Cloning Socrates

A student like Plato presupposes the presence of a teacher like Socrates—my non-elearning friend throws this at me as an unassailable argument in favor of the traditional learning methods.

Closer home, examples of the efficacy of the guru-shishya (teacher-student) tradition abound. The Upanishads (literally meaning “sitting near the guru”) and the Panchatantra (a collection of fables that elucidate issues such as ethics and strategy) have carried forward great wisdom through thousands of years.

The biggest challenge of e-learning to me, therefore, seems to be cloning the teacher and transporting him/her around the world, to be delivered on the remote computers of the e-learning users. There has to be a way of replicating the intense give-and-take and personal focus of one-on-one teaching to hundreds or thousands of students at a time.

The education side of e-learning seems to have cracked this challenge better than the corporate side. I’ve come across several well-written articles on how facilitators/instructors for online courses can adapt themselves to synchronous/asynchronous learning. Some of the useful links are:

http://www.learningcircuits.org/2003/dec2003/hofmann.htm

http://itdl.org/Journal/Oct_04/article04.htm

http://www.internettime.com/itimegroup/people/guide.htm

The third link traces the role of an online instructor from “Driver” to “Guru”!

In the corporate world, however, there doesn’t seem to be any model of using on-line facilitators effectively. I wonder whether this is because e learning in companies usually has specific, short term learning goals or is it because it is tough to find "gurus" for all subject matters? What about “learning organizations”, where learning is a continuous and collective process? While on this quest, it was inevitable that I stumbled on Peter Senge and his model. You can read more about this in:

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm

I guess technologies such as blogs and wiki can support a team learning model. Any thoughts?

(Priya Thiagarajan is a Senior Instructional Design consultant)

Comments

[Mammen]

Is it that important for a corporate e-learning program to have a guru? Most corporate training programs aim to enable learners to apply certain skills or to make them aware of certain policies or guidelines that can have a direct impact on what they do. Therefore, our focus needs to shift from “delivering instruction” to “creating a learning environment.” The opportunities for the learner to do something, to engage in something, and to interact with an environment are more important than what an instructor can show or tell. What it means is that we need to clone “real environments” and not “real instructors.”

[Dawn Papaila]

One key distinction that may apply here is the difference between education, training, and providing access to information for retrieval and immediate use.

The guru educates, a coach (advanced yogi) provides training to a younger student, and artifacts in various forms provide access to information.

IMHO, the common misperception about "e-Learning" is that it stands alone. Regardless of the LOB e-learning (be it a course or an EPSS) is just one aspect of a learning, or Knowledge Management system.

This field is in its infancy and we have given too much power to the sparkly new toy. It is similar to the high expectations that initially existed for television as an educational medium. TV is extremely powerful, but it doesn't stand alone.

(I like this blog!)

[Dale Jones]

FYI - Long before TV was touted as the great instructional medium radio was thought to be the next big thing.

To spin off Anil’s comment… Creating a learning environment is an essential component of any organization that expects to survive and thrive. “The smart enterprise is a high performance organization that allows knowledge, enabled by technology, to grow and flow freely across departmental, geographic or hierarchical boundaries, where it is shared and made actionable for the use and benefit of all.” – Marc Rosenberg
A Peter Senge quote: “Learning is a much more complicated phenomenon than can ever be limited to a classroom. In organizational learning efforts, the confusion of learning and training is fatal.”

More from Marc Rosenberg… www.marcrosenberg.com and www.learningcircuits.org/2005/mar2005/rosenberg.htm

A Tom Peters quote: “E-Learning! We need to talk about ‘e-forgetting,’ because to be successful at e-learning, you must forget the ways of your past.”