Each of these provides valuable mental exercise, but the little voice inside me says we are off target. Life in our world was already accelerating before the Web. Now, anything connected to the Web (and what isn't these days?) tends to move fast enough to blur the lines in how we define and perceive them. That certainly describes the broad area in and around elearning!
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Drawing more lines here, is like drawing them on the beach while the tide comes in. The valued skill is learning to juggle all of the options...and being ready to add new ones to the mix, regularly. In a way, the distinctions between different vehicles and modalities of learning don't matter, as long as we effectively deliver client results.
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Case in point: we're working on a learning activity about home media centers, right now (convergence between home computers and home entertainment systems). We have a nice interaction to help learners understand the basic concepts, and for awhile, we debated about including or excluding a Microsoft interview from the latest CES show and a video from Steve Jobs at MacWorld Expo 2008. Then we reasoned that, since the information in our activity is non-linear, these media objects absolutely should be included. They're not required, and a quick sentence tells the learner what they are about. Learners are free to decide what's interesting to them and what is not. They can invest more time, or not. And is that elearning or online training? Dunno. But they are interesting, third-party references, they do add depth...and they're free.
So! eLearning, online training, eperformance, performance support, courses, wikis, social networks, search, YouTube...the colors on a palette tend to run together, don't they? The real question is, "what's the picture like?"
3 comments:
Good points, but is there a picture or is it a trillion little pictures. Can we understand the pictures at another level? What do they look like when you zoom out? And what does that mean for those of us used to thinking about things in terms of Online Training?
Mmm-m-m...I like the way you think, Tony. And it probably is a trillion (well, maybe several hundred million) pictures...from our side. And it's good for us to zoom in and our, or juggle, with all these pieces. But the picture I had in mind was an elegant, effective customer solution (results). While we have to keep adding more balls to what we juggle, in the end, all the semantic wrangling we do is only for us, behind the curtain. What the client deserves is our best result...whatever we call it.
Hi tony,
Distance Online Education involves getting degrees or certificates without going to a campus or physically taking classes from a teacher. The most common type of distance learning programs is online distance education. The main difference between a correspondence program and an online program is that the course material is sent either by mail or courier in a correspondence program, while online education course materials are accessed via the Internet.
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