The past week was busy both in my personal and professional life as well as in the world of IPT 525 – E-learning Principles & Practices. There was a whirlwind of discussion around instructional architectures and learning objects. Often, at times, it was difficult to keep up.
An interesting thing occurred over the course of the week, as often they do in online forums. The class began to draw their own conclusions about the subject being taught. Our instructor, Bruce Kennedy, offered up his own insights that I thought was worthy of presenting here on this blog.
Regarding Instructional Architectures
As illustrated in a previous post, there are four different instructional architectures to choose from when designing instruction.
- Receptive
- Directive
- Guided Discovery
- Exploratory
Looking at these architectures, from the top down, the Receptive architecture tends to take an objective approach. Learners are passive while receiving instruction and this form of learning is easy to develop and deliver.
The Exploratory architecture takes a constructivist approach. Learners aren’t necessarily guided to a conclusion. They form their own conclusions from the content presented to them to form a mental model that is meaningful to them. Learners take an active role in their learning and for developers this form of instruction tends to be more difficult to develop.
Regarding Reusable Learning Objects
There was much discussion about Learning Objects over the course of the week. Learning Objects are really the equivalent to lessons, a collection of Information Objects (chunks of content) compiled in context to a learning objective.
The discussion shifted to what is the difference between E-learning and web-based training (WBT). I agree with our instructor with his conclusion, which is the two are not the same.
E-learning is not the same as WBT. I would consider this class an E-learning class, but would not say that it is WBT. An E-learning course can mimic most, if not all, of the same interactions that a F2F course has based on the technology and strategies used.
In other words, think of WBT as stand-alone, perhaps a Learning Object in and of itself, and E-learning as a collection of Learning Objects. E-learning is really an environment, or platform, learners enter to draw from the available Learning Objects to construct meaning, relevance and solutions to problems they encounter.
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The beauty about such conclusions (including my own) is that they are not necessarily right or wrong. The only way to confirm or disprove such conclusions is to actually apply them and learn from the results.
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