Published in
TechTrends, 2001 vol 44, pp. 16-19

and

THE ASTD E-LEARNING HANDBOOK
BEST PRACTICES, STRATEGIES, AND CASE STUDIES FOR AN EMERGING FIELD
Allison Rossett, Editor
McGraw-Hill, 2002

The first feature films were simply filmed stage plays. The then-new medium was used not to do new things, but rather to do the same old things in a different way. Today, of course, movie-makers use zooms, pans, and special effects to communicate in ways that a stage play cannot. With the Web today, we are still coming to terms with what is truly new about the technology. We talk about this astonishing new communications technology using words from earlier technologies, such as "broadcast" and "publish" and "network." Many (often self-described) visionaries have a big problem with that. They fulminate endlessly about new paradigms, and how the Web will transform the world. This is good -- we should be talking about new ways to use this new medium. But the visionaries’ visions often fail to address two basic facts of importance to educators and trainers: first, the network infrastructure we have in the real world of schools and training today are only beginning to be able to support the massive-bandwidth, high-reliability applications they describe in their blue-sky visions of a cyber future. Second, the new medium does not render untrue everything we know about teaching and learning.

Except for highly specialized, internal applications, Web applications today and in the near future must work at 28.8 KBPS. Let’s face facts. It’s a 28.8 world, and it is going to stay that way for the next several years, especially in homes. Yes, you can buy faster modems, but users of 33.6 and 56K modems are often surprised to find that their modem is faster than their local telephone service. There is a limit to how much data a regular telephone line can carry, and a Net connection is only as fast as its slowest component.

Companies, schools, libraries and state agencies might have high-bandwidth Internet connections and intranets, but chances are that teachers planning lessons at home, outlying regional offices and traveling personnel dial in via modem. Modem connect time must compete with other telephone needs over the same phone line used for voice and fax. Most homes and hotel rooms don’t have ISDN, DSL or T1 lines or satellite links or cable modems. Widespread, low-cost adoption of these technologies is unfortunately still years away once you get away from the campus of major corporate or school facilities. Developers of Net-based applications must keep this in mind, or limit their audience to those for whom throughput and persistent connections—and their costs-- are not an issue.

But let’s put aside all that gloom-and-doom and focus on happy thoughts! To what nobler use can we put a new technology than to harness it in the service of education and training? Deliver high-quality instructional materials on-demand, enable information-rich, meaningful communication between learners of all ages across the globe, and do it for free! We’ll all save the world, right?

Here’s another bucket of cold water, team. Putting content on a web page is no guarantee of learning. The Web may be a great way to distribute information, but can you really teach with it? There’s a big difference between information and instruction, and this basic principle is as true on the Web as anywhere. Since the work of E.L. Thorndike at the beginning of the 20th Century, we’ve known that learners learn what they do, not what you tell them. In a recent conference discussion, Dave Merrill made the same point by arguing that instruction requires practice & feedback. Without those two key ingredients, there is no instruction, simply the delivery of information. There may indeed be incidental learning, but you can’t really be sure what—if anything--will be learned. And if you can’t say what will be learned, you can’t call it instruction. Now, some would argue that simply connecting learners to the Internet is valuable in and of itself. Maybe. But for the people footing the bill, that’s probably not enough assurance of a positive return on investment.

The Web is full of information, but it’s amazingly light on instruction. What is needed now is not just presentation but courseware - structured, managed content specifically designed to elicit performance, enable practice and provide feedback. When they have avoided the temptation to lecture, classroom teachers have been delivering courseware for millennia. The principles which apply in classroom teaching and learning still apply to the Web.

The classroom instructors who are adopting the Net as an instructional technology are rather like those early film-makers. There are a great many applications using the Net as a communications medium to expand the traditional instructor-led classroom beyond the campus walls. Technology-savvy teachers have spent the last several years setting up e-mail, HTML lecture notes, chat sessions, listserves, newsgroups, and other asynchronous communications tools. But in most cases, they are using the Net to replicate what they would do in ordinary classroom activities: lecture, assign readings and research reports, facilitate learner discussions, and so forth. That’s roughly analogous to the early films which simply recorded stage plays from the audience’s point of view.

Technology enables many alternatives. Consider, for example, Computer-Based Education (CBE). CBE allows courseware to be delivered without a great deal of real-time instructor intervention, but with lots of practice and feedback. CBE also is private, delivers training and education on demand, and lets learners progress at their own pace. For a generation, research has demonstrated what CBE can do. To be sure, there are limitations to CBE. For example, it is very difficult for a computer to provide meaningful feedback on written responses longer than a few words, not to mention a five-paragraph theme. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of knowledge and skill that is quite amenable to automated delivery.

The point is not that classroom-emulating distance education is bad and CBE is good. The point is that the strengths of CBE and classroom instruction can offset each other nicely. Some classroom instructors use CBE to provide a consistent set of foundation skills, freeing them up to do those things that humans do better than machines. The same could be true in a distance education model, by combining CBE with the technologies for asynchronous group discussion. More generally, we need to get better at combining the instructional formats the technology enables.

We believe three componenets are needed to have an effective Net-based instructional delivery system: management, courseware, and groupware. Let’s look at each one. As a case study, we will use PLATOÒ on the Internet, an Internet-based instructional system which PLATO Learning created in 1995.

Management. Any system that claims to instruct (as opposed to inform) must be capable of placing learners in a managed learning environment which includes the basic functions of curriculum structure, assessment, prescription, enrollment, progress monitoring, record-keeping and reporting. Curriculum structure is a necessary feature of instruction. Implementation of the structure, at the "macro" level at least, is a management function. Assessment is needed because learning is inherently private. Without some assessment and reporting facility, there is no way for a learner, an instructor or administrator to tell how a particular learner is doing. Progress monitoring, record-keeping and reporting are important to provide accountability data for instructors, administrators, and for the folks paying the bill. In addition, the records help administrators who want to manage access to resources, so they can be sure that the people who need the training or education are getting it. So, any Net-based CBE system must provide a robust set of learner-management tools, including performance reporting.

In PLATO on the Internet, learner enrollment, class assignments, and other management tasks are handled through a special administrator’s website, using a browser-based interface with a series of databases in the PLATO Pathways system. The system contains curriculum structures in "instructional paths," which can be assigned to any individual learner or group, in any way the instructor desires. Assessment is provided through an on-line system of placement and mastery tests. The system makes individual prescriptions and assigns resources according to each learner’s path. The system stores records centrally, so learners can log in from any work station and resume work where they left off. The degree of learner control and access to resources is controlled by the instructor. Reports for management and accountability purposes can be generated for individual learners and instructors in a wide variety of formats.

Courseware, of course, is the heart and soul of any Net-based instructional system. The PLATO^® courseware delivered over the Net is identical to the PLATO courseware delivered on standalone workstations. The PLATO library contains approximately three thousand hours of courseware in math, language arts, and life and job skills. The offerings are deep as well as broad; for example, the math series covers everything from how to count, through calculus and statistical process control.

Groupware is the final feature needed to complete a WBE system. Years before the predecessor of the Internet, the original mainframe PLATO system incorporated synchronous and asynchronous communication features such as TermTalk, TermComment, g-notes and p-notes. Years before creation of the predecessor to the Internet, these features anticipated the e-mail, chat rooms and threaded discussion groups Net users are so familiar with today. In an instructional environment, these facilities serve the valuable purpose of facilitating creation of a community of learners. They also allow skilled instructors to implement instructional activities which are complementary to CBE courseware.

In PLATO on the Internet, we saw the need to provide asynchronous communication. We are now evaluating a number of new technologies to upgrade this part of the system.

In 1995 and 1996, PLATO Learning began incorporating these ideas into PLATO^® on the Internet. The pilot implementation was in partnership with Tennessee Tomorrow, Inc., a publicly chartered corporation for statewide work force training. The system saw its 2.1 release in the summer of 1997. Schools, companies, and individual users pay a low monthly per-learner fee for unlimited access the entire library of PLATO courseware. Clients avoid having to purchase software, and pay only for what they actually use.

The system has several components: The PLATO Learning Folder, a Gatekeeper server, a Records server, a Courseware server, and an Web server. These components are illustrated in the figure below.

A set of system files, called the PLATO Learning Folder (PLF), is installed on a local workstation’s browser. The system must have Internet access either through a direct connection to a local router or via a dial-up connection to a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP).

When the learner logs on, PLF establishes an Internet connection with a "Gatekeeper" server. The Gatekeeper validates the user’s ID, then instructs the records server to push the user’s individual learner record down to the workstation. The learner then selects a lesson, and the PLF streams the files using MacroMedia’s Flash, Citrix or proprietary software. When the learner finishes and logs off, the Net connection is re-established and in a few seconds the updated learner record is pushed up to the Records server.

PLATO on the Internet is more than just software. Clients such as such as community colleges and schools can use PLATO as the foundation for their own courseware offerings, while adding local instructional components as appropriate. Partners purchase PLATO account logins in quantity, then can resell them to their local "customers" as part of their own course offerings. For example, a community college might have a contract with a local manufacturer to provide training in ISO 9000 statistical process control methods. The college could use PLATO to assess employees’ math skills and assign individualized review where necessary. The college’s instructors then would create additional customized classroom and distance education activities for the manufacturer. Employees could access their assigned PLATO lessons at the college, from home, from the local library, from a PC on the factory floor: anywhere a computer can bet set up with a browser and Internet access.

To date, thousands of student-years of use have been purchased. Our experience has taught us a number of important lessons.

The need is for a turn-key system that requires a minimum of support. As a result, we spent a great deal of time refining the install and setup procedure, and building a robust set of online helps and FAQs.

Although many of our customers have installed the system on intranets, with all the servers behind a firewall, some of their outlying offices (and employees at home) use modems to connect. In addition, many schools still rely exclusively on modems. Our experience has shown that the system does indeed work with a 28.8 connection. However, quality of service from Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) has been quite variable, and we often have worked with our customers to improve their Internet access.

We have found a wide variation among instructors in their comprehension of the learning environment created by PLATO on the Internet, and their motivation and skill in using the "community of learners" features of the system. Instructors often begin by viewing the CBE components as a one-for-one replacement for their own classroom teaching, and do not grasp the essentially complementary nature of CBE and what an instructor can do. We are finding that for some instructors, the quality of interaction with their learners goes up as they gain experience. On the other hand, particularly in training environments, we have encountered instructors who expect the computer system to require no instructional support. While the system can function that way, our experience is consistent with the research showing that the combination of CBE and instructor participation is the most powerful. A study of the use of PLATO to teach developmental studies math in a distance learning environment was recently undertaken with the League for Innovation in the Community College. It verified the range of instructional options available, and confirmed the importance of active instructor involvement.

Instructional management is such an implicit part of the conventional classroom teaching environment that instructors may not even be aware of its important role. We have found that when placed in the environment of PLATO on the Internet, instructors often tend to underestimate the importance of instructional management, and how the assumptions of the classroom no longer hold.

To meet the needs for instructor and manager training, we have developed an implementation guide and offer workshops for training managers and instructors. We believe manager and instructor training is essential to any innovation, and is certainly critical to any client’s success with PLATO on the Internet.

Since PLATO is designed for adults and young adults, and since it is largely self-instructional, we have found that it is critical to place learners in the correct module. If a new learner is placed in too hard a module, the learner is likely to conclude that learning by computer is "too hard," and become discouraged. If the learner is placed in too easy a module, the learner is likely to conclude that learning by computer is "too easy," and become rapidly bored. It is rare for learners to realize that their feelings are the result of misplacement, and it is rarer still for the new learner to use the learner control built into the system to overcome the problem.

This experience has created the need for additional teacher training, and has emphasized the need for an excellent placement and prescription system as a "front end" to the instructional software. The first version of that system is in use now, and an upgraded system is being designed.

Developing an easy-to-use, complete, practical, reliable and cost-effective solution for delivering training and education on the Internet has required considerable research and development. We have found that off-the-shelf technologies offer only partial solutions, at best. Even when the software problems were solved, however, we found that our work was just beginning. An effective solution requires software technology, but equally important has been expertise in instructional design. The learning environments our clients create on the Net have the potential for both "high tech" and "high touch." They are finding ways to reach beyond the physical limitations of the classroom, but – perhaps more significantly—they are using the system to reach beyond the limiting assumptions of the classroom, as well. As they, and we, do so, we will begin to understand the ways in which the Net really is a new medium.