ePublishing still important to eLearning

2004-12-03

I came across this today, eLearning is not ePublishing, from someone who has a bio, but no name that I could see. My response? Yes but decent ePublishing won't hurt.

Some good stuff in here:

Too much of what passes for e-learning consists of displaying several pages of content (with or without a cute story line) and then taking a simple multiple-choice quiz to ensure short-term retention of the vocabulary and concepts. Alternatively, now with the advent of “virtual classrooms,” we also see more organizations saving all their web meetings as hour-long files for passive listeners to suffer through. This isn’t e-learning, it’s e-publishing.

I'd agree with that. And this:

it gets all messed up when we start at the other end: “We have a lot of content, how can we make e-learning out of it?” (Easy, we get this PowerPoint-to-Flash conversion program and…)

Exactly. But let's look at it another way.

Publishing does not equate to learning, but learning can still be helped along by effective publishing, at least if you have materials that have been designed along the lines described in this piece; matching teaching methodologies to desired outcomes.

Here at the Distance and e-Learning Centre at USQ the idea is that Instruction Designers do work with course authors to match design to outcome, and the resulting materials are then published. And no this is not done with PowerPoint, although there is that as well.

I think that good content management for the web, ePublishing, is so rarely encountered that people tend to stop seeking it, possibly never realizing what real content management could do for them. But I believe that we can transcend PowerPoint, by providing good content creation tools and delivery environments. See my other posts on this matter via del.icio.us.

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