I’ve got lots of respect for Tom King, but I’d say he’s underselling the depth of the problem. In my view, DOD dollars are the only thing propping up the current system.
I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone, outside the DOD / ADL who doesn’t think SCORM and AICC are over engineered pieces of junk. And the LMS / LCMS products and vendors engender pure hate at every contact point whether purchaser, content develoeprs, admins or end users. Do a couple of white-papers do anything to help remedy the situation?
5 Comments
its words like these that make me wish i couldn’t read
Amen, i love it when SCORM makes you build these fragile content structures and then LMS’s that start with a “P” just disregard or demand requirements beyond SCORM while saying they are compliant. I guess they are if that means the developer has to recode their whole runtime. I tell most of my clients to hire 3 developers, have them look at the standards, pick what they like and build their own standard-then make sure they write a integration doc so i can scope the job correctly. Nobody in corporate are going to share their elearning so half of SCORM is useless to them. Most of my clients don’t even want multi sco’s.
Interesting stuff…thanks for the update:)
‘Completely broken’? Perhaps people are being too harsh. E-learning works great for compliance and many types of training. If it is so broken, I dare anyone to find a Fortune 500 company willing to expunge e-learning and/or an LMS from their organization. Would they replace it all with books? Tapes, Classrooms? Web pages? Yeah, I’ve never seen any of those be sucky experiences.
Regarding ‘over-engineered junk’– I’d agree everyone wants simplicity, but they also want both power and flexibility– and they don’t get active in the process of the specs. Criticism is easier work. Someone trying to get code to work with a spec just dropped in their lap or levied on them is never going to like it– regardless of the simplicity.
Are traffic laws completely broke because a visit to the licensing bureau is a bad experience, drivers change lanes without signaling or speed, or poorly designed intersections back-up? I think the regulations, agency, and enforcement are good (except when it takes my time or I get pulled over). I think there is parallel to consider there.
It takes effort as well as intelligence to implement a spec from scratch. Once in Vienna, I met an Italian speaker who found the AICC spec online and managed/wrote a compatible LMS with no outside help. AICC is a far simpler spec. I’ve seen non-browser based content that implements AICC content communication. I’ll go on record that at the higher implementation levels of the spec, AICC packaging and course structure is unnecessarily complex, but the entry levels are magnitudes of order easier than SCORM. I’ve successfully hand coded many AICC Course Interchange file sets from Excel or Notepad. I wouldn’t dare try that with SCORM.
Maybe a bigger challenge is e-learning design– poor instructional strategy decisions are amplified, not eliminated by elearning and an LMS. I think there is too much stuff forced into an LMS that is poorly designed/built, shouldn’t even be elearning or shouldn’t be in an LMS in the first place.
Content too can be over-engineered, I’ve seen people attempt overly complex Simple Sequencing that cries out for 30 minutes with a human instructor in the loop instead. ISD can get simpler too, not just specs.
Content also gets under-designed, under-funded and can have poor workmanship. It pains me to take mandated training at a big company and see it is called e-learning and it is LITERALLY A PPT that I read to myself followed by a ‘performance assessment’ of 6 questions to which the answers are either ‘B’ ‘All of the above’ or ‘False’. At least they only wasted every learners time instead of also wasting resource on production materials and ISD.
Ok, now I’m ranting too. :-)
@Tom - My response turned into a post. :-P
http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2008/07/17/why-elearning-is-dead/
3 Trackbacks
[...] Brooks Andrus This is the blog of Brooks Andrus. Here, at irregular intervals, you may find digital noise centered around the activities of an early 21st century technologist. I work for TechSmith Corporation, but this web space and the views found on it are entirely my own. Skip to content « The Elearning Industry Is Dead [...]
[...] and solve future learning challenges. And we’re willing to fix what’s broken.Much has been discussed (for a very long time) about what’s wrong with SCORM. It is a subset of the greater [...]
[...] and solve future learning challenges. And we’re willing to fix what’s broken.Much has been discussed (for a very long time) about what’s wrong with SCORM. It is a subset of the greater [...]