Michael Allen's Guide to e-Learning, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5Executive's Guide to Good e-Learning

Excellent e-learning is an investment that pays for itself over and over again. It's ready to go any time learners are ready for it. Each positive e-learning experience energizes, focuses, and enables yet another learner to be both more personally successful and able to contribute more to the organization.

Differentiating the Good and the Bad

While energizing, focusing, and empowering e-learning is the goal, e-learning often falls short because traditional instructional design principles are either misapplied or used inappropriately. Common sense would say to abandon poor practices when they yield little success, yet they are seemingly ingrained and live on. I don't like to criticize earnest efforts. Even poor e-learning often takes considerable effort. But I do hope to dislodge organizations from adherence to ineffective principles frequently followed with something akin to religious fervor. It's only right if it works; otherwise, it's wrong regardless of its source.

Conversely, when we find approaches that work reliably, we should use them. And share them. And we should continue to explore and evaluate so we can discover new and more effective means to help learners learn. We should be guided by values, not habits; by realized benefits, not traditions.

The eLearning Manifesto and its list of desired e-learning values have received ...