What counts as e-learning? — from Allen Interactions by Ethan Edwards

This is a frustrating field to be in. In most areas of production and consumption, the consumers of a product can exert influence on the product by the choices they make.  But there are some arenas where the decision makers are not ultimately the ones to gain or lose whether the product is any good or not, and thus decisions get oddly distorted.  For example, the college textbook market is a good example.  Publishers make their money by selling books to college students who have no voice in the actual purchasing decision.  The professor who makes the decision is driven by different factors than those that matter to the learner. Thus, publishers implement features that are of benefit to the professor (like pre-built PowerPoint slides, pre-written tests, suggested lesson plans, etc.) at the cost of features that might deliver more  significant benefits to the student (like readability, effective layout, a lower price, etc.)  If students chose their books based on what would help them learn most effectively, I bet textbooks would look a lot different than they do now.

e-Learning is a victim of this same sort of problem.  A lot of the money that exchanges hands in e-learning (and that’s what drives products and development) is spent on authoring software and LMS system purchases.  Ultimately, these software companies succeed or fail not so much on whether their products provide value to the learner, but rather whether they satisfy the needs of the instructional designers and developers and the larger organizations that use them.

…

And ultimately this just devalues the amazing transformative impact that e-learning can have.  I’m not arguing that cost and time aren’t important factors.  But e-learning requires more than just being online.  It implies that a learner is engaged in a productive, active process.  It implies a larger plan that content is meaningfully linked to the real world. It implies some assurance that meaningful behavior change will result.  If our criteria for e-learning success are limited to “Did you build it fast?” and “Did you build it cheap?” then we’re no longer doing e-learning. We may be doing Rapid Online Information Access Development or Rapid Document Conversion, or maybe something else of value.  It’s important that even while we juggle the administrative aspects of e-learning design (such as timeline, budget, content scope, etc.) we never lose sight of the essential requirement of e-learning to be a vehicle through which we create change in learners’ performance.