The content is in the user, not the medium

When you develop content for e-learning you have to do the same as you would do for anything that's to be published. You worry about accuracy, precision, grammar, punctuation (if you're like that); about depth and breadth; about whether "it" says what you mean and so on. The "it" may be just words or animations or video or pictures or sounds or even all of those, so there are lots of things to worry about.

No-one would suggest that you shouldn't do that, especially if you are developing something that is trying to do justice to knowledge that you are trying to transfer. But there are a couple of problems. The first is a literacy thing - what you write ain't necessarily what they will read. I like saying (because it sounds cool) that content is transformed by use. Really that just means that different users will probably see different things. It's not rocket science, but it is a bit of an issue. It means that you have to be very brave to use behavioural objectives like After working through this module you will be able to ..." whatever.

Because of course there's no guarantee of that. Just as there is no  guarantee that what you said will "mean" what you thought it would, to each reader. Knowledge does not replicate itself  quite like that. It's a problem that has occupied philosophers for years but a lot of us e-learning types don't seem to worry about it much. Not enough, anyway.

I A Richards took the view (I think) that the job of the reader is to understand exactly what the text is getting across. That was way back in the 1920s. Even then, the intention of the author was not part of the toolkit - just the text itself, with all it's time-bound qualities because the way we write changes over time; with  all its cultural baggage and linguistic complexity. Even back then they were ditching the idea that the author is totally in charge of the meaning the reader picks up. Richards wrote a very influential book called The meaning of meaning so if you want to (think you) know what he really said, do read it. And there was an article published by someone called The meaning of the meaning of meaning but I can't find it and can't remember what it said.

So how are we supposed to teach anything with e-learning?

More on that next time.