David Pecaut

The Future of E-Learning

By David Pecaut

Let’s look at e-learning from the perspective of our children. Children are exposed to the Internet from an early age. It’s as much a part of their lives as television was to the previous generation. Our experiences with the Internet as adults, and those of children, can help illustrate the notion of the e-learning curve.What we’re finding today is that the youngest children are picking up the Internet and technological concepts the fastest. We are living in a new world that is going to keep changing at the pace that we’ve experienced recently.

Our children are already living with that pace day-to-day, but those of us who’ve been around longer are still getting used to it. If you really want to know where things are going in e-learning, you have to look five to eight years out and a number of things are already clear.

First, the underlying technical drivers are entirely predictable because they are an accumulation of scientific wisdom and breakthrough research that is 30 or 40 years old.

The first driver of the revolution is Moore’s Law, whereby the computing capacity any of us can purchase will fall by half in cost every 18 months. The second revolution is Gilder’s Law, named after US technology business commentator George Gilder. It states that every nine months, the amount of information you can transmit doubles. This trend is accelerating faster because of technologies like fibre optics and the ability to manage digital information through optical networking, and will likely continue for the next 10 years.

The third driver is Metcalfe’s law, named after Robert Metcalfe, who founded 3Com Corp and designed the Ethernet protocol for computer networks. He conceived the notion that a network is only valuable when you add people to it. If you have 10 people in the network and add another 10, the value has not doubled, but increased by four times.

So think about our world in e-learning 10 years from now. Distance communication is essentially free, computing power is enormous and we’re fundamentally connected all the time. Until the age of the Internet, there has been a fundamental trade off or tension between two very different ways of communicating and teaching – or two different dimensions.

One is the richness dimension. Richness is about that kind of interactivity that offers depth and breadth all in one place. The second dimension is reach. Your biggest reach experience may have been watching television with 25 million other people after President Kennedy had been shot, or the first man walked on the moon. These are historic, seminal moments when many millions of people tuned in and were touched simultaneously.

So what does the new technology do to this paradigm? It breaks the tradeoff between richness and reach. A wide bandwidth, free communications and the power of Moore’s law means we can have enormous richness, huge simulation power, and the ability for interactivity. All of that, and enormous reach. The power to reach millions of people all doing the same thing, at the same time, off of the same servers, with the same software.

The possibilities for education are boundless. The new e-learning paradigm allows for enormous richness and reach and we’re only at the beginning of the e-learning curve. Achieving the full spectrum of e-learning has several implications for schools, businesses and people.

First, it is revolutionary technology for our public schools. One very good way of dealing with cost issues, without undermining either the quality or availability of education, is by using technology to break the richness/reach paradigm. E-learning offers new hope for delivering a deep and broad learning experience at a fraction of the cost. E-learning also has profound implications for classroom size. It presents a real opportunity to enable individual-paced learning to move outside the walls of the school, creating equal opportunity for schools in remote locations.

There are also major implications for corporate training. Training, both obvious and hidden, has become one of the biggest costs in most Canadian corporations and small businesses. E-learning technology enables a revolution in the cost of delivering training that is mission critical and fully accessible. It will open up opportunities, drive down costs and ultimately improve productivity.

Canada started in a great position. We had more distance learning programs three years ago than almost any other country in the world. Unfortunately, most of the progress in the 24 months has been in the US and Europe. We have not applied the online technologies to date in our colleges, our universities and our corporate training programs. The opportunities to sell it don’t exist just in Canada, but also in Europe and abroad.

So what should our objectives be moving forward?

1.Let’s stake out an agenda to have leadership in our public schools around e-learning. This is an opportunity for dramatic quality improvements and sensible cost reductions. It is also an opportunity to level the playing field for students, no matter where they come from, who they are, or how small their schools are.

2. Let’s take leadership in our businesses, workplaces and non-profit organizations. We are going to be the leaders adopting this as a tool for the new learning environment and getting the productivity benefits but also being able to learn at home.

3. Let’s look at this as a new industry. We’re leaders in the technology of the Internet, but we’re very much followers when it comes to services online. We have an industry in Canada that’s about one 60th of the size of that in the US. This is something that Canada is good at, and where we can become a world leader, but we’re squandering that asset. Others are building the online universities, colleges, trade schools and high schools. Let’s stake our claim on some of the $18 billion industry that’s going to be built over the next five years.

4. Finally, let’s have a very broad vision of what leadership in this phase means. Fundamentally, e-learning is about democracy, about civic responsibility. It’s about finding our relationships with ourselves, our governments, and our enterprises.

We have a unique geopolitical position. We have a strong history of excellence in education in this country with deep roots and capabilities. And we have a technology industry that is still one of the global leaders. The only question for us is, do we have the will as a country to pick up this mantle of leadership and seize this opportunity?

David Pecaut is president of the iForm-ation Group and chairman of the Canadian E-Business Opportunities Roundtable.