Why E-Learning is killing education:

When I started teaching as a university professor, I did what we all do when we start as an educator I relied on my intuition about what good education looks like and I’ll let everyone in on a little secret.

My intuitions were bad they were based on my experience in the lecture model of education that’s where we talk to people for really long periods give them some textbooks to read and then give them a test that’s what I did I talked to people kind of like right now that was my original sin but I didn’t stop there years later when I was working as an education consultant.

E-learning:

I was asked to design some e-learning and I hadn’t done that before you’ll never guess how I went about it by injecting all the same terrible intuitions into it.

It looks something like this a virtual instructor in front of a virtual whiteboard delivering virtual bullet points I’m pretty sure when we thought of using virtual reality and education this isn’t what we had in mind unfortunately, this is what e-learning looks like today and no one’s learning anything from it.

OLD SCHOOL METHOD FOR EDUCATION and E-Learning:

Think about how absurd that is so how did we get here? well, I talked about intuition but let’s actually, go a little bit deeper our earliest instincts around education are based on storytelling we know this from archaeological data.

People telling other people stories people teaching other people using human stories it’s how we learn and it’s how we communicate fast forward 40 000 years.

We now have beautifully scalable mobile-enabled e-learning that we can use to teach people on opposite ends of the world the same thing at the same time but somewhere between the caves and the clicking, we got so focused on building this technology.

We forgot about the only thing that matters in education the people e-learning can be used to teach everyone good hygiene practices to stop the spread of disease.

E-learning can be used to teach everyone everywhere sustainable living practices to combat the climate crisis these are global problems that require global solutions and e-learning should be contributing to them but it isn’t it isn’t because we’ve forgotten about the people.

We’ve forgotten about the way people learn if there’s one thing that everyone in this room can do to start refocusing their efforts on people and to start doing e-learning that works it’s this start telling stories again not because it’s what we used to do but because the science says it works.

We know that scenario and story-based learning can accelerate our time to expertise on a given task because stories simulate the way we learn through experience we know that scenario or story-based learning is more engaging than click-then-quiz e-learning.

The reason why is that stories create Empathy in turn creates personal meaning and it’s personal meaning not clicking that drives engagement finally we know that scenario or story-based learning is the best way to teach complex skills like problem-solving collaboration and creativity precisely the skills that workforce of today and tomorrow need to solve our biggest problems.

Biggest Problem in E-learning:

let me show you how this works Steven and his 12-year-old granddaughter Rose are going to the bank to open up her first bank account she just made a traveling basketball team and he wants to be able to send her money while she’s on the road.

they’re super excited they booked the meeting way in advance and it’s a big moment for their family when they get to the bank and start filling out the paperwork things start to go sideways a bank employee is immediately suspicious of them both she thinks there’s a discrepancy in their bank account.

But more importantly, she thinks that the identification that they’ve provided is fraudulent she grabs the ID abruptly leaves the room, and escalates it to her superior shortly after that the cops roll in they handcuff Stephen they handcuff 12-year-old robes bring them out to the police cruiser and arrest them.

So I know you might be thinking I mean maybe this is just a big misunderstanding or maybe the ID is fraudulent but let’s add some color to the story truth is that Stephen and Rose are Indigenous Canadians and the ID that the bank employee thinks is fraudulent is their official government issued status card this is a true story happened a few months ago in Vancouver.

Now for argument’s sake let’s imagine that sometime before the incident the bank employee passed with flying colors their e-learning module on unconscious bias they listened to the virtual instructor in front of the virtual whiteboard deliver virtual bullet points.

They crushed the drag-and-drop activities and after 12 tries they got perfects on the quiz do any of us think that this kind of e-learning experience would prepare the bank employee to deal with this situation properly?

We shouldn’t know that 20 20 minutes after a traditional classroom-style experience you’ve already forgotten sixty percent of the content now I want you to compare that to how you feel after having heard Stephen and Rose’s story.

I guarantee that everyone in this room will remember 12-year-old and Rose handcuffed and you’ll remember it in a way that will change your behavior so what if the e-learning experience was simply a simulation of this story?

What if this story and others like it form the core of the e-learning that bank employees had well if we did it that way we’d be simulating a real-world experience and therefore accelerating expertise.

it’s the one based on the human story we need to start telling these human stories again it’s not going to be easy it means you can’t keep cutting and pasting content into an e-learning module it means giving up the avatars giving up the dragon drops giving up the quizzes but it’ll be worth it because if we can get back to telling these human stories again.

We can get back to why we all got into education in the first place we can get back to empowering people let’s start telling stories again thank you.