Friday, February 24, 2006

eLearning 2.0: what does the future hold?

Answer: I don't know.

But lots of people are talking about it. Tony Karrer recently asked me to take a peak at his blog located at http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/ and he's been talking about e-Learning 2.0 quite a bit!

For example, he states that e-Learning 2.0 is trending towards: “small pieces of content, delivered closer to time / place of work, and likely delivered in pieces over time as part of a larger program.” I think he is "bang on" in my view. This statement makes me remember back to what the manufacturing sector experienced in the 1980s where much of the sector transformed to a Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory model in order to maximize efficiency. In the future, I see training establishments now moving to more a more effective, e-Learning 2.0, model where staff are delivered training only at the moment they need it for their job performance (i.e. JIT!), that the training be in small pieces that are not intermingled with other less-relevant content, that they receive the training while on the job, via their own workstation, that there be permanent access to the training resources to act as a job aid and that this job aid be centrally updated for all employees in the future should any processes/policies change/improve. To me the job aid aspect of training is very crucial and I think the ease with which electronic materials can be updated centrally lends itself very well to this.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Monday, February 06, 2006

Do instructional designers in the trenches really need to know about things like Web 2.0 right now?

Jay Cross suggested some web competencies that generalist instructional designers should have. A couple of them surprise me because they are very specific technology issues. For example, he lists "Web 2.0" as one issue. Personaly, I am not convinced a generalist instructioanl designer has to worry about Web 2.0 at this time. I think that generalist instructional designers should try to focus on general issues around instructional design and project management, and that they should strive to work within multidisciplinary teams where the computer technologists on the team are well versed on the more specific technology-ladden concepts. I've written about this before. If you'd like to check out Jay's list of competencies, here's the link. Many of them are quite good!