Week 3: Instructor-led vs. Learner-led

For this discussion, let's focus on the differences between and purposes of instructor-led vs. learner-led eLearning courses. What: 1) content areas, 2) learning audiences, and 3) types of learning activities are best addressed in instructor-led eLearning courses? Learner-led eLearning courses? Why?

Initial posts discussed definition of terms, with some color on individuals’ observations. One of them being that most any course must start being instructor led before it can move on to being learner led. There was a question about whether e-learning, because of the design work going in to it, is inherently instructor led. But, this was correctly pointed out that making resources available isn’t the same as deciding in which order to take them in.

Joni injected the topic of “relevance” and questioned if this could be established by instructor led learning. My personal feeling is this question was a bit of a red-herring. The question of relevance is frequently decided before the learner ever starts the course. As to the question can the instructor establish relevance, and maybe I’m misunderstanding the question, the answer is a resounding yes.

The pattern most of the group had experience with was grounding the students, then moving on to learner-led activities. Interesting about that is the number of people in the group whose background in teaching is with high school age students. Much of the material for this class assumes we are dealing with mature learners with a high degree of self motivation. This is frequently not the case, and as e-learning becomes more common, driving tools down to “immature” learners will be more and more important.

My best contribution was pointing out that we have to work with less than ideal students. As organizations and groups want e-Learning as part of their organization, the more designers need to be aware of the actual students they are dealing with, as the ideal solution may not be the best solution for the actual students. I feel this is my best contribution as Dave assigned an inspiration point for having provided a real world example of some of the challenges faced in creating e-learning tools.