Moving the Camera

How e-learning can learn some lessons from the entertainment industry.

By Paul Clothier

In 1894 the Lumiere brothers created in France the Cinematographe, which could record and project moving pictures onto a screen. A year later, the brothers held a public screening of their first minute-long film, “Workers Leaving the Factory.” The new medium inspired and fascinated a swarm of creative individuals who began to brainstorm a multitude of wondrous uses for it. The rest, as they say, is Hollywood history.

The evolution of the film industry is worth noting because parallels can be drawn between the moving pictures of the early 1900s and e-learning. For many years, the camera remained fixed while the actors, speakers, and scenes moved in front of it. People were used to watching theater actors move about before them while they sat motionless in their seats. When the new medium appeared, what did everyone do? They took the old ideas they were accustomed to and put a camera in front of them. Only years later did some imaginative individual think, “Hey, let’s try moving the camera as well!” Wow, what a concept.

Cinematography today is vastly different from how it started. It took time to explore the unique capabilities of the new medium and create from there.

Although online learning, in one form or another, has been on the scene for many years now, I contend that we are still in the early days of its development. The mistake that many organizations make is to jump on the bandwagon and shout, “We deliver e-learning on all our products! We are part of the e-learning revolution! Anytime, anyplace, blah, blah, blah.”

Some organizations have done a good job, but in most cases what passes for e-learning has been a crude attempt to turn existing instructor-led training (ILT) materials into Web pages and spice it up with a few cool graphics and so-called interactivity. We are still thinking, often unconsciously, in terms of the classic classroom-style training model and trying to get e-learning to mimic it. We are still keeping the camera stationary.

The traditional ILT model has a lot going for it in many respects, but let’s not try to shoehorn it onto the Web. We need to look at the new medium -- its strengths, its weaknesses, and its unique capabilities -- and start brainstorming from there.

I hear those starting to design e-learning systems throw all their existing training materials onto the Web and say, “We must have some interactivity with a real person; it’s a crucial part of the educational process. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you bought a book only to lament the fact that you couldn’t chat with the author for clarification, wouldn’t you consider that a badly written book? Just because education and learning has been dominated by the “sage on the stage” model for thousands of years doesn’t mean that has to be the only model for learning. Let’s stop comparing e-learning materials and delivery mechanisms to ILT to see if they shape up. E-learning doesn’t need all of the ILT elements to be successful. In fact, if you try to force the ILT model onto e-learning you’ll end up with square pegs forced into round holes.

An instructor friend worked with a software company that taught technical product information to customers using the standard instructor-led classroom method. The students sat and listened to an instructor explain the basics of the product architecture using PowerPoint slides. Then they developed applications with hands-on programming work. Management suggested that the PowerPoint portion of the training be moved online so that the students--mostly developer-geeks-- could learn the basic architecture back at their offices or homes before they flew in for hands-on training. This way they could save time and do more of what they loved -- hacking the code.

This had the elements of a great idea, but the assumption that accompanied the idea was not so great. The assumption was that the text and graphics from the slides could be moved to the Web and then, with the simple addition of some extra text, explanations, and navigation, you were home free.

There’s the root of the problem. ILT materials are different from those required for online learning. Training materials are designed to help push information to an eager mind. Learning materials must be designed to help a learner pull information. Taking existing ILT materials and dumping them on the Web is trying to force the ILT model on e-learning. It doesn’t work.

The materials my friend produced for ILT delivery consisted of basic ideas, bullet points, and diagrams. The slides were nothing more than a skeleton or a structure on which to hang information. The substance of the training was provided by the instructor, who elucidated with background information and examples, and also questioned and challenged the students. The diagrams in the slides enabled the instructor to trace flows with a finger or point to specific elements and highlight details. Like any good instructor, my friend constantly asks questions that clear up confusion and aid understanding. His ILT materials were only meaningful when accompanied by an instructor; they couldn’t, and were not designed to, stand alone.

So what happened? Under a tight deadline, and being new to online learning, he did a basic port of all the existing training materials to HTML pages and added some explanatory text where he felt it was necessary. After four weeks, he had “completed” the project. Management congratulated him and was happy. Then, unfortunately, customers actually tried to use the materials to learn about the product architecture and its capabilities. My friend’s training department got calls and e-mails every day from developers asking for clarification: “What’s the blue dotted line around the interfaces supposed to represent?” “Does traffic flow from left to right or top to bottom in Figure 10?” “What is the purpose of the four functions on page 20?”

When the developers arrived for their week of hands-on training, my friend spent the entire first day trying to clarify the content of the online materials and thus ended up doing just what he used to do -- teaching the basic architectural concepts in a classroom setting. The problem was not that the e-learning medium wasn’t suited to communicating the technical information but that the materials were not written for that medium. They were training materials placed online, as opposed to online training materials. He had a new medium to work with but was thinking inside the box of the old medium. He was keeping his camera still.

So how is one supposed to go about creating online learning materials? Consider two basic things: a) What are the crucial elements, concepts, and information that need to be communicated? b) How can the online medium’s capabilities be used to communicate these concepts and information? Doing this well takes a lot of time, expertise, and resources.

A simple diagram that allows a classroom instructor to point out operation flow is only confusing to an online learner. The flow that the instructor so easily illustrated with his index finger must be shown dynamically in an online diagram -- maybe using color schemes, animation, or streaming audio. Where the live instructor used to say, “By the way, although this diagram makes it look like element A is on top of B, it is actually parallel to it; it was just hard to draw it that way,” we now have the challenging task of trying to communicate this via text, audio, video, or by redrawing the diagram. A good instructor can, and often does, juggle and tap dance with mediocre materials. An online learning system cannot afford to have any mediocre materials; they must stand alone.

The good news is that developing e-learning content forces us to determine instructional objectives carefully, decide which crucial concepts and skills the learners must grasp, and painstakingly create complete materials that carry the full teaching burden on their own. For learning materials to stand alone, for them to be absolutely clear and self-explanatory, content developers and e-learning architects need to spend more time, more thought, more resources than when they produced ILT materials.

Content development is entering a new era because there’s a new medium. We previously could get away with poor content and courseware development with ILT materials -- the instructor could juggle, perform slight-of-hand tricks, punt, or apologize. Online learning materials and content must be light years ahead of the ILT model if we are to leverage the awesome possibilities of e-learning. We need to immerse ourselves in the new media, not drag stale ideas from the old classroom model and try to fix them. We need to start moving the camera.

Paul Clothier, author of The Complete Computer Trainer (McGraw Hill), is an education and training specialist, writer, and speaker. He can be contacted at paulclothier@yahoo.com.
Article used by permission of the author.