INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN FOR THE WEB ”

Today, the e-Learning designs we create should be focused on “The Learner” and on individual learning styles. With some exceptions, these designs must take into account the current infrastructure limitations found in most organizations and businesses. For the moment, because of those infrastructure limitations, we must regard the Web as more like a radio extension and less as a television experience – if we want to heighten multi-sensory learning. (Conversely, we must never regard e-Learning as a reading experience! For, if we do, only a slim minority of our learners will be well served.)

In the future, as more facilities become “wired” for easy full motion video transmission, e-Learning will be treated successfully as a television experience.

At this very moment, however, the Web can be an excellent extension of those qualities that have always made radio a superb communication tool. In order to take full advantage of this radio-influenced power, we must demand that our e-Learning courseware design includes optional word-for-word audio accompaniment to the written text along with “teaching pictures,” animated graphics plus music and sound effects.

Please never forget all those potential learners we should be addressing with our instructional designs. They have grown up in a television age and learn readily from multi-sensory media designs.

As instructional designers our goal must be to serve “the many” with dynamic multi-sensory media that results in knowledgeably designed e-Learning — rather than serving just a privileged “few” with adapted written procedures, adapted PowerPoint presentations and twentieth century CBT designs.

“Education for human freedom is also education for human community. The two cannot exist without each other . . . In the end, it turns out that liberty is not about thinking or saying or doing whatever we want. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves.”

from: Only Connect . . . The Goals of Liberal Education, by William Cronon