Background in e-learning developments (p2)
Early CBT was designed for relatively high-level IT users, whose conditions and characteristics were very specific to their education, industry culture etc. When attempts were made to widen the use of e-learning to other groups, it became obvious that not all learners shared these characteristics and conditions. The response to negative perceptions of this early form of e-learning was to bring into e-learning what good distance learning practice had developed: good tutor support, better design of resources, plenty of formative assessment. However, it has also become evident that learners, especially those with poor levels of self-efficacy and with lower levels of education, find it very difficult to 'self-manage' learning. Adding more and more tutor support has become the answer - providing 'scaffolding' that can be slowly reduced as the learner becomes more proficient. This requires a cadre of expert tutors to support this process, most of whom who will not have been involved in the design of the original 'course content' and whose relationship is defined by their secondary role of 'support'.
More recently, and with the mainstreaming of technologies into education and training systems, learning supported by technologies has been re-conceptualised. It's obvious that learning is a process not a product. Attempts to 'productise' or 'commoditise' learning have not proven successful - at least so far - either in terms of learning quality improvement or potentially profitable commercial business.
In recent years, technologies are being used not just in open and distance learning (overcoming time and location barriers) but are being mainstreamed into education and training systems on the one hand and are being used to innovate both traditional learning and teaching methods, and to extend learning opportunities and our definition of learning. In this more recent and broader approach to learning using technologies, it is conceived as a transformational process or processes that can be supported by appropriate technologies and which use resources including content, tools and communications, as and when needed in that process.
Learning as a process, moderated by the pedagogical approach appropriate to a particular individual or group of learners, dominates, with the resources including content supporting the learning process - not the other way around. These resources may be fixed or variable, stable or unstable and may vary from learner to learner and context to context. This approach2 places much greater emphasis on the learning context, the characteristics of the learners, and the conditions for learning, as well as the learning needs and objectives. It is a constructivist rather than instructivist approach. It aims to understand the learner in their 'eco-system' and all the factors within that eco-system that influence effective learning. The use of technologies for learning need to be examined within that eco-system and pedagogical decisions arise not just from learning objectives but wider learning conditions. The ICCA factors Toolkit has been built to assist organisations adopting e-learning to understand these wide factors that influence successful take-up and outcomes.
The evaluation of the Learning for Living resources was approached from the framework of the factors that had been identified within the ICCA Toolkit. The evaluator then interpreted the results from this exercise within the broader context of what has been learned about e-learning as described above. This report describes what occurred in the pilot and later draws some conclusions and recommendations.
...continue to scope and scenario
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