Find out what peas and onion rings have to do with instructional design as Marie Jasinski interviews Saul Carliner, internationally recognised expert on e-learning, information design and technical communication.
As an assistant professor of information design at Bentley College in Massachusetts, USA, and a consultant, Carliner has a foot in both ivory tower and business reality and moves easily between both worlds.
In this fascinating interview, Carliner hops from soapbox to soapbox with alacrity, at all times interesting and often controversial, nimbly pursued by Jasinski who asks probing, insightful questions.
The discussion opens with Carliner observing that instructional design is not truly research-based and nowhere is this more true than in e-learning spheres.
Carliner asserts that the technology is generally far in advance of the practice and until we have seen the practice we can’t research it – we simply don’t know which techniques will be most effective.
According to Carliner, instructional design needs to stop calling itself a model and start calling itself a framework, AND it needs to be backed up by a philosophy so people can understand it.
A large part of this interview concentrates on Carliner’s views on learning management systems and learning content management systems. As far as Carliner is concerned, the jury is still out but he perceives learning content management systems as one of the most complex design issues and one that is made even more so by the surrounding hype.
He uses a number of industry best practice examples (eg Microsoft Office Help) to demonstrate that reusable learning objects do work and are not necessarily akin “to using someone else’s bathwater”.
An advocate of customising learning objects to fit purpose and contexts of learning, Carliner maintains there is no need to reinvent the wheel when a little polish will do the trick.
Carliner discusses the importance of communities of practice to the instructional design world and canvasses content brokering to manage the glut of information. As well he supports the notion of paying for knowledge - “brain power”, in the gospel according to Carliner, shouldn’t come free.
Whilst MIT might be giving away their content, Carliner concludes that it’s the value adding interaction that brings the content to life and makes it meaningful.
Carliner concludes the interview by speculating on where we will be in five years’ time. He anticipates progress may well be slower with 20% of content in industry and 10 to 20% of content in universities online, e-books won’t rule the world but customised textbooks will, and industrial e-learning will see the rise of brokers.
