All I want for Christmas…
No other time of year is so charged with memories as the hearth-warmed days of the holiday season. As the nights start earlier, the weather turns chillier and we gather to string lights and sing carols we begin to remember those earlier days. Remember when Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penny delivered two-inch thick colorful catalogs to salivate over. While the Christmas catalogs are still around if you look hard enough, in these days of Amazon.com and iTunes their ubiquity is no longer assured. There was a time when every child huddled over their Wish Book and compiled their lists for Santa.
It’s with memories like these dancing in our heads that we’ve decided to offer our eLearning wish list. What we hope the industry will get or give in the year ahead. What we’d like to see under our tree that would move eLearning forward and make it as cool as it could be in 2010. So, sit back, pour yourself some mulled wine or a cup of cocoa and see if our list matches yours.
An Insanely Great Open Source LMS
There seem to be two types of LMSs out there; the really slick, feature rich proprietary systems… and the open source puppies that even a mother couldn’t love (yes, I’m looking at you Moodle). Yes there are a few of the proprietary systems that are dogs too, but who would consider those unless you were stuck with them? Why would we want an open source solution? Think of it this way, there are millions of school kids to whom eLearning will be the only way to learn starting about… now. If a single proprietary LMS becomes entrenched it will be as if someone patented books and licensed the technology to anyone who wanted to publish a textbook. It would be a monopoly of the worst kind. On the other hand, a great open source LMS would create a level playing field. Anyone could create great lessons and offer them to all students (not just those content creators with enough money to purchase a license). It would be a free marketplace of ideas. The best teacher would triumph over the best business model. The students would be the winners, not the shareholders. And isn’t that what we’re all in this for? Thought so.
Really Real Development Tools
You shouldn’t need an IT department to create courseware. Wait. I’d like to amend that sentence because there are quite a few systems that allow anyone to create courseware without an IT department. I should have written… You shouldn’t need an IT department to create courseware that doesn’t suck. That’s the choice right now isn’t it? Hire a team of developers to create cool interactive courses or convert a PowerPoint presentation into a lesson (or, worse, a Word document). I don’t know what you’re doing when you’re using a Microsoft Office product to make eLearning… but it isn’t teaching. And all you IT folks out there, don’t get me wrong. You are, in fact, my peeps. It’s just that you have become fat and happy off of eLearning. You’ve begun to act like the MCSE certified prima donnas from the late 1990s. You aren’t the solution anymore. You’re getting in the way of the really important people in the process, the Subject Matter Experts. I hate to say it IT folks, but it isn’t about you. It’s about the teachers and the students, especially the students. We need tools that simplify the process, to get it back to those two groups and get everyone else out from between them.
A Home of Our Own
If you had the great good fortune to be involved in the 3D animation boom of the late 90s you might have been a member of the preeminent industry organization perhaps of all time. Though it’s glory has somewhat faded, SIGGRAPH, an offshoot of ACM, was amazing to be a part of back then. Their conventions were what you’d imagine visiting Hogwarts Castle might be like… wizards everywhere. Where else could you go to a symposium on virtual life in the morning and attend a detailed step-by-step analysis of the math behind the pod racer sequence in Star Wars Episode I? You couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a few geniuses. Where is that sort of organization for eLearning? Don’t tell me to look at the eLearning Guild. No comparison. And ISTE is more of a teacher’s thing. We need an organization like SIGGRAPH to generate some excitement and to attract the geniuses. Because that’s what this industry really needs…
Some Excitement
There shouldn’t be much that generates more excitement than learning. It is the single coolest act a human being can partake of… and, yes, I mean even in comparison to that other exciting act. There is nothing more empowering, nothing more mind expanding, nothing more miraculous than to suddenly understand something that you never understood before. Why then do most people think eLearning is boring? Because the industry has been hijacked by a group of people who never understood that, or simply forgot it. The eLearning industry is led by people who think that Articulate and Captivate are the greatest applications in the world, by people who think PowerPoint makes a reasonable tool for creating courseware, by people who have a fiscal interest in maintaining the status quo. Look at the courseware you’re using today. Does it look like it was designed in this decade? Is it as cool, as interactive, as attractive as you’d expect courseware to be in the last months of the first decade of the new millennium? We’d like something to come along and thrill us about eLearning. Is that asking too much?
God Bless Us Everyone
So that’s our list. It’s not very long but we’re pretty happy this year. We’re pretty content with what we have. We at Standard Imagination have been blessed with great clients and even greater co-workers. We’ve had a chance to work on some cutting edge stuff this year. As we look at the year to come, we don’t know what problems we’ll get to solve… but we know this, we’ll bring to it as much talent, enthusiasm, and imagination as we have to all of our projects. So, from our family to yours… Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Hopeful New Year.
