Contemporary trends & practices
Quality of contemporary e-learning practices
There is a great deal of variability in the quality of e-learning and teaching. This should not be any surprise as there are just as many instances of poor and reckless face-to-face teaching as there are instances of excellence in that regard as well.
In addition to this, despite the growing recognition of the important role and function of instructional design in teaching and learning, educators have overall, failed to make the best use of the opportunities that alternative delivery technologies can provide.
Evidence of this is all around us in the form of innumerable university course websites, which contain little more than the schedule, a brief outline of the course content, PowerPoint slides of lecturer's notes, and sometimes, sample examination papers. Instead of exploiting the unique attributes of information and communications technologies, such practices replicate the ³education is equal to transmission of information² model of teaching that is so common of conventional classroom practice.
Regardless of the capabilities of the delivery medium, the nature of the subject matter content and learner needs, much of educational practice continues to be teacher directed and delivery centered. Rarely we have paused to think about why we are teaching the way we do teach and support learning, and if our instructional approaches are based on sound educational principles of cognition and learning.
This kind of instructional practice has led to a great deal of frustration for learners and teachers, many of whom have grown increasingly skeptical about the benefits of the newer delivery technologies such as e-learning, and distance education generally (Kirkwood, 2000; Rumble, 2000). This is a classic instructional design problem. It has to do with the failure of instructional designers and subject matter experts to come up with instructional and learning designs that best match the type of the subject matter and the needs of their learners within the constraints of particular learning environments.
Notwithstanding this, there are in the midst of it all, examples of good instructional practice. These are instances when the educational experience has been carefully modeled to support the development of clearly identified learning outcomes, and in light of learner needs, learner readiness and the nature of the educational context.
Flexible access
A group of adult educators from the University of British Columbia in Canada carried out an investigation of Web-based courses (Boshier, Mohapi, Moulton, Qayyaum, Sadownik, & Wilson, 1997) that focussed on the attractiveness and face validity of 'stand alone' Web-based courses. These researchers defined a 'stand alone' course as one that "might include supplemental material but can be completed entirely without face-to-face interaction with an instructor" (Boshier et. al., 1997, p. 327).
Of the 127 subjects they reviewed, these investigators classed 19 of them as 'not enjoyable' to walk through, 42 were considered as 'mildly enjoyable', 43 as 'moderately enjoyable', 19 as 'very enjoyable' and 4 as a 'complete blast'. They also found that very few of the courses surveyed offered much interactive capability for the learner or opportunity for collaborative learning. They found that many of the courses seemed to have been overly driven by an obsession with statement of objectives, assessment outcomes, and a hierarchical ordering of subject matter content, as opposed to a focus on building rich resource-based learning environments around enduring themes. The researchers concluded, from the study that the biggest challenge for web-based course developers seemed to be conceptual, and not technological. They suggest that course developers ought to be focusing more on how to make their courses "attractive, accessible and interactive" (Boshier et. al., 1997, p. 348).