The absence of sustained demand and a viable link to educational reform only partially explain higher education’s tepid response to electronically mediated learning. The rest of the story involves the nature of the World Wide Web and its limitations as a platform for learning.

From the outset the Web has been a utility for connecting people with people and people with things. Think Amazon.com or Netflix.com, or any of the dozens of sites you use to make airline and hotel reservations. MySpace, Facebook, even YouTube are sites that primarily allow you to see other people’s postings — and then encourages you to share your own experiences. Facebook probably says it best when it describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” Blogs distribute ideas. Wikipedia is a collection of definitions and short essays collectively posted. The Web is primarily used to buy and sell things — books, cars, hotel rooms, old antiques, clothes, gardening supplies, exotic spices, tools, you name it and in all probability you can find a vendor that will sell it to you online.

The fact that the Web is primarily a distribution system helps explain why Blackboard and other course-management systems are the most widely used e-learning technologies across higher education. Course-management systems give students what they want most — their assignments, their course packs, and their grades. This distributional quality of the Web also helps explain why the great majority of learning routines that students can access through and use on the Web — that is, online — are in reality not much more than automated workbooks — multiple-choice exercises that let the student call up discrete learning modules and questions in a largely preset order.

One should not be surprised. The Web began primarily as a network for distributing messages and data among a limited number of researchers in the physical sciences. To run their complex, often collaborative experiments they needed to be able to communicate quickly. For the most part, their experiments produced large data sets that needed to be processed by individual members of the network working in different locations.

In general, mainstream e-commerce Web sites have shied away from the kind of real-time programming and simulation that e-learning’s advocates promised. The routines themselves are expensive to develop, their actual presentation on different platforms hard to control, and the returns difficult to translate into revenue streams. If the product is complex, like a movie in a DVD format, better to have a short preview, a catchy review, and a simple read-and-click order form for sending the movie in the mail.

The moral? Better to think of e-learning modules as things to be distributed on the Web rather than programs to be run there.

(Image from Photobucket.com)