Elliott Masie has reported that he and 11 others – from Singapore, Finland, Canada, the UK and the USA – have met at Harvard in order to discuss the topic of ‘21st Century Skills – A Potential Curriculum’. The idea was to see what set of skills we need the next generation of students to have as they enter the workplace. Among the contributions to the discussion was a paper from the Singapore Ministry of Education (see http://tinyurl.com/yduf98n).

The paper argues: ‘To better position our students to take advantage of opportunities in a globalised world, they need to possess life-ready competencies like creativity, innovation, cross-cultural understanding and resilience’. Moreover, every student needs to be confident, with a strong sense of right and wrong; be a self-directed learner who is able to work effectively in teams and who has a strong sense of civic responsibility.

It goes on to say that: ‘Knowledge and skills must be underpinned by values. Values define a person’s character. They shape the beliefs, attitudes and actions of a person, and therefore form the core of the framework of 21st century competencies’. Students also need skills to recognise and manage their emotions, develop care and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships, as well as to handle challenging situations effectively. It concludes that the key skills for 21^st century success are:

• Civic literacy, global awareness and cross-cultural skills
• Critical and inventive thinking
• Information and communication skills

Comment: This is a challenging and thought provoking debate – and it’s also interesting that certain countries take this whole issue seriously enough to devote significant resources to discussing it. At least it could be argued that we’ve currently got another 89 years in which to come up with the right answers – although, of course, the ‘early birds’ might win the ‘worm’, whatever that might be.

Alan Nelson, of Nelson Croom, which won an E-Learning Age Award last November, has now clarified in print his thoughts – delivered at this year’s Learning Technologies conference – on ‘the good, the bad and the ugly of e-learning’.

He argues that, before deciding on what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ in e-learning, we need to acknowledge that we’re all different (Of course, to quote the well known riposte to this sentiment from a lone voice in the film, ’Life of Brian’: ‘I’m not’), so our experiences and preferences will be different. Moreover, we’re not even consistent about the way in which we’re different – and that means that our preferred learning style will change from situation to situation.

Nelson goes on to argue that e-learning has never risen beyond the lowest two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy as applied to the cognitive domain (remembering and understanding). He maintains that e-learning materials should not only address the higher levels of this taxonomy (applying, analysing, evaluating and creating) but also address Bloom’s taxonomy as applied to the affective domain – which attempts to explain the way people react emotionally and, thus, change their attitudes and behaviour.

Some 25 years ago, two researchers – Malone and Lepper – looking at factors affecting intrinsic motivation, said: “It seems a frequent assumption that learning (and, now, e-learning) is boring and unpleasant drudgery – something one endures only to avoid punishment or to achieve some goal, such as a high-paying job.”

Their answer was to come up with seven factors affecting intrinsic motivation: challenge, curiosity, control, fantasy, competition, cooperation and recognition. Thus, people are motivated: when they are working towards personally meaningful goals; by the discrepancy between present knowledge or skills and what could be achieved; when they can control what happens to them; when they can imagine relating what they are learning to real life settings; when they can compare their performance favourably to others; when they can feel satisfaction from helping others, and when others recognise and appreciate their accomplishments.

This is what ‘good’ e-learning should be, says Nelson, who then outlines three dangers for e-learning:

• If was already bad, putting it online won’t make it better
• Just because it works well in a different medium doesn’t mean it should work well online
• ‘Putting learners in control’ means more than merely letting them click the ‘next’ button

Comment: According to Jacqui Nelson, of Nelson Croom: “We’ve made it a bit of a mission to try and raise the bar in the industry.”

That, of course, is highly commendable and Alan Nelson has made some good points in outlining his view on how to spot the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in e-learning materials. However, the growth in popularity and use of rapid authoring tools, combined with today’s economic challenges leading to cost-cutting wherever possible, means that subject matter experts – and not ‘professional e-learning developers’ – are taking control of producing e-learning content. The days when the person who’s developing e-learning materials will know about Gagne, Reigeluth, Maslow et al – let alone understand and apply their various teachings to the e-learning materials being produced – are fast disappearing.

We are entering a new era in e-learning content creation. Immediacy and expediency, not instructional design fidelity, are the new watchwords. After all – as Nelson says – e-learning today is really only about addressing ‘remembering and understanding’. At such a low level of cognition, maybe any old approach to producing learning will do.

You know you’re getting older when you notice sentiment creeping in, uninvited, to your judgements. In today’s corporate e-learning world it’s ‘dog eat dog’ and, generally, there are no tears shed for those companies who fall behind.

However, one of the corporate e-learning industry’s longest serving companies – PeakDean Interactive – closed its doors recently and, in the current accepted tradition of the industry, instantly passed out of the industry’s collective consciousness. Its passing was unlamented and, indeed, probably generated some relief among its competitors who will not, now, have to ‘pitch’ against it ever again.

Yet it can easily be argued that there would have been no corporate e-learning industry in this country if it had not been for Christopher Dean – the ‘Dean’ of PeakDean – and his trusty partner, Quentin Whitlock. In the 1980s, these men wrote a seminal work – which formed at least one of the pillars on which the UK’s computer based training industry (as it was then) was based.

That book, like much of the US-originated theory and the UK forces’ experience that inspired it, has passed out of corporate memory. Few, now, will even recall Dean’s and Whitlock’s names, let alone remember them with any degree of industry awe or even recall them as ‘real people’.

The passing of PeakDean Interactive leaves Epic as, by far and away, the oldest surviving company on the UK e-learning scene. As the French used to say: ‘Le roi est mor. Vive le roi.’ Although it’s not encouraged in these revolutionary days, maybe those who are constantly knitting their e-learning courses around the corporate guillotine, could pause long enough to drop a swift but silent tear for the good old days.