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[Bob Earp]

I sense the frustration Judy, but wonder if it was related somewhat to your children's birthday ;-)  

Having just had a granddaughter turn 11 and a grandson 9, I too wondered what we had really achieved in online learning since I started with Plato (a DOS system running on a custom Pee Cee) back in the stone age.  Compared to the evolution of technology, I suspect not much.

You raise valid points though, but what you say is not new and likely the byproduct of the technology evolution.  Crappy online learning is rarely due to the tools that are used, just crappy instructional designers egged-on by companies promising perfect eLearning modules with the click of a mouse.  

One of the biggest culprits around at the moment is Articulate.  What a phenomenal marketing concept.  Take a crappy tool called PowerPoint that fools the world into thinking it can make everybody into a wonderful professional instructor or presenter, and with a few simple clicks turn your legacy work into eLearning.  I wish I'd thought of that !!

I shouldn't rant about the tools, sorry, they're not to blame for the idiots that use them.   It's the content we need to focus on and especially putting it into a format that is reusable in whatever "new gizmo" is offered to us.

Statements like "Teachers are quickly moving away from downloading anything and their IT guys are even worse, sometimes setting up systems which disallow downloading a desktop app." maybe true in some circumstances, but that is likely a temporary thing for a temporary reason. That being the decision makers are not knowledgeable, ill informed, or blinded by marketing.

I've so often seen people make radical and very significant (read that as expensive) corporate decisions to use or not use a particular technology or standard, only to change their minds later when they realized it didn't give them what they wanted or needed.  LMS's and CMS's are typical of this.  There was even a time that IT people tried to stop their "customers" getting on to the Internet, need I say more....

I say that we will see a change in current attitudes as I am encouraged by Apple's new education support with iBooks2, iBooks Author, and iTunesU.  Just the fact of offering text books at a fraction of their hard copy price will quickly sway teachers into encouraging downloads, not to mention keeping the books current and all of the other goodies.  And academia using the tools in iTunesU will put pressure on IT people to deliver an infrastructure that support such.

Having said that, will iBooks be the de facto standard for online learning in the future ?  Maybe for a while until the next evolution of technology, but I do know for sure whatever content is in an iBook, on a web page, in a Revlet, and even in some PP presentations, will be used in the new tool !!

My wish (today !) is to get Rev to fix the LC web engine plus continue to develop LC so that we can develop content once and deliver on whatever platform/technology is the flavour of the day.  A very daunting task, but one I have faith in the Rev team and especially the plethora of LC developers around the world to solve.

best, Bob...

PS, oh yes...  I still want to deliver LC content in iBooks !!


On Mar 26, 2012, at 11:00 PM, Judy Perry wrote:

> Sigh.
> 
> It's unfortunately gotten to the point that every time some new gizmo is added to the "suite" my first thought is reluctance to even look at it, wondering 'how long will this be supported?'  On-Rev?  When will that stop being supported?  As long as DreamCard?  RevMedia?  the web plugin?  All of the third-party editors and stop-gap work-arounds and layers of complexity added to using Rev, er, LC?  Wonky/awkward non-xtalk-like syntax?  Commands that have never worked?
> 
> My kids will be 11 tomorrow.  Here's an example of the exciting new world of online learning that they use:

snip...

> Anybody still reading wondering why there's a lot of crap in online learning?  How much better this could have been as a revlet?  But won't be because nobody is going to commit public funds or even private time to doing the same curricular standards correspondence for a technology that, come rollout time, you come to find out had been abandoned by the company years earlier without telling you.
> 
> WHY do we keep doing this?  Because Edu can't pay for what it wants?  This is part of the reason why.
> 
> Judy
> 
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2012, Ray Horsley wrote:
> 
>> I'm in the K-12 education field.  Teachers are quickly moving away from downloading anything and their IT guys are even worse, sometimes setting up systems which disallow downloading a desktop app.  I hadn't looked at building for Web in a while but this is very discouraging to find it's gone.  I had hoped it had been cleaned up since I last worked with it, not abandoned.




Bob Earp
White Rock, British Columbia.