Learning Review offered me, back in June, to participate in a round table within the framework of Virtual Educa Zaragoza 2008. I had to speak about the Spanish corporate e-learning market, although I would only have 15 minutes. Immediately I got to work, because I really had some things to say about it; But I certainly wanted to respond appropriately to the expectations of the audience, and I contacted friends of APeL and Aefol, and my boss at Nanfor Ibérica, in search of quantitative information.
(I must insert this paragraph, more regressive than digressive. I think I started to publish articles about e-learning in Spain about ten years ago, and it may be more than a hundred; but I still have things to say and I welcome the opportunities to do so. In the sector they know me, they know me above all for the articles; but I have always spoken or written, with or without success, from the perspective of the teacher and the student, and even today, if you enter Google with these two words, and -learning and quality, my texts appear immediately, even from the year 2003. In other words, I did not intend to extend myself in figures of hours and euros…).
In my parallel search for information on the Internet, I soon came to the conclusion that there were figures for almost everyone, although there are certainly more complete reports or studies than others, and more objective and reliable information than others. I was surprised by some statistics that linked e-learning with blended learning, to compare the set with the figures offered on face-to-face training, but I interpreted that this was intended to improve the image of e-learning. It can surely be said that electronic courses (online or offline) represent at most 10% of total and formal training orchestrated in companies and organizations, but the distribution is very uneven, and the average is rather low: it should not be avoided an examination of conscience.
Summarizing my impressions, I ended up first needing greater precision on what we should understand by both e-learning and blended learning, and even face-to-face training; Then I ended up reaffirming myself - and I said it later in Zaragoza - about what I had thought years ago: "e-learning flaps its wings, but it does not fly." With a certain abstraction, I would say that formal e-elarning has grown in recent years below the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT), but, in any case, below what was foreseen years ago.
However, there is e-learning that does seem to be skyrocketing: informal e-learning, through Google or another search engine. Some people think that Google is the best online learning tool, and I would only add that it may be, if at all, the best "exogenous" tool; But there is much more to say about our “endogenous” learning tools, and for that reason I spent a few minutes in my presentation (available online).
Certainly it is almost impossible to imagine today a face-to-face training program in companies, in which the learners do not interact with each other, or with the teachers, by e-mail or another collaborative solution; or do not search for additional information on the Internet. That is why the concept of blended is somewhat diluted, which, on the other hand, could be valid for any combination of methods. But we must also attribute indefiniteness to e-learning itself, which, for example, for some excludes the case of mere e-reading: I, of course, now with the cap of the learner, and if it were only that, I prefer to read on paper than on screen… So, as I have always thought, it would be perhaps more significant to divide continuing education by content, rather than by channels or methods:even in face-to-face training there ends up being ICT. (I remember by the way that my first Computer Aided Teaching designs, in the 80s and in those floppies, were later used by users… gathered in the classroom!
In Zaragoza, I also wanted to focus the audience's attention on the four hiatuses to which I refer whenever I speak in public about these things: the transition from technology to information (1st), from information to knowledge (2nd), the from knowledge to professional performance (3rd), and also from knowledge to inexcusable innovation (4th). The emerging economy forces us to focus more on those steps in which we have not been doing it sufficiently -the 2nd and 4th-, because productivity and competitiveness do not only come with digital literacy.
Online learning products should provide us with information that is easy to translate into robust, valuable, and applicable knowledge. " Knowledge comes from information and not from technology, like or dislike technologists in the e-learning sector": when I say this, I look with caution at the audience, in case some technologist throws a tomato at me. Excuse the colloquial expression with which I write, but it is that I do it in a swimsuit, on Sunday (today our Carlos Sastre Tour just won: bravo, Carlos), on the porch of my house in town (I had no budget this year for beaches). Let's keep going.
I was optimistic about the future of e-learning, mainly because I had to do it; But I publicly called for an urgent reengineering of the production processes of courses, with a greater presence and prominence of teachers: here, I believe, are the learning solutions "faster", "more effective", "more pleasant". E-learning seems to have taken its first steps as a derivative of technological advancement, but perhaps it would have been better to continue walking (or flying) as a derivative, on the one hand, of methodological advancement in teaching, and, on the.
In Zaragoza I did not want to be so explicit, nor did I have time for it, but I believe that there are two types of parallel relationships in our e-learning sector. The first and most consolidated is that existing between the executives and sales representatives of the supplying companies, and the human resources and training areas of their client companies. Both parties seem to have agreed business in the consolidation of the system that we know: a system prepared for the best use of technology, but which perhaps pays less attention to the methodology and content that seek to materialize learning.
The second - most malnourished - relationship I want to refer to is that of the teachers who design the online courses, with the users of these products. Both parties, teachers and students, do not seem to count much, and, perhaps and sometimes, "they are considered eluded"; However, the good teacher makes his storyboard thinking of the learner, and the latter remembers the former for better or for worse, but perhaps especially if he misses him.
If electronic learning was insignificant years ago, and this was denounced by a representative of the Tripartite Foundation at an Expoelearning (2005) of Aefol in Madrid, I fear that they will continue to be; that they continue to be for lack of suitable content, with carefully designed didactics. Someone, with greater power than the users themselves (in my opinion, so “avoided”, yes, like the teachers), should ensure the effectiveness of e-learning products, and I fear that here the quality standards we have been learning about, even trying to contribute to it, do not provide us with the decisive solution that we seek.
Let's talk, if you like, more about lifelong learning, and not so much about e-learning or blendend learning. I pointed out some pending subjects of the learning, and a good part of them are located in the second and fourth hiatus, but that does not mean that it is not necessary to continue working in the first and third, and even outside the hiatus scheme. I spoke of “total” learning (which includes learning what nobody knows yet), the informal, the unconscious, the self-taught, the autotelic…, and even a cow named Blossom, and of course, I made my dear friend Erez Itzkovich suffer (moderator): Forgive me, Erez.
To end this quick memory of the messages of my presentation, I reproduce a phrase by Thomas O. Davenport that I included almost at the end, and that was already in force in the late-century scenario: “ Workers are not jars that have to be filled; they are protagonists in the effort to fill themselves with learning. Workers are owners of human capital and demand control over their learning processes… ”It seemed necessary to me to insist that the terms“ human capital ”and“ human resources ”are not synonymous, except that we refer to the“ resources of beings humans".
