E-learning joins the class struggle

To a conference on e-learning organised by VNU, publisher of IT Week, I go as a natural sympathiser; but I know that many educationists are not sympathetic at all.

They attack IT-based pedagogy as a linear, mechanistic, high-volume, overly didactic affair that can never replace teachers. Bad enough that e-learning is now backed by Fat Five consulting firms; worse that many e-learning suppliers are American IT cowboys, itching both to dominate the desktop and, inevitably, cram masterclasses on to mobiles.

The critics of e-learning are often unbalanced. As conference chairwoman Jane Massy pointed out, the industry has developed enormously in recent years. In Europe, the e-learning of foreign languages has prospered.

More generally, programmers have authored instructive simulations of taxing business predicaments. Content management systems are spreading. And now they put electronic objects – both for learning and “performance support” – in central object repositories.

Beyond resources and courses, electronic tools for designing, delivering and managing online education are more sophisticated. Analyst firm IDC reckons that the market for e-learning in the EU will grow at an annual compound rate of 108 percent, reaching perhaps $4bn in 2006, or nearly a third of the EU’s overall market for corporate training.

So far, so good. But when Learndirect, the UK’s largest publicly funded e-learning network and a partner of the government’s University for Industry, gleefully reports that “fear and uncertainty in the workplace is fuelling a reskilling revolution”, I get nervous.

And when, against the six hours a week it says people “waste” making tea and coffee, Learndirect campaigns with the slogan “it’s time to dunk your brain not your biscuit”, I get more nervous still. Is the idea really to help people fit learning into their lives with cuppa-sized educational sittings as short as 10 minutes?

E-learning has already focused on return on investment and measures of effectiveness. Certificates are a mania. But alongside the management metrics, the educational philosophy of many e-teachers is alarmingly New Age.

Everyone in e-learning accepts that it must be blended or made a “hybrid” with in-person learning; but the truth is that far too many people in e-learning are far too fond of the touchy and the feely. Content, curriculum and mass instruction aren’t important in e-learning, many argue, and instead they promote holistic, socially-constructed, student-centred, informal, one-to-one tutoring, based on learning paths and individual support.

HR lessons, along with European directives in health, safety and environmental protection, have provided much of the drive behind e-learning. At the conference, sessions were held on the relevance of e-learning to short-attention-span museum visitors and videogame enthusiasts.

In the real world of primary and secondary schools, exams are constantly revised and often devoid of meaning. All that goes alongside a dubious inflation of pupil grades.

The danger that faces e-learning is not just American commercialism. It is also a Europe where, as Madonna opined at her Turner prize speech in London, there is no such thing as best.