic-Adaptive Learning · Build a Case for ROI
List of Future Visions:
· Companies Become More “Content-Centric” · Standards and Learning Objects · Live, Synchronous Learning · Everything Becomes an EPSS (Electronic Performance Support System) · Enterprise-Wide Learning · Smarter Development Tools · Self-Adaptive Learning · Virtual Reality
|
Through
the Eyes of Visionaries:
What
is the jaycross@InternetTime.com