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Chapter 16: Designing Asynchronous Learning
LARRY ISRAELITE AND NANETTE DUNN
Your E-Learning Questions Answered by this Chapter
Are there ways to reduce e-learning development time?
How do we make e-learning interesting?
In a song released in 1980, Billy Joel described the ebb and flow of the pop music industry of the 1970s. And, in the end, he concluded that not all that much had really changed: Even called by a different name, rock and roll was still rock and roll.Although Joel's target was the pop music industry, he might as well have been writing about the learning industry. Regardless of what we call things, the way we go about constructing products and programs that facilitate learning hasn't changed all that much in the past 3 0 years. And as Billy Joel expresses in his song, new names for old (but not necessarily invalid) ideas and approaches don't make those ideas different. It only means that we talk about them differently. And, sometimes, we even talk ourselves into believing they aren't the same, often at the expense of those who rely on us to create useful and meaningful learning products.What does this have to do with e-learning or the design of e-learning? The answer is simple. As an industry and/or, perhaps, as a profession, we have stopped looking back—we have forgotten our roots. For some reason, we have chosen to ignore what we know about how people learn or how to design products intended to enable learning. We have approached the design of e-learning like it is something new and unique; like we have never designed instruction that is delivered using computer technology, or over a network, or that included a blend of individual (asynchronous) and group (synchronous) activities.The other problem is that we continue to be enamored of technology. For years and years, we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the lure of educational elixirs. The list is long—programmed instruction, instructional television, computer-based training, interactive video, multimedia, and now the Internet. Perhaps it is our ongoing affinity for toys. As children, we always loved receiving gifts of new toys. Sometimes we even played with them for a few days. But in many cases, they soon were relegated to the back of the closet, and we went back to our old standbys. We played with the toys that continued, over time, to bring us enjoyment.As each new generation of learning technologies was introduced, the same thing seemed to happen. We enthusiastically embrace them, we play with them for a while, and then, when the technologies don't deliver on the overstated promises of learning and/or economic impact, we return to using the methods, tools, and technologies that have served us well in the past.With this as a context, the topic of designing for asynchronous learning is, for the most part, the result of the emergence of the web as the latest teaching toy. Most learning professionals define asynchronous learning as learning products than can be used anytime and anywhere. But it's not like we haven't designed anytime/anywhere instructional products before. If fact, we have done it for years—paper-based self-study courses, early computer-based training, and even CD-Rom-based multimedia programs of the 1990s. Clearly, the web adds some technology resources that expand the media choices that need to be considered during the design and development process. But, by itself, the web is not an instructional device. It is, in its purest form, a tool that enables the effective and efficient distribution and storage of data. At the same time, and not insignificantly, it also is an extremely effective communication device, not unlike the telephone, that provides access to others in a way that simply wasn't possible before. But the instructional design process itself is not new. And the availability of the web should not influence how we go about the process of creating instructional products, other than providing instructional designers with some additional options when contemplating media.We also should note that there are today two different models of asynchronous learning in the marketplace. The first might be referred to as the university model, which takes its name from the institutions of higher learning that have discovered that the web provides a great opportunity for expanding both the number and types of learners they can serve. The second approach, which might be called the corporate model, is used to improve the effectiveness and cost efficiency of corporate training and to create databases of useful information that can be rapidly accessed and used after training has been completed. The corporate model is the one we will address here.
