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Introduction
We are at a critical
moment in the evolution of e-learning. After many years of development,
e-learning has become an important business process for corporations, which are
now exploring how to better educate and manage their employees who rely on
fresh knowledge to perform.
E-learning is also at the top of the agenda of public and private
universities, which are looking for ways to extend their influence and reach
new types of customers. And e-learning has attracted the attention of the
investment community as companies have emerged to capture market opportunities
in technology, content, and services.
Despite all the recent
activity, models for how people teach and learn online are still immature. A new approach could take care of the
long-standing e-learning bugaboos:
low enrollments and high attrition rates stemming from user
dissatisfaction. The cause of this
problem is the separation of people in time and space; but it can be overcome
by building environments where people talk to one another, build relationships,
and teach one another.
While there is no simple
answer, there is one key idea that has been overlooked in the design and implementation
of many of the e-learning programs on the market today: Learning is fundamentally both
social and experiential. It is the
context of the learning--all of the elements that comprise the experience
around the content--that is most important.
This paper will lay out
the OTTER Group's model for how best to teach and learn online. It will look at many of the elements
that must be managed to create e-learning programs where real knowledge is
gained, where communities of learning are created, and where high levels of
student satisfaction are generated.
The emphasis of most
e-learning programs to date has been on the accumulation, organization, and
delivery of content. This is
manifested in all aspects of how the new sector has been organized: in the business and operating models of
the service and technology providers; in the design and organization of the
content and learning management systems that are now widely used; and in the
investments venture capitalists, publishers, universities, and corporations
have made.
With all of the
information now available on the Web, it is possible to find really good
content on just about any subject.
And once information becomes digital, it wants to become free--so much
so that MIT is now considering making the underlying content of all its 2,000
courses available on the Internet without charge. In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education,
MIT's president, Charles Vest, was quoted as saying: "I think we're in a
kind of brief shining moment in general in that the World Wide Web is making
information available to the world for free. I would like to think that, for at
least a brief period of time, we could be a leading source of higher education
on the Web." According to MIT
Civil Engineering Professor Steven Lerman, MIT can make this content available
free of charge because, "the syllabus and lecture notes are not an
education. The education is what
you do with the materials."
MIT is visionary in
realizing that it can give away its syllabi and lecture notes and retain what
is of real value: the navigation
through these materials by superb teachers (the pedagogical process); the
social aspect of learning with incredibly smart peers (the learning community);
and the knitting together of content, pedagogy, and community into a unique
learning experience, which is what people are buying when they step on to the
MIT campus.
Former OTTER students,
even when working with the best professors at Harvard and MIT, have told us
that they value their interaction with one another as much as they value the
content being delivered by their professors. Thus, the ideal class is organized
around what we call the 50/50 rule.
At least 50 percent of the time students spend in the virtual classroom
is spent interacting with and learning about other students. When the social aspect of the classroom
is missing, student dissatisfaction rises dramatically, as does the attrition
rate.
When we think about our
own learning experiences, we remember not only what we learned, but how and
where we learned. A very large
part of the value we derive from our educational experiences comes socially and
informally--from the context. It
comes from the relationships we build around the substance of what we are
learning. In college, it's the
late-night study sessions, the interesting conversations around the lunch
table, an informal chat during a professor's office hours, the insights of our
classmates in a case study discussion.
At conferences, seminars and off-site meetings it's the networking. The rich context that we gain from
informal, peer-to-peer conversation is often what helps us make the content
more memorable and useful.
In most e-learning
programs offered today, the burden for learning is placed wholly on the
shoulders of the learner. When a
learner goes to a course web site, she enters a grid that does not vary from
course to course, consisting of a menu of activities: announcements, documents, assignments, external links,
communications, and tools. The
course is served up as content that is devoid of any context. She is expected
to navigate this material on her own, without much support. She is offered
email links to faculty and other students, but not much more.
E-learning should be first
and foremost about creating a social space that must be managed for the
teaching and learning needs of the particular group of people inhabiting that
space. This requires a platform that
can be easily modified to take into consideration the needs of the particular
learners in the course. In an optimal arrangement, a student will know a great
deal about his fellow students and faculty before he begins working through the
material. He will be prompted with
questions that have been very carefully designed to encourage him to link the
material he is learning to his own knowledge and experience, as well as
stimulate him to interact with other students and the faculty via email and
chat. This model will use the
database underlying the course to link people and information in new ways that
will help him understand the community of learners he has joined, as well as
affect his relationship with the material itself.
With the right enabling
technologies, the learner can take advantage of the context in interesting new
ways: if she thinks that someone
has posted something particularly insightful, she can choose to automatically
filter out every posting that individual has contributed to the course. She can
rate her fellow students' postings and emails and have the system mine the data
for the most highly rated information. Even in an online discussion with
thousands of comments posted by hundreds of students, the most valued
information will automatically be recognized by the professors and read by all
of the learners. Such a system also allows for something that is often
overlooked in the e-classroom:
recognizing and acknowledging the most valuable contributors.
When the focus is no
longer content but rather the management of the learning experience, then the
pedagogical process becomes the most important factor in the design and support
of that experience. And that process
is fundamentally idiosyncratic. It's
also what makes learning pleasurable and beautiful. To experience a wonderful teacher's pedagogy is to be inside
her mind.
To be effective, each
course must be customized both to the pedagogical process of the teacher or
subject-matter expert and to the individual needs of the learner. Currently, customization of online
learning programs often amounts to changing color schemes or turning features
of the platform on or off.
But customization at a
deeper level can mean changing the fundamental organizing principles of the
course space. In a pilot course the OTTER Group is currently running, we wanted
an organization that reflected the functional tasks of a global securities
trader with very little time. The design was for a small group of people (30)
focused on very specific tasks.
Many complex ideas were presented in a linear fashion, and the students
needed to be guided by specific questions. This tight focus demanded a course environment reflecting
that task-oriented need. To guide students, we made class discussion the most
prominent object on the screen, followed by the group project area. Document
exchange--relatively unimportant for this course-was placed in the least
prominent spot. We employed simple
page designs, making them task-oriented rather than information-oriented by
emphasizing both the names of the task areas within the course space and
deliberately organizing the functions that were accessible in each of those
areas. Rather than have a "home" page, we made "discussion"
the root page of the class. We also created a directory page called "Who's
Who" because we wanted to encourage students to get to know each other.
The importance of these
types of contextual changes is best illustrated in one of my favorite books of
2000: The Tipping Point, by
Malcolm Gladwell. In his chapter
on "The Stickiness Factor" he explains how the producers of Sesame
Street made television sticky: "They
discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented
ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television's weakness as a teaching
tool and make what they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make
television sticky."
Gladwell analyzes two
Sesame Street segments to see how the context and formatting affect learning
and retention. One involves the spelling of the word HUG by a female
Muppet. In this segment the
letters HUG are the central feature on the screen. In a second segment involving the spelling the word CAT,
Oscar is the central feature.
Researchers at Harvard's School of Education tracked pre-schoolers' eye
movements and found that the students focused on the letters in the HUG segment
but on Oscar in the CAT segment.
The kids weren't watching the letters because Oscar was so
interesting: "Oscar was
sticky. The lesson wasn't."
This seemingly small adjustment in the context of how the information was
presented had enormous implications for how much was actually learned.
In another example of how
to create stickiness, Gladwell cites an experiment done at Yale in the 1960s on
increasing the likelihood that students would get tetanus shots. It turns out
that variations in the type of information given the students about the dangers
of tetanus had no impact whatsoever on the likelihood of their getting
vaccinated. Only one thing
dramatically raised the rates of vaccination from 3 to 28 percent: "including a map of the campus,
with the university health building circled and the times that shots were
available clearly listed."
Gladwell's analysis of the
importance of contextual and formatting innovations should be mandatory reading
for anyone thinking about using the Internet as a teaching tool. These small but critical adjustments in
context and format are just as important to the learning process of global
traders as they are to pre-schoolers.
An enormous amount of lip
service has been paid to the creation of learning communities in the e-learning
arena. Most of the services promoted
as communities are really just transactional: fronts for the sale of content. The truth is that a community is very difficult, if not
impossible, to create from scratch--at least without enormous resources (time
and/or money) matched with deep social and structural understanding. It is much easier to recruit and
organize an existing community into a learning community than to start fresh.
Sociologist Amitai
Etzioni, in a recent article in Contemporary Sociology,1 defines communities as
having the following attributes:
1. A web of affect-laden
relationships among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross
and reinforce one another (rather than merely one-on-one or chainlike
individual relationships).
2. A measure of commitment
to a set of shared values, norms, and meanings and a shared history and
identification within a particular culture.
Etzioni expands this
definition to say that communities need not be territorial: "many ethnic,
professional, gay, and other communities are geographically
dispersed." Also, the bonds
that are found within communities go beyond the instrumental into the realm of
affection. And they are at some
level exclusive.
It is important to keep
these definitions in mind when developing learning communities. In the OTTER Group's work with
universities, for example, we have been most successful when we have drawn upon
alumni as the starting place for marketing and managing e-learning programs. An alumni group fulfills all of the
criteria Etzioni lays out: an
exclusive group whose relationships crisscross and reinforce one another, by
virtue of common cultural
experience, with a set of shared values, norms, and meanings, linked together
with bonds of affection.
In the early pre-web
1990s, we developed Harvard Business School's first distance learning program,
a seminar via satellite on service management, marketed to HBS's 50,000
alumni. This proved to be an
extraordinarily successful program, in part because it tapped into the
affiliations and knowledge that were already in place within this tightly-knit
community. First and foremost the
learning experience was very simple to market: we conducted one direct postal mailing to the HBS alumni
list of 50,000. Our extremely high
conversion rate of 7,000 participants has only been replicated when we were
marketing to communities of similarly high degrees of affiliation: other alumni groups and the extremely
tightly bound American Library Association.
For HBS service management
program, only 1 in 6 of the attendees were actual HBS alumni. The rest were
"guests"--colleagues, employees, and friends that the alumni had
referred of their own accord. The
service management learning experience was extremely well received by this
community of participants, with an overall satisfaction rating of 9 out of
10. Over 90 % of the 7,000
participants said that they would buy similar e-learning programs from HBS. We
would not expect to find such loyalty among students derived from a random
sample.
In a current pilot program
on the science of persuasion as a social skill, the learning community begins
with the marketing of the course. We are sending emails to the students who
have taken the course and asking them to go to our web site where they can add comments
about how they have successfully used the material in the course in their
personal and professional lives.
Specifically, we are asking them to debunk the three major
misconceptions people have about the mastery of persuasion: that it is innate and cannot be
learned; that it is self-evident and therefore trivial; and that its practice
is unethical.
This inquiry is intended
to reactivate and engage the community of course alumni who will themselves
refer us to interested buyers within their organizations. Further, the
responses of former students will build a set of multiple points of view about
the course to be read by prospective students. By reading testimonials that are
focused on the alumni's successful experiences in applying the course knowledge,
prospective students will have a chance to see the existing community around
the course and imagine themselves fitting into it. The same process applies to working with corporations: draw
from a pool of people who are already affiliated with one another; make
selection for the course exclusive; and tap into the connecting and selling
energy of managers and sponsors.
To make all of this work,
a new category of community manager is needed: the Learning Director.
For university programs, Learning Directors are drawn from the alumni of
the school or course. In
corporations, they are drawn from the ranks of key managers and/or the training
and education departments. They
are trained to act in the role of what Howard Gardner calls pedagogistas. Learning Directors have some knowledge
of the content, but their expertise is really in the context: they understand the personal and
organizational issues around engaging the students. Learning Directors make sure the students feel connected to
the professor, material, and one another.
They highlight student comments that are very insightful or relevant{,}
and they prod somebody who has not spoken up in three weeks.
In our course on financial
technology for global traders, the Learning Director understands the course
materials; he is also a bank insider who knows how the course is going to be
received by the learners. He knows what will interest them, and how they can
apply what they are learning to their business practices. He acts as a mediator between the
professor and the students. He selects the most relevant of the professor's
questions to highlight for student discussions. He also selects the best
comments and ideas to flow back to the professor.
Learning directors also
serve as the beta testers for our pilot programs, allowing us to create
programs that are highly interactive at large scale. We like to think of them as the Avon Ladies of the knowledge
economy.
One of the great
advantages of the web is that it can organize information so that it is
personalized to an individual's needs.
But today's e-learning programs are often organized around the needs of
the content providers, not around those of the individual learners: students are served up homogenized, standardized
content "course cartridges" and "e-packs." In the physical world, people organize
their own notebooks, choose their study techniques and even pick where they
will sit in the classroom based on their own needs. Personalization is an area where the power of databases can
rival offerings in the physical classroom. Information can be organized in such a way that learners are
given only what they need when they need it. They also can be given total control over their learning
environments. Meaningful user-controlled personalization is
something that needs to be incorporated into e-learning design from the
beginning, rather than as a frill or afterthought.
The Web offers the ability
to create deep profiles of students and use that information to create
personal, unique learning experiences. Profiling is more than just finding out
what skill and information gaps the students have. It is about understanding
the learner's context as a whole human being and shaping the content and course
experience accordingly.
Sophisticated polling
methods can be used to build a set of independent variables about students that
can later be cross-referenced with questions that deepen their understanding of
one another and the material they are studying. In the OTTER Group's course on
persuasion, we have students take a 360-degree evaluation over the Internet.
They assess themselves along several key metrics and then they have ten people
(bosses, spouses, subordinates, clients) assess them along those same metrics. This assessment is handled anonymously
via email and then collated in a central database on the web. Once these
profiles are built, they can be used as reference points in teaching case
materials.
For instance, because it
turns out that the buyers of SUVs and Minivans are very different
psychologically, one of the questions we asked students in the persuasion
course is which they'd prefer to buy.
According to an article in The New York Times, "Sport utility
buyers tend to be more restless, more sybaritic, less social people who are
'self-oriented,' to use the automakers' words, and who have strong conscious or
subconscious fears of crime. Minivan buyers tend to be more self-confident and
more 'other-oriented'--more involved with family, friends and their
communities." The SUV vs. Minivan distinction proved to be an interesting
variable in how groups of students made decisions about retaining or firing
struggling managers in our case study discussions. In a case in the course, a manager ineptly handled a
politically charged situation with two warring bosses. After reading the case,
students were asked to decide whether the manager should have been fired or
retained. The class was equally divided.
Interestingly, SUV drivers-i.e., those who were more self-oriented--were
more likely to want her fired than minivan drivers. This exercise ended by asking students what they thought her
job title is today, ten years later.
Most students placed her as either VP of Manufacturing or
unemployed. (She is currently the
CEO of Handspring.)
Cross-referencing unusual and compelling personal data not only helped
this particular "learning community" understand itself better, but it
also changed the students' relationship with the material itself by giving them
insight into their own decision-making processes.
The technology platform
that the OTTER Group prefers for our e-learning programs is both free and open
source. It was originally
developed by an MIT computer scientist, Philip Greenspun, to support
collaboration and knowledge-sharing among a community of amateur
photographers. It is worth
studying the operation of this true learning community (http://photo.net), as
there are many lessons to be learned there for teaching and learning
online.2 Greenspun first created
Photo.net to share what he knew about photography. He started by writing a 30-page story about a trip to Berlin
and Prague, illustrated with about 60 photos. He then invited people to contribute their experiences. By simply including an
"add-a-comment" link at the bottom of every article, he helped users
build a great repository of photographic knowledge.
The company that has built
our platform of choice, ArsDigita, was founded by Greenspun and evolved out of
Photo.net. The toolkit upon which the platform rests, the ArsDigita Community
System, places social interaction and collaboration--the management of the
learning experience--at the center not only of its design, but also of its
operating philosophy. One of the
great strengths of the open source software movement and the reason that it
yields superior programs--programs that reflect the specific needs of the
communities of people and individuals who are using the software-is that you
have access to a large community of developers with many ideas. With closed
source software, you only have as many ideas as the group of people who created
the program generates or as their lawyers will allow.
For example, the next
version of the ArsDigita software will contain chat protocol that is written
with academic exchange and collaboration in mind: chat postings can be threaded as they are posted so that
inquiry and answers between students and professors can be well
documented. Automatic transcripts
of chats are generated that can be organized by time and by thread. Because the software is open source,
this kind of enhancement can be readily added to the functionality of the
platform by any of the many people working on the system, and this best
practice of archiving threaded chat can then be used freely by others.
As more users adopt the
software and adapt it for their specific needs, the best practices in
e-learning will be shared by getting built into the software itself. In the past year, the ArsDigita
Community System has been developed as a content and learning management
system, now called ACES (the ArsDigita Community Education System). You can read the case study about its
use at MIT's Sloan School of Management, as well as download the software,
at: http://www.arsdigita.com/customers/casestudies/mit.
We believe open source to
be the best technology strategy for the development of shared knowledge and
learning. In a recently published
book on the open source software movement, Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the
Open Source Revolution, author Glyn Moody talks about the values that have
driven the development of the Internet: "as the Internet moves closer to
the heart of the modern world, it inevitably carries with it the free programs
that drive it, and seeds the values that led to their creation. Its basic code of openness, sharing and
cooperation is starting to spread outside the confines of one or two high-tech
industries."
We believe that the code
of openness, sharing, and cooperation that is at the heart of the e-learning
process is also at the heart of successful academic institutions and
corporations. At OTTER, openness
is a pivotal part of our company's technology and operating strategies and
value system. Sharing knowledge and ideas is one of the great joys of being
human. We take advantage of that phenomenon in our course design. We pay
careful attention to it in the technology platform we choose. We have the most
meaningful jobs in the world: we
connect people-including some of the world's great teachers-across time and
space to share ideas, knowledge, and wisdom so that they can teach and learn
from one another. And we learn so
much in the process.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
March 28, 2001
Michael Feldstein made
many significant contributions and helped write sections of the paper. Sarah Milstein's editing gave it
clarity and focus. Philip
Greenspun's book and seminar also greatly helped refine my thinking about the
topics covered.
1 http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/etzioni/A276.html
2 It is also worth reading
Philip Greenspun's book, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, which can
be read online at http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/
or found at Amazon or at a local bookstore.
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. seltzer@samizdat.com
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