Just what is it anyway?

No one seems to agree on anything... except that no one owns it

Many people have particular ideas about what "eLearning" is. Is it learning that takes place in front of a computer? Learning that is delivered electroncially? Learning via the internet? Multimedia assisted learning? The list goes on and on!

For my purposes, eLearning is something that takes place using a computer... usually connected to the internet. Certainly, that is where my interests lie. It is pretty clear that the internet is here to stay and that it will play a pivotal role in the delivery of learning in the years to come. How that happens is yet to be seen, but one thing is sure... it is going to be interesting!

That being said, I don't believe that the fundamentals of instructional design or of teaching practices will change because of the advent of eLearning. We still need to teach effectively. As an article I had published in Classroom Connections points out, 50,000 years of instructional design can't be wrong.

1. Show them
2. Tell them
3. Let them practice
4. Repeat

Some of the technologies I've got my eye on these days include massively multiplayer online role playing games and learning environments such as secondlife. There is a great deal of potential there. I am also interested in rich media such as video and animation. The entry barrier to this type of content production is much lower than it used to be. Now, anyone with a few hundred dollars can produce video content and deliver it for free via services like youtube or google video. This has the potential to be a very disruptive technology. Once they figure out how to monetize it we will see an explosion of video assisted learning content freely available over the net.

Some of my humble efforts

Examples of work and ideas

This online portfolio of eLearning content will evolves over time. As new content is available I put it here to share it with the world! This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is more representative than anything else.

TeachingFish
This is an community web site I put together for teachers of English. It is an extensive site with a great deal of content. It includes an English grammar, cross-referenced to games and activities for teachers. I built it more as an exercise in learning dynamic web programing than anything else; but as it got going it grew larger and larger. It was successful, a little too successful. At one point it was getting over 1 million hits a month and my hosting costs had risen to $100/month. I simply could not afford to host it any longer and so I pulled the plug. Most of the site is still functional however and can be seen here.

Online Presentations
When you want to teach something you need to present it to your learning audience. If you are going to put presentation content online, you should make it look good. I genuinely feel that design matters and that students respond better to well designed content. Articulate Presenter does a great job of that. Here is an example of a presentation I put together for some of my teaching at HCT. I like to combine presentations of this sort with demonstrations like the one below. That is then followed up with a hands on practice session. This is often called blended learning.

Online Demonstrations
If presenting content is telling them, then demonstrating content is showing them. One of the best tools for demonstrations is video. In this example I have inicluded a demonstration of how to construct branching macros in Microsoft Access. As you will see, by showing rather than telling, the impact is much improved. Typically I combine both presentation and demonstration content in a one-two-punch.

The virtual sandbox

Here is where I play with interesting tools and technologies

I love to play with new technologies as they become available. This area of my site is where I will noodle around with them. It will be more experimental than anything, but it won't be boring!