Principles of good teaching and good computer conferencing

.Aug. 30, 2000

Report: Online Training 'Boring'
by Michelle Delio

Businesses are enthusiastic about online learning, but whether many are actually seeing any real benefits from their Net-based education programs is unclear, according to a recent study.

Seventy-seven percent of the interviewees in a study by Forrester Research said they don't track the number of workers who take advantage of online education offerings. And two-thirds don't measure whether the skills that people are being taught are actually improving their performance on the job. See also:
Online Schools Mean Business
Dear Student: We Pay if You Stay
Home is Where the E-Classroom is
Learn more in Back to School

But one thing is certain: Managers are having a hard time getting employees to sign up for the courses. And students who do sign up seldom graduate; the content providers and consultants Forrester interviewed for the report acknowledged that some online courses suffer from dropout rates as high as 80 percent.

Forrester interviewed training managers and knowledge officers at 40 global companies. All but one company was already using online training.

Many of the managers who responded to Forrester's survey said they were struggling to convince employees to utilize "boring, text-heavy content," and were meeting real resistance from employees who preferred traditional person-to-person training methods.

According to the report's author, John P. Dalton, much of the problem is caused by firms who simply convert standard instruction manuals into Web pages.

According to Dalton, studies show that training is least effective when it is "reduced to simple reading" -- especially when the text is presented on computer monitors. Studies have shown that onscreen reading retention is 30 percent lower than with printed material.

The report compares many of the current course offerings to the "tentative, simplistic e-commerce initiatives of 1995," Dalton said. "Instead of marketers creating static online brochures, now its trainers are creating boring online textbooks."

Management consultant David Anderson of Anderson and Associates feels that Web-based learning serves a valuable but limited role.

"No matter how good the training courses are, the need for effective in-person teaching and coaching won't go away," Anderson said.

Anderson agrees with the findings in the Forrester report that indicate companies need to focus online training efforts onto specific business goals, such as increased sales and improved customer support.

More than half of the study's respondents used online training only to teach programming and application software skills. So-called soft skills -- like conflict resolution, customer relationships, and negotiation -- are largely ignored, but are crucial for today's business world, which revolves around customer service and teamwork, Anderson said.

"Soft skills are things you simply can't learn from a Web page. You need face time to learn how to deal with people," Anderson said.

"When you're interacting with a Web page you can be as uninterested, sarcastic, or rude as you like," he said. "The Web page won't call you on it. People skills need to be taught by people."

Anderson worries that Internet-centered companies will soon offer training only in technology, leaving their employees adrift when it comes to dealing with other people.

Some companies are doing it right. When General Electric hired Cognitive Arts for training consulting, the company discovered that 80 percent of GE's customer center calls involved less than 20 percent of the procedures that were taught during GE's traditional course of training.

Using a combination of in-class instruction and online simulations focused on the most common customer requests, GE improved its agent response times by 10 percent. And because GE's Net-based solution let trainees experience practice calls rather than simply watching others performing the task, training time was cut in half.

Dalton believes that even though many of today's efforts may under-perform, Net-based corporate education efforts will continue to expand and prosper from to dramatic cost savings. IBM reports that it avoided more than $80 million in travel and housing expenses during 1999 by globally deploying online learning.

"The marketplace will get even noisier as firms discover that much of their early e-commerce investments in content management and personalization tools, knowledge bases, and search engines have a vital role to play in Net-based corporate education," Dalton said.

"Expect e-commerce stalwarts like BroadVision and Interwoven and support veterans like Ask Jeeves, Kana, and Support.com to invade the e-learning space -- offering their clients extensible content authoring, tracking, and distribution," he said.

Anderson agrees that online training will be an active market. But he points out that many executives -- the people who are most enthusiastic about online learning -- are also not overly interested in taking the courses, according to the Forrester report.

"Executives don't like training online, according to several of the survey respondents, because it prevents them from shaking hands and doing some networking," Anderson said. "It's like what they say about business school -- the only reason to go is to make connections.

"And it's hard to connect with people when your focus is on connecting to the Internet."

 

Related Wired Links:

Building a Jetsons-like Community
Aug. 26, 2000

Home Is Where the E-Classroom Is
Aug. 22, 2000

Venture Folk Saying No to Youth
Aug. 21, 2000

Online Schools Mean Business
Aug. 18, 2000

Read a Good E-Textbook Lately?
Aug. 15, 2000 http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38059,00.html
http://www.versaware.com
http://www.mhhe.com/primis/online/ebookstore/viewebook.html

The Future of E-Textbooks
Aug. 15, 2000

Teaching Teachers to Teach
Jul. 11, 2000

One study indicated that students retain only about 30% as much from what they read from the screen.

On college campuses and high school classrooms, the full-blown digital revolution is still a few semesters away.

Currently, there are textbooks available on CD-ROM. But the big change will come in early 2001 when students
start using their laptops to read interactive Web-based textbooks enhanced with multimedia content surrounded
by tools for communication and study.

In three studies, Peter Navarro, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of California Irvine
gave electronic textbooks a high grade. His findings show that students in a fully interactive, multimedia cyber
course performed as well or better than a control group in the traditional lecture hall.

Rich Wohl, general manager for education and professional services at Versaware, has seen additional studies that support Navarro's conclusions.

One of the leading textbook publishers, McGraw-Hill, has invested $5 million in NetLibrary, one of several
companies that provide the software and applications to create electronic books. McGraw-Hill is in the process of
digitizing hundreds of texts.

But Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill higher education, said it is too soon to settle on just one form of
digitized books. By mid-fall McGraw-Hill's own website, Primis Online, will offer one hundred textbooks in pdf
format, the simplest delivery system for digital books.

"We are doing a lot of different experiments with form, content, and function because (we) just don't know how
ready students and teachers are for interactive texts. We still may be at the stage where students are more
comfortable with electronic books that resemble print books," he said.

At least 50 of these books are available now though delivery systems created by Versaware, Wizeup, and
NetLibrary. The industry expects to have over 2,500 electronic texts available by the end of next year.

A student reading an e-textbook on a computer screen can do more than just click on a word and get a dictionary
definition. Audio and video plug-ins allow for pronunciation guides and clips of lectures. Other functions enable
students to highlight, type notes in the margin of the text, take quizzes, and interact with their professors.

Cyberprofs can customize the text by adding, removing, and rearranging textbooks, primary sources, and articles.
They can create a Web syllabus that links directly to assignments and adds materials as needed throughout the
semester. Class progress can be monitored with reports on student usage and self-grading quizzes.

David Serbun, director of technology for the college division of the Houghton Mifflin Company, announced it too
would begin producing electronic texts with NetLibary. But Serbun warned that textbook conversion is not that
simple. "This isn't like Stephen King just publishing an e-book," he said.

Currently, Houghton Mifflin has online companion websites for each of its 200 major titles offering more than 30
tools designed to increase learning via the Web.

WebCT and Blackboard are the leaders in creating compendium sites. Currently more than 48,500 faculty members use WebCT to teach courses to over 6.9 million students at 1,494 institutions in 57 countries.

Blackboard, which began as a collaboration with the students and faculty at Cornell University, has grown into a
user base of more than 2.1 million people at 3,600 colleges, universities, K-12 schools, and other organizations in
every state and more than 70 countries.

Serbun and others believe fully integrated electronic texts are the next step from compendium sites. Speech
books should speak foreign languages and physics books should move, he explained. "It's hard to teach processes
on static pages, but by using interactivity, streaming audio, video, and animation we can place ideas in their
proper context, which makes them easier to understand."

Despite his enthusiasm, Serbun cites several issues that are slowing down the revolution. In addition to getting
content digitized and buying electronic rights for the material in books previously published, one serious question is how publishers will educate an entire population of teachers in usage.

"While we think of the campus as already wired, and while students are very computer savvy, there is still a great
deal of inertia on the part of professors to use electronic texts," said Serbun.

In Navarro's studies, professors reported they are spending twice as much time both developing and teaching Web-based courses and complained they are doing so without supplementary pay.

Besides faculty resistance, publishers are struggling to figure out how to store content correctly so it can be
uploaded into various platforms. "This is a very complicated issue for everyone in the book business right now, not
just textbook publishers," said Ed Stanford.

And what becomes the unit of origination in this new world? Does a chapter stay a chapter? Should publishers
continue to sell individual titles –- or rather subscriptions to information?

"We're very excited about all this," said Stanford. "It's just important to realize we’re only at the Pre-K level when
it comes to knowledge about the electronic textbook."

Janel Crider, an instructor at Purdue University, tested one of the Net-Library interactive textbooks in her class on
communication and emerging technology in 1999 and was most impressed with the annotation features.

"My students told me it was like having me there looking over their shoulder and pointing out what was most
important." Knowing students tend to tune out while they are studying, Crider said her annotations help snap
students back to reality every few minutes and keep them focused.
 

Related Wired Links:

Read a Good E-Textbook Lately? Aug. 15, 2000 Miracle Engine's Tank Is Empty Aug. 7, 2000 King 'Plants' News on His Site Aug. 1, 2000

New Award for E-Publishers Jul. 17, 2000 This E-Book Is a Free Book Jul. 17, 2000 Book Confab Techno-Crazed Jun. 3, 2000 E-Books for Writers, Not Readers Apr. 22, 2000

The Metatext Digitial Textbook solution

Helping students, instructors and publishers harness the power of the information age, MetaText is a powerful platform created specifically to bring digital textbooks into the college classroom. MetaText titles are web-based textbooks enhanced with interactive and multimedia content and surrounded by tools for communication and study. Designed by students and instructors for effective learning and teaching, the MetaText platform provides benefits to each of these groups:
 
 

Students   Search the text and annotations, hear glossary words pronounced, find credible web sites.  Click for instant access to supplemental and reference materials.  Use instant-grading quizzes to check your progress and identify what should be read next.  See notes from your professor embedded in your book customizing it specifically for your class.  Communicate with your professor and classmates through integrated email and bulletin boards.

Instructors   Customize the text by adding, removing, and rearranging textbooks, primary sources and articles.  Create a web syllabus linking directly to assignments with our simple syllabus editor.  Add materials as needed, throughout the semester, instantly.  Gauge class progress with reports on student usage and self-grading quizzes.  Interact with students conveniently through announcements, integrated email and chat rooms.

Publishers   Make the textbook indispensable for every student through communication and grading features.  Increase sales by offering a text that is more useful during the semester and impossible to buy used. Reduce costs by allowing custom publishing in the digital realm. Produce digital ancillaries at a lower cost while offering greater value than traditional paper-based instructor editions, test banks, workbooks, and overheads.

Today we are working with the world’s leading publishers. Together we are creating a new class of education resources that are more adaptive, more interactive and more easily explored than traditional bound books.

The result is a learning portal for students with desktop access to all the texts, tools, and information they need to learn on their own terms.

The Instructional Design Lab at netLibrary is translating the most promising current research on computer mediated pedagogy into high-quality professional tools ready for today’s college student. The web holds the potential for changing the way we learn and thus the way we think, and we believe these changes must be made thoughtfully and with a deep understanding of the learning process.

The accessibility of the web combined with the credibility of academic journals and market-leading textbooks create a customizable resource without parallel. Instant, reliable, secure access from any web connection means no student is more than a password away from the textbook, the library and the professor’s virtual office. MetaTexts offer the wisdom of books in a smart web-based form for convenience, customization and a more interactive learning experience.

For more information about MetaText, contact: support@netLibrary.com

Bb 5.0 Orientation - getting started  |  Bb Orientation - ways to improve  |  Evaluation  |  Quality on the line-Benchmarks

Dead link http://cvm.tamu.edu/~vaph/klemm/instruc1.html