What I learned at the BYOL eLearning Conference

I just completed presenting and attending the BYOL eLearning conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Having an opportunity to present for the attendees as well as attend a few sessions I had a unique perspective on the conference and came away with a few revelations about eLearning in general.

This is the second eLearning focused conference I have presented at and certainly will not be the last.  I enjoyed the interaction with the others at the conference and enjoyed teaching two Actionscript Sessions and a shorter introductory session on Flex.

However, like the last elearning conference I attended I came away with a slightly uneasy feeling about the state of eLearning and the eLearning “profession.”

These are a few of my thoughts and conclusions about the state of eLearning:

1. eLearning Needs Rockstar Innovators: Social Media’s growth, reach, and innovations can be traced at least partially to several rock star innovators.  These rock stars have thousands of twitter followers, extremely well read blogs and influence over the social media community.  I think of Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, among others as social media rock stars.  They tend to catalyze forward movement, innovation and progress in social media.  Who’s filling this role for eLearning?eLearning seems to be blindly following the lead of social media, trying to integrate tools like twitter, Second Life without the foggiest idea of whether or not these technologies help people learn.  It was almost anathema, in my experience, to bring up effectiveness in sessions at the conference, as if I was spoiling the enthusiasm around the tool– even though the tool might turn out to be HURTING the learners’ experience and learning outcomes.The sooner we have some innovative rock stars cutting a path through the hype and BS the better.  Any volunteers?
2. eLearning Needs Better and More Standards: There are too many vendors selling incompatible distribution systems making it difficult, if not impossible, to move content from one LMS (Learning Management System) to the another.  I think the competition is good and SCORM compliance helps, but SCORM compliance only seems to scratch the surface in the area of standards.In talking with my new friend Matt Stoner at the conference we discussed the need for a standardized XML mark-up to hold learning content.  (Kind of like SOAP messaging– but for learning.)  However, these standards don’t exist– in fact it seems like most developers are simply embedding their content directly in to Flash movies or (shudder) Powerpoint and have no idea about the advantages of encapsulation and reuse.
3. eLearning Needs to Think About Certification Tracks: I have never been a huge fan of certification tracks for programmers, but, perhaps I need to change my tune.  Some type of certifying body would indicate that eLearning people know at least some level of course design principals if certified.  Again, it’s not a solution to all of our problems, but it would, at least, provide some baseline level of competence.
4. eLearning Needs to Recruit from Web Developers and Designers, and degreeded education folks– not Office Administrators: The skills possessed by web designers and developers are similar to those needed for eLearning creatives and production people.  It seems as if many of the people in eLearning did not come from the web production, web creative, or education professional ranks.  Many that I met had eLearning tacked on to their duties in sales, HR, or some other only peripherally relevant department.  Unacceptable!
   
   There are several skill sets involved in creating quality eLearning and these skill sets often require college education, high levels of training, experience or a likely combination of the three.  If eLearning is going to be a profession we need professionals– or at least those willing to acquire the necessary skill sets and not simply seek out tools that cover for their skill deficits.  (I can already see the hate emails on this one!)
5. eLearning Needs to Take itself Seriously as a Profession: This is strongly related to the revelation above about the people entering the eLearning arena.  Corporate training, web development and design, and education are all highly related fields that seem to have been able to make the case to professionalize– There are at least informal barriers to entry to the fields.  However, to be an eLearning professional you simply have to call yourself one.  I’m not saying it should be mandated that you have an distance learning degree or 2,000 hours of apprenticeship, but we need to look at creating professional standards and guidelines in order to stop pretending to be and actually become professionals.
6. eLearning Should not be Designed by “anyone” in Two Hours: More than once I heard smart, educated people at the conference say things like “This tool will let ANYONE create an eLearning course,” or “You can create eLearning in two hours.”  Are we trading efficiency and ease for effectiveness?  How do we know?I would argue that eLearning shouldn’t be created by “anyone,” and certainly not in two hours.  eLearning should be created by professionals and the process of instructional design, planning, asset creation and development, production and distribution should certainly take more than two hours.

I certainly don’t mean this article to be an indictment of the eLearning field.  I do hope, however, it sparks some discussion of what we can do to move the profession forward.  My friend Matt Stoner expressed the hope that one day we “stop calling it eLearning and just call it Learning.”  I think that’s a long way off, but a laudable goal.  A laudable goal that can only be reached by professionals committed to quality and the development of  high standards that are reflective of the quality necessary for eLearning outcomes to be indistinguishable from traditional education.