eSpok - Company blog

When I talk to the boss of a training company, I always hesitate before saying the word: “e-learning”. Such a bad word which, most of the time, smacks of “old and bad experience”, “bad quality”, “not our philosophy”… It sounds bad… but also, in my opinion, this is a little bit unfair!

Even the best would have to give a simple and clear definition of this word… but,  as the article devoted to the subject on Wikipedia reminds us, there is not one definition, but many. And this is precisely the problem! So, instead of telling you what e-learning is, let me tell you what e-learning is NOT:

1. e-learning is not blended-learning, but a part of it. Blended-learning consists of diversifying the way and the support of teaching so that the student doesn’t feel bored after two weeks of training and remains stimulated and motivated and keeps concentrating. In a way, everybody already proposes a kind of blended-learning because it has been obvious for many years that the classic face-to-face classes are not enough; that’s why, we should be aware that training that mixes individual lessons, group lessons and phone lessons is blended-learning. However, the key point of blended-learning is, most of the time, the electronic support of e-learning which can be used to introduce a personal workspace for reviewing and practising and/or online classes. Indeed, as efficient as time with the tutor or the other students can be, we do believe that a successful learning process should allow (or impose) a time per week for personal work and to support this we do believe that e-learning - as (not) presented in this article - is the best support.

2. e-learning is not (always) multimedia-learning or interactive-learning, but it should be! E-learning - or more exactly “old e-learning”- can be as boring as a classic paper support (books and so on): indeed, what is the interest of giving a quiz with questions and answers on an e-learning platform if it looks like the one on paper? For sure, this online quiz will be accessible from anywhere thanks to the Internet and the correction will be available immediately without waiting for the tutor to do his job of correcting it. But that’s the way one may have defined and supported e-learning ten years ago! And it’s not enough because nowadays everyone knows that in the balance these two real advantages may weigh less than the obstacle that the electronic interface can represent for a lot of students. E-learning is more than accessibility and availability: it must also be interactivity. Add MP3, videos, pictures… to your exercises; communicate with the student from the correction of his exercises… let the students interact together by sharing interesting multimedia content they encounter in their daily lives… E-learning should be more than the two dimensions of a sheet of paper: it depends on you to create as many dimensions as you want! (NB: but keep it simple, that’s the basis!).

3. e-learning is not self-learning, or it shouldn’t be (ever)! Either as the core or as an extra of the training (the two extreme cases), e-learning is - unfortunately - often presented as a purely electronic way to learn: the student faces a computer, alone with himself, his bravery and his motivation. Considered as a simple tool, e-learning will always lead to at best decreasing motivation, at worst a failure; we encourage you to consider e-learning as a process that includes:
- upstream, consideration of the whole training process (see point 1)
- choice of an interactive platform and creation of multimedia content (see point 2)
- transmission of the content as a task to do and monitoring the achievement of this task
- downstream, request for feedback and feelings

At every step, you - as educative manager or tutor - have an important role to play to let the student feel that he’s closely accompanied. Be sure that this commitment is not so costly in terms of time (a quick answer to students’ questions, short comments on their exercises…) and that at the end it definitely improves the efficiency of your e-learning. That’s the only way to reach the main goal usually assigned to e-learning: reduce the costs, while maintaining a high level of quality.

4. e-learning is not distance-learning, but it can be. If you have read and understood the above points, this may be obvious: first of all, because we encourage you to introduce e-learning most of the time as part of a blended-learning process (with classic classes, etc… see point 1) but also because we advise you to always be close to your student, even - I should rather say “especially”- if he attends a pure e-learning training. E-learning must always be close-learning, that’s the key to success. However, to successfully respond to the needs of your students in a modern way of life (and work), it’s a good thing to propose a pure distance-learning service: your e-learning becomes the main (or the only) interface of this training, thanks to the workspace but also and especially thanks to a video conference system to support the classes. For these cases, you have to keep in mind two key points:
- for a long distance training, it’s especially recommended to respect a blended-learning process (by mixing online classes with phone classes for instance…)
- the video conference system must be available from your e-learning platform and with a share-screen (possibility for both tutor and student to interact on the same document) to keep the process as simple and interactive as possible.

I hope that after reading this article you will agree with the fact that e-learning is not a revolution, and neither is it a useless extra, but a real “plus”. In my opinion, that’s the paradox of e-learning: it was introduced as the modern miracle to change everything in the teaching world but we never gave it the chance to reach these too great and unrealistic expectations. And - what a surprise!- it failed in this revolution, so much so that it can sometimes be considered as the bad word I was speaking about at the beginning of this article.

So yes, human relationships are the key point of any learning process (or prove me wrong!).

And yes, if we keep this in mind, a smart electronic system can successfully support and even improve this learning process.

As a person passionate about education I am very interested in the question “How will education look in 5 years?”

Since I co-founded eSpok together with my friend and partner Francois Xavier around 2 years ago I have been wondering how strong Internet based learning can improve the existing educational model. Advantages like more “flexible” and more “convenient” are obvious but is it really as efficient as, or even more efficient than face to face training? What about the aspect of social learning: are a lot of people not going to schools to socialize?

Recently I spent a lot of time in China and got motivated to learn Mandarin. As my time is extremely limited I decided to take 30min of live training every day in our virtual classroom with a Chinese teacher and an additional 3 hours face to face training over the weekend. So far I am impressed with the positive result of the online learning part. The key to learning Mandarin is correct pronunciation of the different tons which is the greatest challenge for a good distance training solution.  Using her webcam, my teacher allows me to follow her mouth at any moment, which I wouldn’t be able to do with her sitting next to me. Having a good headset and connection allows me to totally focus on her pronunciation, being alone in front of my computer to freely talk without repression. Receiving the vocabulary learned and the documents used after every lesson makes it extremely convenient for me to take 15min in the evening to review what I learned in the morning.

In the last month we twice skipped the face to face training and decided on online training even over the weekend. The fact that nobody has to move, that classes can be taken spontaneously in the evening in pyjamas and that all the materials including vocabulary are already online is very  appealing.

After two months of both online and offline Mandarin training I consider both ways to be equally efficient. Because of online training being so flexible in a lot of aspects, I consider it to be a better solution for busy people.

After Facebook and co have shown us that online socializing is possible and practiced worldwide, I do believe that social learning has a great future as well. The idea of getting to know people online by studying with them and exchanging experiences and information with them sounds very useful, promising and exciting to me.

In the upcoming month I am planning to invite some passionate Mandarin learners in Shanghai and Berlin to join me on eSpok to test and experience social learning.

..as written in “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Pracises in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies” from the US department of education.

As part of the findings, we can read:
“Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

This combined with “cost efficiency” of online learning justifies largely the use of distant learning.

When talking with our clients, it doesn’t always seem clear whether or not they consider blended learning to be a mature and effective option, or if indeed there is a real need and potential market for it. We hear all too often that “it is interesting, but I am not sure that it’s a priority of ours”, or “my clients are not really demanding it.” Some take the standpoint that it is largely an investment in time and that the current climate demands a stricter focus on the acquisition of new customers. Others state that having tried e-Learning as a solution in the past, they found that the students lacked motivation and enthusiasm.

There are some un-truths and oversights regarding this issue, which I hope to highlight here. I am going to try to demonstrate briefly in this article using, as a case study, the successful French company, Telelangue.

1. E-Learning has led to an error of conclusions. Effectively, pure e-Learning which I would define as learning with a computer and a computer only has led to poor results in the past. It doesn’t mean however that blending courses with a computer and a real professor doesn’t work. The tutor is actually extremely necessary in the process of learning and is a source of motivation for the student. Here is an extract of a Telelangue press release in French which has been translated into English:

“Telelangue est la seule société de formation a avoir intégré la présence du tuteur/professeur dès la conception de son outil elearning. Cela lui a permis d‘éviter l’absentéisme et l’échec des solutions d’auto-apprentissage de première génération”

Telelangue is the only language training company that integrates the presence of a tutor/professor right from the conception of e-learning. It allows the company to avoid the usual slow participation of the students and failure of self-learning”.

At eSpok we believe as well that this is a contentious point that needs addressing and that is why so many have failed in developing self-learning methods which work independently from learning with tutors.

2. The market of distant learning is expanding extremely quickly. Soon it will be necessary for all schools to offer a distant learning solution to their customers. As an example, Telelangue has, for the fourth consecutive year, had a growth of more than 25%. Lots of language schools would be happy to have such a growth.

Telelangue, however, is not the only one to propose this. Naturally, English First, as one of the world leaders, has invested more than 45 millions dollars into their online platform Englishtown.com.

It seems that the majority of language schools isn’t focusing on this crucial selling point and is simply content to leave this market open for the world leaders or for those few companies who understand the demands of this market and that distant learning is a more convenient and cost effective option. Telelangue mentions that their blending learning system is up to five times cheaper than normal training solutions. When put like this, it makes a lot of sense.

Our thoughts and advice

It is important to move now:

We are surprised to see how slowly schools are reacting to this issue. The market opportunity is there and we believe that a significant part of the actual market for language learning will transfer to online courses within the next two to three years. It is important from now on to prepare for the future.

Not all schools have the ability to invest 45 million dollars in an online system, but our goal is to provide all schools with the opportunity to start small, where the investment is small and the risks are smaller.

The solution is not to buy another self-learning solution to be sold additionally to the students besides the online courses:

Some of the schools with which we are in contact with are looking for self-learning teaching material, which would be offered to their students as a supplementary learning tool, in addition to tutor-led courses. Doing this would be ignoring the lessons of the past and would in most cases lead to lower student participation. Again I lay emphasis on the fact that to be effective, learning must be blended; the tutor-led courses must be integrated with student-led, self-learning activities.

About Telelangue

Telelangue had a turnover of 27 million euros in 2008. Their growth is increasing by 25% each year. They are expanding very quickly in Europe and now in the US and Asia.

If you want to know more, and you read French, please follow this link: http://www.cursus.edu/?module=directory&subMod=COM&pclass=1&action=getMod&type=1&subject=0&uid=69

I had the chance at the beginning of this week to travel to Hong Kong to attend the 2009 International Conference on ICT in teaching and learning. I would like to thank the organizers as the conference was truly a valuable learning experience. Provided here is a small summary of what I heard at the conference and my thoughts upon these things.

Blended learning which can be defined as alternating classes with a tutor and learning with the computer is considered the most effective way to learn today. It not only increases the effectiveness of the students learning, but it also permits a wider access to education as it makes it cheaper and easily accessible from remote places.

Naturally Mr Peter Olaf Looms reminded us how important it is to think about accessibility so that everybody can truly benefit from education provided. He insisted that a big part of the population (20% if I remember correctly) may encounter this problem of accessibility.

Support of LMS (Learning Management System) and blended learning is now imperative for education organization. The technology is mature and using multimedia and the internet brings education closer to what the learners are actually using in their daily life (websites such as Youtube for video etc…). In order for an organization to succeed in using this new technology it is crucial that the technology functions very well and that it is easy to use. This seems quite obvious but one may not necessarily see this reflected in many of the online systems which have been developed in the past. Another point raised was the fact that a LMS should be student oriented. We should create products for the students and not for the administration of the school and administrators within the school.

Social online learning which will likely be the style of education used in the next generation is not yet totally mature. However, it is really a promising field. I was able to participate in a workshop with Prof. Bebo White from Stanford University. Professor White was able to show us how Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon can be used in the purpose of education. I found it interesting, but the main drawback is that all of these tools are not centralized making it harder to use in the process of education.

Second life is actually a powerful tool (for those who still doubt it). I was very surprised to discover it during the presentation of next year conference by SIM University who hosts the conference in 2010.  We had a tour in Second life where you can easily see different videos, go to different stands, and listen to different pre-recorded speeches. Second Life offers a fun way to deliver content and therefore makes it interesting for using in online education.

For eSpok this conference was a good occasion to consider the future of our product and how we are going to integrate the latest social tools in our product.