Asking the right questions of the right people.

George wonders why, "As an industry ... we really don't have a defined process of asking our potential market what they are using to learn."

A couple of thoughts. Podcasting and weblogs are content distribution tools. This plays right into the "learning as consumption of information" model that so many people accept without even thinking to challenge it. 

Much of instructional design assumes that the instructional designers are smart, and the learners are dumb. Many designers therefore see no reason to ask the "dumb" learners how or what they are using to learn.

Understanding the Market.

I think it's safe to say that many organizations don't have a proper read of the elearning industry. As I've stated previously, elearning is an aggregate industry - it relies on developments in various technology and research fields. For example, tools like blogs, wikis, iPods were not developed for learning. They were developed for communication and content creation/sharing. We simply adopted them for learning purposes. As a result, we misread what's really going on if we don't take time to see what people are using for communication and personal learning. I think we have failed to capture the mobile learning market (it's all there, we just don't have a clear vision of how we should do it). We have also failed to grasp the effectiveness of peer-created content (we focus on learners dialoguing about our content, but we rarely involve them in the creation stage). In order to understand what's happening, organizations need to poll and survey their potential market (Duke CE is currently running a public survey on tools used for learning). As an industry, however, we really don't have a defined process of asking our potential market what they are using to learn. I wonder why...

5:07:26 PM    

Moodle becoming larger player among Learning Management Systems.

Moodle and British Open University.

It's hard to overstate the significance of this announcement (and others that I'm sure will follow): British Open University switches to Moodle (.doc). More here.

4:56:38 PM