Why has eLearning been slow to catch on to Web 2.0?

We’re witnessing the second generation of the internet now, folks. The beginning was the internet as information source. But the dawn of social networking—starting with LiveJournal and Friendster, and evolving into today’s technologies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram—has made the internet into a source of connection. This is Web 2.0, where information is not just a static object to be accessed at will. Instead, information is a conversation-starter. It’s for sharing, connecting, circuit building. The purpose of information in Web 2.0 is to start a conversation so that a community of users can grow up around it and re-purpose it in creative ways.

But eLearning has been slow to catch up. Learning Management Systems (LMS’s) still style themselves primarily as information delivery systems. In my experience, when professors want to do something truly “2.0-like”—have students blog, create a wiki, publicly share course content in whatever manner—they’ve had to go outside the LMS to do it. Many high schools still forbid extra-LMS activity altogether. Slowly but surely, the tide is shifting, but it still begs the question: why has eLearning been so slow to “catch on” to the new way of conceptualizing information that Web 2.0 represents? Here are two theories:

• educators are nervous about sharing ideas in the Wild West of Web 2.0 If your bread and butter is the information you create, you’re understandably nervous about “opening it up” to be re-mixed and re-purposed. Your tenure depends on ownership of your ideas. This isn’t an insurmountable obstacle—after all, we’ve found ways to share content in the academic space and still give credit where credit is due—but the rules of information sharing in Web 2.0 aren’t as cut and dry as the Chicago Manual of Style and probably won’t be for a long while yet—if ever. 

• educators still think of teaching as a “top down” process where the professor is the “sage on the stage.” Even educators who are conscious of the Web 2.0 paradigm shift and love to think of their classrooms as a collaborative learning space struggle with this one (and yes, I speak from personal experience). We got our education way before the internet was a thing and the “learner-centered classroom” was all the rage. It’s hard to break our preconceived notions of what learning and teaching should look like.

 Overcoming these stumbling blocks requires us to fundamentally rethink not only what we do in the classroom but who we are as teachers. New metaphors of the teacher’s role—for example, curator, concierge, network administrator, and most delightfully, game designer—offer a lot of promise for helping us do this. In a subsequent post, I’ll think through some of these metaphors and consider what a seriously-undertaken adoption of one or all of these identities might look like in the classroom.

In this post, I’ve considered the consequences of Web 2.0 primarily at the non-profit university level. But I believe my comments about a need to fundamentally rethink our paradigms apply to for-profit eLearning companies, too. Those who take eLearning 2.0 seriously must rethink what their product is. It can’t be simply the information that is for sale, because many very credible experts have taken to the web to offer it for free. It must be a specific approach to that information—and in particular, what the company’s product enables learners to do with it—that takes center stage in an eLearning company’s marketing efforts and instructional design.