CBT/WBT - who likes it ?

We are noticing some interesting patterns in usage across our worldwide customer base. For example, in Europe and USA many of our on-line students seem to take courses outside work hours. But they do it in short bursts of activity.

In Asia (and particularly Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia) we note that students do much longer periods of study in one session,but mostly during work hours. The same is true in Africa.

Why is this the case ? Is it that Anglo-American employers just give minimal learning time on-the-job ? Or is it that Asia/African employees are more hungry for technical learning ?

Serious Games

A lot of game technology businesses have tools that could work for eLearning. But those businesses have really never been concerned with providing content for business applications or management issues.

Now content providers like Ossidian are seeking to provide more engaging learning experience. That has historically meant multimedia, simulations, and animations. Now comes the Serious Game idea. This is the application of gaming technology to eLearning - gaming engines and virtual reality spaces to provide an immersive and stimultaing learning environment.

The great thing here is that Serious Games can use reward principles to keep the user engaged in pursuit of goals. Reaching goals along the way can be rewarded in many ways - points, new levels, 'top scorer' lists to mention some.

The tech environment for building Serious Games is in its infancy. Who wants to download huge programs to a PC just to run some eLearning ! But web delivery is not yet good enough because the browser just is not able to do really serious graphics-intensive work. And that assumes the bandwith is even there to deliver the content.

We are looking at ways to promote Serious Games options in the Ossidian content library. We'll keep you posted.

Web 2.0

Here at Ossidian we are looking to improve the engagement of learners with each other. We are also researching ways to de-formalize some learning processes so that people can share ideas with each other.

Essentially this is to get away from the push model of learning that is so prevalent in the eLearning world.

Web 2.0 appears to offer ways for us to improve. Blogs. Mashups. Video. Bulletin boards. Maybe not much new under the sun, but lots of interesting stuff.

Take a look at the non-commercial Wikiversity. This is a really cool collaborative site based on the wiki idea. Maybe a little thin on good stuff, but it's growing fast.

Universities just will not collaborate

So does anyone think that Universities have an inflated sense of their own value ? It seems as if Internet-based learning is here to stay - but without really good content there is a risk of a devalued learning experience for many people. Surely, one might suppose, Universities have course content that can be transformed into the new medium ?

Well, you might have though so. But there are lots of problems here. Firstly, quality content is not easy to locate since lots of Unversity course materials are not packaged well for re-use.

Secondly, Universities generally want to guard 'intellectual property' very closely - even if it's not their own. Getting them to collaborate on co-development of eLearning is a nightmare because their common 'business' models don't allow them to think really creatively. Ownership is the chief criterion for decision-taking. And exercise of bureaucratic decision processes takes too much time - products have to be innovated, brought to market and changed within 3 months. Any longer and the ship has moved on.

Getting their hands on money ('research funding') is a primary goal of institutions. Sharing assets in a collaborative way is very low on their list. Universities really want all of the cake - they think they have good undergraduate teraching content, they think they are central to all R&D and they believe they can market/sell internationally. And they really do not understand co-financing at all !

Of course, the last point is crucial. The value of on-line diplomas/degrees has been severly diluted by the number of them available (and from disreputable sources in many cases). We suggest that Universities need to recognize that the key is to target co-produced and co-branded digital products at specific markets (and corporate training is the one most dear to our hearts !).

There are some good exceptions - MIT's OpenCourseWare is making vast swathes of course materials freely available oneline. And the Open University (UK) too. This is good news for people that want access to good content across a range of subjects. But bad news because commercial re-use is prohibited.