Trends in eLearning Curriculum

The trends in eLearning Curriculum can be summarized by generational changes and disruptive technology advance to suit the new generation:

This the age of ”Nintendo children” -- raised on video and computer games, Walkmans, the Internet, etc. Ref.  http://www.games2train.com/site/html/article.html

--They work at jet speed. 

--They multi-task – doing homework while watching TV, 

--Always talking to their friends with headphones on, 

--On-demand access instead of sequential. 

--Graphics as main theme and text for elucidating it. 

--"Connected" experience” --Interactive learning, by playing and fun

Trends 

• “A picture is worth a thousand words”!!!

Hence, the learning content i.e. curriculum is going more graphical, interactive with more images, audio, and video files along with text.

• “Adaptive Learning” 

Hence, the need of the tailor-made content instead of standardized content. Student does not want to pick and choose from mass of content based on their requirement. Students want learning more suited to their own learning needs and adapted intelligence to gradually become complex as student start understanding the complex concepts.

• Objective Learning or Outcome based learning

Ref . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcome-based_education “Outcome-based education is a student-centered learning philosophy that focuses on empirically measuring student performance, which are called outcomes. OBE contrasts with traditional education, which primarily focuses on the resources that are available to the student, which are called inputs.” Example:-Objective of session could be “Student will be able to add 2-digit addition after this section”.  After the course, student can be assessed with 2-digit addition questions for measuring the student performance. If student scores above 80%, he can proceed for next section else sequence of learning can be adapted for explaining the concept again.

•  Connectivism

Learning is not limited to individuals working their heads out in the deep concepts but emulates the classrooms with students and friends connecting together using internet tools (chat, whiteboards, desktop sharing, video etc) irrespective of geography and time. This connection is in tune with the trends of growing connectivism and social networking evident with increasing mass base of face book and twitter.

•  Participative Active Consumer

Today’s learning is not one-way communication where teachers impart lectures in monotonous mode but is 2-way communication in form of questions, assignment, problem solving, lengthy discussion over shared learning content.

The learning content starts with basic concepts and material which evolves with active contributions from students their comments, notes, annotations, tagging into a more useful content with semantic and meaningful tags (something like our old notes for fast track exam refreshers).

However, this has additional advantages of sharing and thought of multiple minds. It also is digital content with all advantages like find, search, retrieve etc.

• Open Society

There is a trend towards open society where there are no proclaimed experts and no predefined institutions or university authorized for providing learning. But, anybody who can provide knowledge and contribute can be part of this learning phenomenon.

Teacher or Expert can become publisher and write learning in form of blogs and provide knowledge and solve the students’ problems.

Technology Trends 

Technology has to keep pace with e-learning trends to be able to meet the demand requirements.

• The Content development is maturing the way other industries are working. Content is developed as modular granular components (text, images and video) separately and then assembled and aggregated to create the actual e-Learning product. 

• This promotes re-use by allowing the content being utilized in multiple place and product (composition pattern).
• This promotes parallel development by allowing people expert in their areas to develop. e.g Graphics expert developing images, author developing text content, Animation artist developing the animations.
• This also allows for better management over content development by breaking single content into multiple constituents and tracks their progress instead of older method where one author would be working on a single book for years.
• This also allows for “Objective Content” where content units can be linked to their objectives. Allowing for intelligence for adapting content based on the change in objective or changes in better ways of achieving the Objective.

New Specification like SCROM, QTI, and DITA all are based on the same concept of content unit’s aggregations into e-Learning content.

• With content going more digital (mix of images, video, animation), new editors are coming in which allows creating content by assembling this type of content text, images and video.   

The content writers are aiming for more colorful, intuitive and animation learning keeping up with the trends of technology change.  This innovative content makes the learning fun and play and keeps up the interest of the students.

The editors not only allows the content development but adding tags, annotations, comments, notes to add further value to the content. This allows for adding the relationship between objectives to a content unit.

This also allows the Content development based on the Objectives. Thus, “Outcome based content development”.

• Learning Management system (LMS) or eLearning content Delivery systems are getting very intuitive allowing for getting feedback from the learner on the go and adapting the learning sequence and content based on the learner’s needs and skill level.

It mixes the content with periodic assessment to assess skill (measure outcomes) and then change the further sequence of learning based on the outcome/score.

Specification like SCORM has student interaction and feedback collection mechanism which can dynamically drive the learning sequence (Sequence Navigation).

• ELearning Delivery system are getting more connectivist(Web 2.0) in nature.  It allows the multiple students and teachers to connect to with sharing the learning in “Virtual classroom”.

Students can interact over Instant messages (IM), white board (similar to blackboard) , Q&A and forums.  The tele-conference, video-conference, desktop sharing, file sharing al;l features are possible for virtual connectivity and presence.

They can further mark, tag, circle, write notes, underline (almost do anything which can be done on a paper books) to add meaning and write personal contents.

All these transcripts can be saved or recorded for references later. The content with additional notes can be saved and searched like other digital content.   

• ELearning content creation is also getting more open. It is no longer limited to “expert area”. The content today is no longer monologue or standard flow of text but collection of meaningful transcripts and conversation developed over chat, discussion and arguments.  

Past students, hobbyist, Subject Matter Experts and Student all can freely interact without any agents in between to share their thoughts and get feedbacks for improving the content.

Students can freely post their doubts and questions over forums and get the multiple answers which explain the content.

Internet technology, Social Networking, Social Networking Tool and Standard Specification are leading the changes in eLearning Curriculum.