Now, I think we’re starting to see a demand for more sophistication. The industry is growing, the technology is getting easier to use, and people are empowered to understand and try new things.

You blog is a good example of the changes in the industry. Just a few years ago, no one would have known you and benefited from your experience and expertise. Today, you’re able to influence training that’s built all over the world. Pretty amazing.

I just get uncomfortable when we start to call a slideshow a “course.” It sometimes seems like the elearning is defined as “slideshow with a quiz at the end.”

We had the same problem at a company I worked with. The state required 2 hours but it only took about 30 minutes to get through the content…a very boring 30 minutes, I might add.

One way to prevent harassment is to tell the people going through the course is that if they harass they’ll be subject to taking more courses.

What I have in mind is something like Amtrak’s reservation system (or Marriott’s, or a bank’s retail-customer system): lots of stuff going on, most of it in the form of transactions that add up to some custormer-valued whole.

You can assemble these transactional molecules in many ways, some guided by particular scenarios. For example, the agent at the station probably does a lot more ticket-issuing; the agent on the phone does a lot more what-if comparisons.

You could (and my team did) assemble clusters of learning, making clear what someone needed as prerequisite skills. A simple nontechnical description helps: “This course shows you how to report arrival and departure times.” (In other words, if you don’t want or need that, don’t take the course.)

This is in no way endorses micromanagement; not everything that can be counted, counts. Far too often, though, the online learning system (or LMS or what have you) is sold to decision-makers at a high level, and tracking means control means I know something, even if it’s not worth knowing.

As for compliance training, I worked on an online, prevention-of-harassment course for which one criteria was that it had to take at least two hours to complete. This was because (at least at time time) the state of California required supervisors and managers to complete two hours’ worth of such training.

So if someone finished in 90 minutes, she wouldn’t have met the standard.

Higher education seems less likely to impose the kind of control that I’m concerned about. My concern isn’t with providing structure and steps to follow. I’m more concerned with the kind of micro-management that occurs in many corporate elearning projects, in which the learner is so tightly controlled that they can’t easily review information or skip what that they know.

Often, the learner has no menu (they can only click a Next button), so they don’t even know what the structure of the information is. Happily, I don’t recall seeing this approach in higher education courses, but I’m not as familiar with that world.

I’ve worked on several projects that provide structured yet flexible courses through what are essentially HTML pages. Probably the most relevant example is a series of four courses on consultative sales (business-to-business sales that require you to learn a lot about the company you’re trying to win as a customer).

Each course in the series was roughly equivalent to a two-hour online course, so the whole thing required about 8 hours of online work. The materials were designed in HTML with lots of embedded and pop-up Flash interactives and simulations.

The company offering the series gave learners a high-level overview of what each course covered. A learner would then open a course and see a full-sized web site with a menu on the left that showed the detailed structure of that course’s info. Each page had an entry in the menu, so the menu provided direct access to each step or concept. The HTML pages were occasionally long enough to require a bit of scrolling and always included Flash interactives.

All four courses were one big simulation based on a story, so learners had a good reason to start with course 1 and go through everything in order, or the simulation wouldn’t make sense.

However, we didn’t *require* the learner to go through the materials in order. The learner could easily go back and review something or could skip ahead if they were confident that they understood the material. The beginning of each course summarized what had happened in the story so far.

The project was designed for people who wanted to improve their sales (it wasn’t required for certification, for example). We designed the simulation activities so the learner would discover for themselves if they understood the material and could gauge their own ability to apply it in the real world.

If instead learners had been required to demonstrate competency, we wouldn’t have changed the course design to control the learners more. We would have collected data about their performance in the online activities and possibly added a final activity as an overall assessment.

Again, thanks for your thought-provoking question!