Does President Obama Support Locking Your e-Learning Content?
The gist of the article is that “locking” navigation, or forcing users to view all content, is needlessly constraining and unproductive.
Part of the hurdle, I feel, in gaining adoption of this concept is that course owners invest a great deal of time and effort in the development of content... it seems counter-intuitive to allow users not to view all of it.
Here are some quotes from the article:
Unlock access to information. Think of your course content like a supermarket. The shelves are filled with all sorts of items. Give the learners a shopping list (performance expectations) and let them do the shopping.
If you send them to the store and they come back in 10 minutes (because they already knew where everything was located) or an hour later (because they needed to orient themselves) it makes no difference. You’re not assessing them on how they shopped. You’re assessing them on buying the right products on the list.
Let the learners prove what they understand. Whether the learner looks at a screen or not is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that they know the information well enough to demonstrate understanding.
Don’t make your course linear. […]By using a linear approach you hinder your options and possibly make the course less effective.
Tom suggests using a scenario-based approach by placing the learning in situations where they need to make decisions relevant to the goals of the course. Although he cautions:
This doesn’t need to be a complex design process with elaborate scenarios. It could be simple problem solving questions that guide them through the information.
Hard to argue with this!
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