Training and learning

E-learning — the marriage of technology and education

Both education and technology have experienced a period of major change over the past two decades, with the latter becoming an increasingly important tool in teaching and learning.

To be effective, clinicians need to stay abreast of new initiatives, techniques and treatments within their profession, whilst the text books and printed materials that learners use can sometimes be out of date by the time they are published.

E-learning is one way that the speed of change currently taking place in clinical technology can be incorporated into education, so it is logical that many medical educators regard online learning as the way forward. However, e-learning is more than posting material on the web — if it is to be used effectively as a teaching resource, the materials used need to be devised by people with the appropriate skills and experience — which means the marriage of technology and clinical knowledge. So, if you have the responsibility for devising an online learning project, where do you start?

1. Know where you are going

When embarking on any project, you need to know what you are aiming to achieve — and e-learning is no different. If you are a clinical educator working on developing an e-learning resource, you must first take time to identify the key learning objectives and measureable outcomes of success as it is these which will drive the whole project.

Typically, the next stage is to look to other online resources for inspiration. However, whilst this can be useful, as we all know some material that is found on the internet can be poorly researched, plagiarised or just plain inaccurate. If using other resources as part of preliminary research, you need to know that these resources have met their objectives, that they been properly evaluated and are cost effective. It is all too easy to simply replicate other people’s mistakes.

2. Use your budget effectively

Good e-learning is not cheap to produce and you have to be pragmatic about what you can achieve with an available budget. This may seem rather obvious, but a small online, budget friendly resource to support a face-to-face course is likely to prove far more effective than attempting to place a whole course online, if a tight budget means that you would have to cut corners in doing so. This is particularly true if you are venturing into the development of e-learning for the first time when you may have little knowledge of the likely pitfalls.

An e-learning resource does not have to be developed in its entirety overnight. Instead, focus on those elements which you can most effectively target with your budget, such as expanded key learning points, access to external resources, formative assessments, student tracking and communication.

Build, test and modify to get smaller elements working exactly the way you want them to. Not only will you find such an approach considerably less stressful, it will also do wonders for your confidence. Furthermore, having data to hand which shows that your work has been a success will significantly enhance your chances of securing the required funding to realise your initial goals.

A huge number of e-learning projects have failed due to over ambitious expectations of how far a budget can stretch, so make sure that your financial projections are realistic and achievable.

3. Jack of all trades or a master of one?

Good clinical educators have a specific set of skills: they are able to communicate, to motivate and to interest their audience — usually face to face. But it is unrealistic to assume that these skills automatically transfer to the very different process of online learning. Producing high quality e-learning materials is far more complex than simply placing pages of text or presentations online. Not only will this fail to engage users, but learners have increasingly high expectations of e-learning, ranging from interactive assessments through to simulated collaborative environments.

Neither can clinical educators expect to be experts in graphical design, animation, programming, multimedia and the host of other components necessary to produce an effective e-learning resource. In short, high quality e-learning development is a team effort.

An experienced medical e-learning developer has the knowledge and expertise to help you understand its potential. They should be able to provide useful examples of good practice and appropriate uses of technology. As a clinical educator is unlikely to be a specialist in the form of technology necessary to create an effective online resource, they will also do much of the technical and production work. Handing this responsibility over to the expert in that particular field frees the educator to focus on what they do best: preparing relevant, interesting and innovative learning activities.

4. Content through collaboration

Having established that producing an online learning resource requires a team behind it, it is logical that the content should be a result of collaboration between an experienced instructional designer whose primary role is to work with and support the educator in establishing how best to develop the style and content needed to populate the resource and achieve the clinical learning outcomes within the specified budget. The instructional designer is responsible for creating the e-learning project model and content storyboards, based upon subject material provided by the educator, who then acts largely in an editorial capacity.

5. Bringing in IT

The third side of the triangle is the IT division which is usually responsible for implementing the required technology for delivering the learning. Again, this department brings a different, but entirely necessary, skill set to the whole process. Unfortunately this doesn’t always run smoothly as the end result of this process is often the deployment or inheritance of expensive learning management systems (LMS) which may fail to meet the needs of both educators and learners.

 These systems also often have functionality far in excess of what is actually required. This means that educators may find themselves limited by operational parameters or LMS templates to such an extent that the final outcome bears little relation to their initial vision or the all important learning objectives.

Furthermore, the combination of technology and education is not always a harmonious one. As experts in their particular field, technologists may wish to promote the latest advances in technology, which aren’t always educationally relevant. An example of this is the investment in synchronous video tools which can’t be used as it is impossible to get learners online at the same time due to work obligations and rotas, or an LMS used as a glorified clinical discussion forum without the inclusion of any e-learning content (yes, it really does happen).

Obviously, the deployment of apposite technology is fundamental to the success of an e-learning project, but it is also essential that the focus of meeting the learners’ needs and learning objectives remain the driving force of any online project. This means that the deployment of appropriate, cost-effective technology should be agreed through the process of educator led discussion with technologists, ideally overseen by e-learning specialists.

6. Taking time to spot the mistake

We learn from our mistakes — in fact getting it wrong can be one of the most instructional parts of the whole learning process. Your online resource may not be perfect first time. The most effective educators are always evaluating their strategies, activities and teaching style with a view to making it better next time.

The same principle applies to your online resource: make ongoing assessment and evaluation to identify what worked well and what could be improved an integral part of the whole process. As this can be very time consuming, few educational e-learning resources are formally evaluated against the original learning goals at present. Instead, success is all too frequently measured in terms of timescale and budget.

However, evaluation is a vital part of the process if e-learning is to be used effectively as a teaching tool. Use your original objectives as a measure: analyse your learners’ results to see how well these objectives have been met and plan changes to content, activities and style accordingly.

Without proper analysis measured against learning objectives, the resource that you have spent time and money developing may not only be detrimental to the learning experience, but may also be used to develop future e-learning resources, resulting in bad practice being carried forward into the next cycle of development. Not only will this do little to enthuse learners about the benefits of e-learning, it may also discourage stakeholders from taking online learning any further within their organisation.

Producing anything of quality takes time and money — e-learning is no different. If introduced as a way of providing clinical education on the cheap, it will fail. Time, skill and experience are all qualities that need to be invested when developing online learning — and not just from within the medical education department.

If e-learning is to be truly effective it needs to be a happy marriage of the skills, experience and knowledge of all the different departments involved: subject expertise or technological knowhow in isolation simply isn’t enough. However, done properly, e-learning undoubtedly offers us the potential to make clinical learning more interactive, practical and current than it has ever been before — which has to be good news for educators and learners alike.

Dr Nicholas Blackwell
FIITT (Fellow of the Institute of Information Technology Training), Director of the Health Education Research and Development Unit at the University of Leicester Medical School (www.heradu.org), and Managing Director of OCB Media (www.ocbmedia.com) a providor of e-learning facilities to the medical industry.

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