Learning Conversations

Hi Mark

Not sure how safe it is to bracket accessibility and usability together? I completely agree with your comments re: accessibility, but I think usability can be different because of the different attitudes, inclinations and expectations of the users. Usability on most commercial web sites is driven by the need to hook people in, keep them there, help them find stuff and encourage them to buy it. With e-learning, the users are more likely to want to be there and they will be less inclined to quickly skim and move on. There may also be good pedagogic reasons why we don’t want to spoon-feed them; for example, Nielsen talks about putting the main points first on a page and not having too much of importance ‘below the fold’. For e-learning, there may be a good reason to want to develop something over a few paragraphs and not ‘give the game away’ up front. Also, in assessment or discovery/simulation e-learning, there may be good reasons for not wanting hot spots to be nice and obvious, or to insist that users take some actions in a particular order or enter data in a specific format.

I’m not trying to offer excuses for poor or ill-considered usability, but I think it does need to be tempered by the particular situation or context.

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the comment. I do think that accessibility and usability are part of the same spectrum. We’re trying to get our “audience” to use our systems and materials.

However, I agree that usability is much more about user motivation and expectations.

I also agree wholeheartedly that we need to make explicit pedagogic decisions about every interaction a user makes with our systems and content. That’s why I like tools like Exe (www.exelearning.org), which force you to think pedagogically.

In too many cases our learning designs have very little to do with pedagogy, and are more to do with bells & whistles.

I do find it very interesting that you say that: “With e-learning, the users are more likely to want to be there and they will be less inclined to quickly skim and move on.” That’s the exact opposite of my experience. Most users, particularly in the corporate world, have little motivation to access the e-learning materials we give them, and want to get them out of the way as soon as possible. Personally, I think that’s because, in most cases, the e-learning experience we provide is dull, tedious, pointless and a waste of time.

I think a lot depends on what e-learning means to your particular context. Personally, I would like the definition to be as wide as possible - to include not just content delivery, but interaction with peers and experts too - but to most corporate L&D people, it means SCORM content packages hosted in a Learning Management System.

Mark, Jim,

I completely agree with you bringing usability and accessibility together here.

WCAG 2.0 are useful guidelines to apply to help create accessible eLearning.

But many in the educational community are also interested in learning which is personalised to the needs of the learner. So, for example, I may like learning via video, or may need any text to be spoken to me.

While this ‘user-personalised’ approach may have less currency than WCAG, it can help ensure people using eLearning systems are able to learn in a way which works for them - it goes beyond ‘usable for everyone’ to ‘gives me a great learning experience’.

The upcoming BS8878 standards of Web accessibility in the UK already mention user-personalised approaches to accessibility alongside traditional web-standards (WCAG) approaches.

I’d suggest you check out AccessForAll (http://www.cen-ltso.net/main.aspx?put=202) and my keynote slides from Unitech 2010 on the advantages of user-personalised approaches to accessibility (http://www.iu.hio.no/~frodes/unitech10/036-Hassell/hassell.pdf).

I’d be very interested in hearing what you think.

Jonathan.

Hi Jonathan,

I do the like the core idea in the AccessForAll - ie. that of providing materials in the ways the learner prefers, and remembering those preferences - although I wish they wouldn’t use learning styles as an argument. That theory was discredited years ago.

I don’t think there can be any philosophical objections to this approach.

The only objections will be that of cost and time… We’ve got used to building inclusive websites and learning content, and know the techniques to use. Yes, it’s not perfect, and it’s still expensive - but at least we only build the materials once and don’t need complex content management systems to handle changes of themes etc.

On the time front - you’re right to say we need standard ways of doing this sort of thing - but setting standards takes a huge amount of time. Until that happens I can’t see many smaller players putting in much investment in the personalisation approach?

I hope I’m wrong.

Perhaps the question should be, or could have been, can the resources given using elearning allow for pupil differentiation without explicit change? An experienced teacher would argue the best form of differentiation be by teacher / pupil interactions in class with use of personal feedback to judge understanding.

That said, technology can break down the embarrassment of asking the obvious question in class for the weaker student.

Continuing the discussion in previous comments, could the explicit use of customized CSS be the way forward? Or, to pick a style for a pupil based on teacher knowledge?