Looking at e-Learning

One of the most memorable lessons in my personal education on e-learning was delivered a number of years ago by Edward Tufte (www.edwardtufte.com) during a seminar on information presentation. He first described the battles he went through in the design of the IBM DisplayWrite screen, which required a wide variety of system status messages to be placed on lines and columns stolen from the bottom, top and sides of the display space. It reduced the usable area of the screen significantly, and it was compared to the spare elegance of the WordPerfect 4.1 screen, which had very little system information, but an incredibly usable typing space. The final item he discussed was the Microsoft Word Screen, which, after years of development and technical advances, and most significantly, after the lessons of WordPerfect, returned to stealing lines and columns from the top, bottom and sides of the screen to display the status of the system.

While it sounds amusing, it started me down a path of looking at what it was that I was doing as I created e-Learning (or at the time, CBT). it also opens the door to a discussion of a topic that many e-learning developers and on-line instructors often take for granted – that their audience is instantly able to decode any new device, display element or convention used without instruction, hesitation or frustration. That is, they assume that the audience for e-Learning is automatically literate in the language the developer is speaking, even when that language is constantly evolving.

There are several cracks in this auto-literate assumption. One is easily demonstrated and it involves devices from Apple Computer. If one judged only from the users, these devices are the highest achievement of intuitive user design – everyone is born knowing how to use these devices and that knowledge is transmitted via DNA. This may not be quite the case. Try ejecting a disk without knowing how. There is no eject button to push on the drive itself - you move the disk into the garbage. This is not intuitive. Try turning off an iPod. There is no on/off switch on the player - you press and hold the play button. This is not intuitive.

I once did research on an on-line course. The instructor described each lesson with the language of hypertext – each page could be accessed in multiple sequences at the discretion of the learner and according to their individual learning styles. But the page content was sequential. The content flowed in a very defined sequence, so however many alternatives you had where you could access the page, in fact, there was only one way that you would. But there was an additional element that had been placed on each page – the page layout required that the user scroll down to see the entire content of the page – even when there was nothing to do except confirm that there was no content beyond the bottom border of the screen. Each page re-enforced sequentiality. So we had a course that was macro-sequential and micro-sequential, but which was advertised as neither.

One of the more interesting ways to see this disconnect between intent and achievement is on a website run by Vincent Flanders. He introduces the concept of "mystery meat navigation" and there are several good examples that give everyone the chance to experience intentionally what I fear many e-Learning users stumble into and through as they fight for information.

R