In response to Elliott Masie’s recent Learning Trends newsletter, Albert Ip asks a similar question to what came to my mind when I first read it:
Can anyone show me some concrete proof that any learning technology standard has made a difference in learning?
Elliott is a great champion for advancing good technology-based learning and he has the ability to simplify a complex field. He showed me the potential of the Internet for learning in early 1997 and I haven’t looked back since. That said, I disagree with his analogy of the shipping container as learning object:
As I celebrate my birthday and look out the window of our New York apartment I see stacks of shipping containers on the edge of the Hudson. I see the connection between the work that is underway in content packaging for the learning space. As we adopt XLM, core learning standards and systems, it is possible for us to achieve some of the same benefits as the shipping container brought to transportation …
In a recent project where I reviewed the business case for SCORM implementation, I found no evidence of a market for digital learning objects. There were several vendors offering SCORM conversion or SCORM implementation assistance, but no one was actually buying and selling objects. The bet seems to be that standards will create the market, as shipping containers enabled the free flow of goods over various forms of transportation. Here I disagree, because learning cannot be “containerised”.
In theory, reusable digital learning objects make sense, but in practice they don’t work. The problem is that learning objects cannot be separated from their context.
In the drive to make money in the learning business, too many people are trying to find a way to codify pieces of the messy, personal process known as learning. The learning content market is based on the premise that these pieces can be quantified and therefore owned by someone. So far, all we are seeing is the devaluation of learning content.
The popular belief used to be that 12 years in a standardised classroom created a learned individual, even though many workers called this “book learning” and knew that it didn’t equate to competence. Today we have the belief that standardised content packaging will equate to better learning. As Albert asks, where’s the evidence?
I’ve said before that you need content and context in order to foster learning, and content is just a minor player.
right on the money!
No evidence? I don’t believe that is true at all. Perhaps it is because I come from the development end of the eLearning spectrum.
Just to clarify… The “benefit” of such specifications are not simply to “improve” learning. We’ll leave that to the instructional designers, not the features of any given specification. The benefit here is protecting your investment.
It appears when certain individuals bash the viability of SCORM in the eLearning space, it is due to their lack of real world exposure to developing courseware for a multitude of large corporate clients. Roughly 95% of the courseware we are continually developing for clients are based in SCORM, the rest? AICC. All of which eventually reside in a SCORM/AICC conformant LMS. There are a *ton* of different LMS packages out there, and we support them all. How? Not by reinventing the wheel every time we develop courseware, I can tell you that much. Add to this the fact that we have *huge* clients that change their LMS from time to time, and instead of having to ditch their investment in the current course offerings, or do a communication “re-wrap” job on 100’s or 1000’s of courses, they can simply reupload them into the new LMS. No extra cost. Does this mean the learning approach in such courseware is poor or degraded due to adopting this specification? Certainly not.
Due to the fact that none of our clients typically have subject matter that makes sense outside of the context of a specific course object, we generally don’t have the problems that many are “concerned” with. Since a SCO can mean “any” granularity of information, one could break down their content into pieces of information that could retain context across several modules. We’ve not come across a valid need to do so very often.
There is certainly a place for such specifications. They are used daily, and they are a vital piece to the whole equation. I dread looking back on the days when they didn’t exist. A vast majority of the training groups within the largest corporations around the world have adopted SCORM, at least version 1.2.
I do agree, however, that the specification should not have been boasted an influx of downloadable/purchasable SCO’s. I never really saw this happening, but it’s a neat idea. This industry is still in its infancy though, so it isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility.
In response to skfriese, I can at least say that I’ve had some “real world” experience in developing courseware for large clients, as I was responsible for all aspects of training development for a $1B military helicopter project.
Where training needs are clear and measurable, like flying, fighting and fixing an aircraft, the systems approach to training and reusible content objects make sense. It’s the same aircraft system, whether you are a pilot, flight engineer, avionics or aviation technician. Digital content, in terms of schematics, diagrams and systems explanations can be used by each occupational group. For example, using the same fuel drain sequence diagram for both technicians and aircrew just made sense. But the learning and performance needs of each group, and individuals within these groups, are different.
SCORM and other efforts to standardise “learning” object repositories still miss the bottom of the learning iceberg; the context. Yes, you will be able to shift massive amounts of courseware (what a friend of mine refers to as shovelware) from one LMS to another, but again I ask – where is the evidence that this has made a difference in learning? Content is only the tip of that iceberg.