e-Learning Challenges: The Challenges e-Learning Still Needs to Overcome

e-Learning Challenges: value proposition issues

e-Learning Challenges. The E-learning market bases much of its perception of customer value on scale. Primarily the scale of a learning experience to a large number of learners at little incremental cost per new user acquisition. eLearning combines that with the scale of delivering access to expertise, either homogenized and aggregated or direct from sources, such as authors or academics.

Scale does not solve the fundamental issues of competency, let alone mastery. eLearning assessments cannot easily determine the impact of learning integration. Automated assessments determine recognition of circumstances, and memorization of facts, or familiarity of process steps, but they do little to prove competency during application.

Organizations should include the following factors as they develop their e-learning value propositions.

Alignment with work

The alignment of learning with work underlies the value proposition. But many organizations don’t explicitly call out the situational aspects of their e-learning investments.

All e-learning programs need to include the following:

e-Learning Challenges: Content development and knowledge management

Any strategic solution to eLearning still depends on tactical knowledge management work, most notably the creation and tagging of content. Content creation requires a complex interplay between expertise, design, and pedagogy. And sometimes those creating the content do not possess equal levels of expertise across those disciplines.

Knowledge management plays a crucial role in content development. E-learning systems need to not only meet immediate needs but also evolve to reflect changes in underlying knowledge, in delivery, and pedagogy, as well as ways of curating content for obsolescence and use.

The following bullets outline important areas that require recognition, attention, and investment in order to deliver the most effective e-learning content.

e-Learning Challenges: Technology issues

E-Learning, perhaps more than other technologies, or perhaps more pointedly the content stored in it, faces its destiny regularly. In database technologies or collaboration, data exists in a flexible structure that allows for interpretation. Data regularly ages out. Orders ship. Customers sign contracts. New designs replace old designs—vehicle locations update. Deposits get posted. For the most part, data is simple and abstract. It has purpose and meaning within at least one application and usually does not stray far from its original, intended purpose.

E-learning content is different. Instructors craft E-learning content. They design it with human purpose, save its metadata that fits the category of generally descriptive data. The most difficult issue related to technology and e-learning comes down to the encoding of knowledge, be it in more traditional documents like word processing tests, presentations, or other content, like video or animation. Those content types typically evolve more quickly than infrastructure technology like databases. Although database processes technology has greatly expanded in capability, the storage or data in tables remains relatively consistent when compared to knowledge encoding structures.

Rapidly changing knowledge encoding shackles content to legacy systems. Those systems resist upgrades because the perceived value of access to content often appears more important than the migration of that content to platforms that would require re-encoding the knowledge. But this type of content also suffers from issues of authorship and the evolution of knowledge. Original authors may be hard to find, so updating may be more an issue of recreation than editing. And the evolution of knowledge means that the underlying facts and any theories that govern their interpretation often shift after the content’s creation. While this is very common with e-learning aimed at mastering applications, it also applies to physics, where the fundamental understanding of cosmology and quantum physics faces a lack of consensus and an ongoing exploration of theoretical options.

I own a copy of Clement Woods, The Outline of Man’s Knowledge (1927). The book does not list Pluto as a planet, not because of its demotion to a minor planet in 2006, but because Pluto remained undiscovered at the time. The book also speculates about the detection of upwards of 1,000,000,000 stars from Earth. Astronomers now estimate that the universe contains 10²² to 10²⁴ stars, numbers not even speculated in this book. Similarly, the book only sketches human evolution, which of late, has seen many of its assertions challenged by recent discoveries.

So some content, like transaction system training, arrives with limits as systems change in ever-increasing cycles, stamping obsolesce upon screen captures and videos almost as soon as the final rendering cycle saves the file to disk. But evergreen content, content ABOUT SOMETHING, strives for persistence once codified. Unfortunately, most knowledge ages, and as it ages, it finds itself housed in the wrong format or streamed with the wrong CODEC. Combine that with the general challenges or knowledge expansion, and even evergreen content finds itself deciduous in the end–sometimes a victim of its own hubris, sometimes a child of neglect.

Technology must partner with content development to support the migration of content to new platforms and its emendation. Organizations need to keep content current, and they need to keep it in an accessible form for editing and presentation. And as security models and enterprise platforms evolve, the content needs to be accessible in the right place in the work experience to lend value.

The following list states some of the issues with technology evolution and emerging technology that will require another rethinking of encoding, pedagogy, delivery, and engagement.

Implementation issues

As a human-centered technology, e-learning depends on people adopting it for success. The end goal, as with all learning, remains for a person to learn something, apply that learning, and gain value from it, for themselves, or their organization. Many factors impinge on a e-learning’s ability to serve as a tool to meet learning goals. These factors include:

Operational issues

Balancing tight e-learning budgets remains a challenge. Although e-learning, once deployed, will likely remain deployed, it does not mean maintaining it will remain a priority.

Production Issues

Day-to-day operations also affects the quality of e-learning experiences.

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