E-Learning Council

Five  Inherent Flaws in E-Learning

1. Loss of interactivity with instructor and the lack of motivation provided by a good instructor (insight, enthusiasm, explanation, etc)
2. Physical demonstration of material is impossible.   E-Learning is not focused toward the tactile learner. Just seeing a circuit or water flow or pieces move into a puzzle doesn’t satisfy their learning style.
3. E-learning does not lend itself to class discussion.  Questions from the class can often spark discussion of an explanation of what the learner doesn’t know but should…he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know so he can’t ask questions to learn, or listen to others ask and then discuss.
4. E-Learning lacks of peer-to-peer interaction with others in the same field.

Five Design Flaws

1. Lack of emotion in most e-learning – humor, sadness, joy, mystique are often removed by the bureaucratic process.
2. For thousands of years, people learned by listening to stories.  Most E-learning design ignores that and does not use the classic elements of story telling in its design.
3. Dumbing down of courses to the lowest common denominator.  We don’t have to explain everything.  That’s what links to resources are for.
4. Frequently E-learning course do not ask us to demonstrate true mastery.  Rather they test our  memorization of facts and some concepts. E-Learning course Evaluation is rarely a practical demonstration of learning.
5. Most eLearning is a lecture in a “cartoon” form. It is a brain dump-type scenario from the SME, without all the accompanying side information as found in face to face instruction.
6. Freedom to fail? too often, answers in an eLearning course are too obvious. The learner does not have the option to fail, which is one way we learn what the right way is. And often the ability to review information, or gain additional information is not available as it would be in a classroom setting. Quite a bit of learning in the real world comes because wrong choices are made and we have to learn how to fix the consequences.