IT’S PAST TIME TO GET WITH IT
March 30, 2016
Rich multi-sensory media — designed for learning — has been with us for more than four decades. Interactive Laser Videodisc (IVD), CD-ROM, DVD, and even interactive videotape were the pioneering technologies. And, today, it’s e-Learning!
Yet, e-Learning is singularly failing to deliver on the promise so brilliantly achieved by those earlier multi-sensory technologies.
Why have the producers of most e-Learning courseware forgotten the lessons of multi-sensory media’s past successes?
Instructional Design (so inherent in the earlier media) has much too often been ignored by e-Learning producers who have turned over their development to conversion technologists.
And that results in converted PowerPoint presentations and re-purposed written procedures — all rooted in words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs.
In other words, e-Information! Certainly not e-Learning!
Worse still, those conversions may transmit limited information (but, only to the half of our population that effectively assimilates anything written above a 4th Grade reading level).
However, they fail to add much of anything to increased skills acquisition or longer retention rates.
Why then, should we continue to sit up and listen to the evolving promise of multi-sensory media instruction?
Because, like it or not, operatives in e-Learning creation have an important responsibility. And that responsibility relates to the large numbers to be educated and trained.
In addition, the instructional-media tools available for e-Learning today offer the best educational and training platforms-for-learning the world has ever known!
The promise of multi-sensory media will only be attained when the e-Learning designer can effectively communicate with the users’ senses — be they sight, sound, or touch.
The human animal remains a sense-taught creature. And, multi-sensory media provides the best platform available for stimulating the senses of a leaner.
It’s past time for the designers and producers of e-Learning to catch up with those brilliant early creators of IVD and CD-ROM!
More on Monday – – –
— Bill Walton, co-Founder, ITC Learning
www.itclearning.com/blog/ (Mondays & Wednesdays)