If I think of eLearning as a means to immerse my students or employees in a topic, why wouldn’t I use it for all situations? For starters, eLearning, and especially the higher-end eLearning courses take a lot of time, energy and money to produce. eLearning is not meant to override proven learning methods, and I doubt you could ever beat real world experience as the ultimate teaching tool. So when and where should you implement an eLearning system? Let’s get an idea of basic situations where eLearning can be highly effective.

Lack of Access

The first area where eLearning can be highly effective is when you or your users have a lack of access to some form of physical item or situation. Let’s say topic being taught has a lot of costly materials associated with it.

When my business partner and I started a non profit company called Edheads.org, we polled hundreds of teachers and asked what subjects were most difficult to teach, and why. What we found out from this poll was the topics that needed costly supplies in order to be properly demonstrated topped the list, as not all schools had enough state funding for new materials.

We ended up creating an activity on simple machines, where kids could explore a game-like environment while learning about simple machines. The environment itself not only showed various forms of simple machines, it integrated them into familiar objects such as the family car, a staircase or even the toilet (many kid’s favorite). We provided a testing system, where kids thought out what type of simple machine the object was, and were positively (or negatively) reinforced whether they got the answer right or wrong.

The last thing we did was explain why the simple machine acts as it does through text and animation. Once the project launched, teachers found that they could not only teach their students multiple concepts in a matter of minutes, but the students were absolutely engrossed in the learning environment, spending upwards of 10-30 minutes exploring the activity. The true success though, was enabling teachers to teach this concept of simple machines without having to make a monetary investment in new materials. We took the concept of ‘Lack of access’ and provided access to otherwise unattainable content. Problem solved!

Dangerous Situations

The next area for implementing eLearning is when your users need explore dangerous situations in a safe environment. This is not a new concept, anyone familiar with a flight simulator can quickly understand that it’s a lot cheaper to crash a plane in a simulated environment that it is to take a real plane out for a spin and potentially put yourself and others in danger.

Dangerous as a term can have some flex to it, too. Maybe the piece of equipment you’d like to demonstrate is very fragile, or really expensive. It can be dangerous from a financial point of view to let all those teenagers play with the new flux capacitor, so you recreate a virtual functioning version so all can learn it’s functions and uses without putting your bank account at risk.

Dangerous can be straight forward as well. Learning how to diffuse a bomb is much safer in a virtual environment. And of course anyone learning how to diffuse a bomb will have to work their way up to the real thing at some point, but a well built interactive version can prove to be a safe and efficient starting point.

Boredom or Lack of Interest

eLearning can also be put to use in highly boring situations. People just don’t learn if they’re bored. eLearning plus some mental innovation can provide a means to create a fantastic interactive environment to surround an otherwise boring topic.

Some people might not find investment or saving for retirement to be an interesting topic, but add an engaging situation for those people to connect to (whether plot, a game or point based reward system) and they’ll begin to find themselves interested in the lesson being taught.

Think back to when you were in school; can you even remember the names of the teachers who hated their jobs and didn’t give a **** about your mental welfare? Probably not, but most of us can remember the one or two great teachers who did make a difference in our lives, because they found ways to keep old topics fresh, give their classes a sense of discovery and reward, yet didn’t shy away from punishment either. Those are the situations people find they can’t help but pay attention in, because the experience will truly add something to their life. When people are personally engaged and care about a topic, amazing results can happen!

Various Age Groups

This is more of a ‘don’t worry about age restrictions’ point as opposed to an ‘eLearning works best with this age group’ point.

Although the concept of eLearning is mostly targeted at adults and the corporate environment, there are many variances (which will be discussed in depth later on) that apply to children, teens, adults and the elderly.

One of the most surprising facts I’ve learned is that a lot of adults have just as much fun and learn just as much while using an eLearning system built for kids. It’s not a far stretch to say the corporate (adult) environment can be dull and drab. It has gotten to the point where eLearning systems are entirely too dumbed down, in other words ’safe’, and are so concerned about not offending or making assumptions about someone’s intelligence level, that they totally miss the main point, which is to engage and teach something new.

I’ve seen adults ‘helping’ out kids in a usability session, and these adults remember through the process of helping how fun it can be to learn a new concept, or even be insulted while having a laugh at what a good or bad job they’ve done. The more usability testing sessions I attend, the more apparent it is that the right eLearning methods can transcend age and gender. Projects I’ve targeted at grades 3-6 end up being used by students in grades 2-9, more than double the targeted market of users. Not everyone’s goal is to target as wide a range of users as possible, but the fact that it does can’t hurt.

Variance in Complexity

eLearning solutions can be simple or complex, and this doesn’t directly relate to budgets or age groups. I tend to break up production into two categories. One is the backend, which includes interface and usability structure, quizzes and reporting, and all other programming or backend development. The other category is the front end, everything the user experiences including the plot, interaction style, graphical style and design, audio and navigation.

The backend work can be as beautifully structured or as much of a jumbled hack as you’d like, and the user really won’t know the difference as long as the program doesn’t break & performance doesn’t suffer. I tend to do a bit sloppier backend work for projects I know for a fact no other programmer will have to update (basically my own projects for internal company use), or for custom activities that don’t require upkeep. It’s not that I don’t take pride in clean work, but it speeds up development by almost 1/3 in some cases. I’m not promoting the idea of sloppy work, but like anything, each individual has their own methods of getting things done.

The front end work is where the real variances appear. Every single learning situation can have a full range of solutions from simple (simple plot, simple graphics) to complex (20 page script, personalization features, hundreds of custom graphics).

The majority of the work going into an eLearning system should be research, scripting and goal setting. The backend system itself can be totally independent of that content, or it can be customized to suit the topic at hand. I always find that the more basic and to the point your eLearning system is can help with making learning goals more attainable to your users.

In Conclusion

There really is a solution to every eLearning situation, and the great thing about the programs and technology that exist today, is that they allow developers like myself to really push the boundaries of what’s possible.