organisation
Understandable fear
Collaboration as part of a blended learning package is seldom attempted
Vaughan Waller R
ecently, I was asked to review a one-day classroom-based course to see if a blended approach using technology would produce
a learning experience at least as good if not better. The original course, in time honoured tradition, used a video to illustrate various points and these were then discussed and worked on by the delegates working in teams and their deliberations were then presented and compared. This does not happen with e-learning. When there is only one person working on the course, asynchronously from anyone else, then working together is logistically difficult to organise. The absence of this is undoubtedly detrimental to the learning itself, so it is surprising that with the technology available to us now, collaboration as part of a blended learning package is seldom attempted. There are many reasons for this but most could be overcome if there was a will. This would not need to apply if the e-learning was used as a pre-course to try and bring all delegates up to the same level of knowledge; this usually lops off a big chunk of time from the subsequent time-consuming and expensive classroom element. But the e-learning itself is a solitary and often lonely experience. For this reason the e-learning will, or should be, designed to engage, stimulate and at times even entertain the learner. As everyone knows, the primary attribute of delivering learning in a classroom is listening to and discussing the ideas and interpretations of your peers and thereby learning from them. So bringing in some collaborative elements would change most blended learning programmes for the better. It is common for developers, learners and commissioners to confuse interactivity with collaboration. The former can be interpreted as anything from clicking somewhere on screen to a complex multi-level scenario based question. But regardless of what they are, they are all essential in engaging the attention of the learner and then keeping it. For without taxing the brains of the
e.learning age june 2015
The elephant in the room is the problem of getting buy-in to this combination of learning processes. I am the first in line to rail against mandatory learning and it is worth trotting out the age old maxim again that if someone doesn’t want to learn then they won’t.
learner it is unlikely that learning will take place. Even so, this process is at an individual level and each of us will learn in our own way conditioned by our own knowledge and approach to the problem. On almost any subject, sharing experiences and perspectives from different backgrounds to your own produces completely different outcomes and would be beneficial for all concerned. Neither does this have to be an hour long session since that would be very difficult to justify and organise. This exchange of thoughts and minds was what was promised with the advent of social media in learning but this has not happened in my experience. The main social media platforms are part of our daily lives but they still do not replace the collaboration that you would find in a classroom and the reasons for this are fairly obvious. Our social lives are on those apps and we would not use them to discuss the finer points of an exercise set in an e-learning course. Even an internal system such as Yammer would not be ideal.
But if a question is posed that would benefit from discussion and debate then each individual’s response could be largely prepared beforehand. Then, replicating the team activity that would have happened in the classroom, a nominated spokesperson in the group facilitates a discussion, notes the various responses which are then posted in some commonly accessible place such as a SharePoint site, an e-room or a blog. Just being able to hear, read and think about how others formulate their response to the issue, will open up whole new
vistas on the subject, and as we all know, can be a revelatory learning experience. Many organisations now use Microsoft Lync which makes conference calls, file and application sharing very easy and SharePoint sites can be set up quickly and easily too. The only thing stopping us bringing collaborative elements into e-learning is the understandable fear that no one will do it and the whole investment will be wasted. The elephant in the room is the problem of getting buy-in to this combination of learning processes. I am the first in line to rail against mandatory learning and it is worth trotting out the age old maxim again that if someone doesn’t want to learn then they won’t. So it is always essential to make the case at a personal and a business level for any new learning initiative. The marketing of learning used to be a major topic at conferences but it seems to have fallen by the wayside now. If you can confidently announce that this new course is not the same as all the others, then that is already half the battle. Are we really saying that in this day and age, organising a ten minute conference call to collaborate on a training issue is impossible to realise?
Vaughan Waller is a regular contributor to e.learning age
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