The recent economic turmoil got me thinking about the dotcom bubble, and in particular some of the extraordinary claims made for e-learning at that time. In the workplace, experts claimed that 90% of training would be online by 2003 and fortunes were made and lost on such promises.

Closer to home the Scottish and English e-university experiments came and went, and school initiatives such as NLN, NGFL and, more recently, BBC Jam shone for a while and then winked out. Large-scale e-learning in the corporate sector has now embedded itself within the more sustainable and holistic field of Human Capital Management. In public education, efforts continue to realise the tangible benefits of learning platforms, while the development of e-learning content remains something of a craft skill.

One of the most persistent problems I have experienced in designing good e-learning is specifying the pedagogy in functional requirements with sufficient clarity, so that a) the technologists can build, and b) project leaders have enough confidence in the improved learning outcome to justify the investment. Since 2000, great new technologies have made the development process faster, and the outcomes more interactive, but the challenge of specification has persisted.

The recent emphasis on personalisation (leaving aside the political baggage that the term now carries) re-presents a pedagogy challenge that has been around since the start of e-learning: because computers can respond to learners’ preferences and performance, they can, on their own, provide a personalised learning experience as well as giving information to teachers to help them differentiate their teaching. In my experience, making products that do the first of these well is difficult and costly. Persuading teachers to embrace systems to achieve differentiation is even harder.  
 
About eight years ago, my work began to broaden from e-learning to include e-assessment. The use of on-screen examinations in schools and colleges grew rapidly to the extent that most UK secondary schools and all colleges now undertake some e-assessment for qualifications. User satisfaction is encouragingly high (in contrast to the dotcom e-learning period). E-assessment remains a minority activity (most assessment processes remain paper-based) and has not yet made much headway in high stakes areas such as GCSE and A level. However, where used, it is often fully embedded in the learning programme. 

The early expectations of ‘any place, any time’ testing as the key benefit have given way to ‘immediate feedback’ as the transformational outcome. When the results of an exam are known immediately, teachers can progress their students swiftly to their next learning activity keeping momentum and motivation going. Traditional cohort and term-based learning programmes begin to become a little more personalised. 

At the start of learning programmes, on-screen placement and initial assessments are also becoming more popular, ensuring that students embark on the right level of programme (perhaps the most basic form of personalisation) and (often latent) weaknesses in core skills are identified and prioritised. However, genuine formative e-assessment – embedded in the learning programme, to give purposeful feedback to learners – is much more challenging. 

Seminal work on formative assessment from Black and Wiliam focused on rich interpretative feedback, social constructivism, peer assessment, and resisting the giving of grades and scores from assessment. This reads like a list of things computers struggled to do, and ruled out the one thing they were good at! The temptation to leave formative assessment to the humans, though, is overcome by the extraordinary achievement gains that good formative assessment promises (half a grade at GCSE, with the lower achieving pupils benefiting the most).

The three steps of formative assessment are ‘Where am I now?’, ‘Where am I trying to get to?’ and ‘What should I do next?’ E-assessment can certainly help deliver on the first of these. It can play a part in creating empowered, active learners who can understand and describe their learning objectives. The last step is by far the most difficult for technology and, alas, crucial – the drive to action that makes the process properly formative. It relies on detailed understanding of how learners construct skills and understanding. It requires the diagnosis of ‘what next’ to take account of the learning setting (group, teacher led, solo learning, etc.) and the learner’s preferences. In fact, it is the same problem referred to at the start of this article – the difficulty of specifying the pedagogy in a way that can be implemented effectively.

It is encouraging to see some products attempting to provide targeted learning based on detailed analysis of assessment (Heinemann’s Achieve and EDI’s GOAL, for example). The need to persuade teachers to modify their practice and embed these systems before the benefits are fully realised remains a barrier. The weakness of computer-marked, objective questions in assessing higher level skills and understanding is also slowly being dealt with – as computers can present and interpret more complex information, and provide more purposeful feedback.

At a pragmatic level in schools, student-teacher ratios mean that ICT is the only practical way to manage performance information. As more of this data is shared, knowledge management and data mining approaches may be useful to extract meaning from this data for formative purpose – to help teachers identify weak areas of teaching and learning, and give students context for their active learning.

Such systems would surely benefit from access to exam performance information from awarding bodies.  This perhaps suggests new types of school and college support organisations providing teacher and learner management information support through the whole of the learning programme. (As a side benefit, such systems, where the summative end-of-course assessment is intrinsic to the learning, greatly reduce concerns about burden of assessment.) Reliable evidence on areas of weak teaching and learning should also help us to solve the e-learning specification challenge, or at least obtain speedy feedback on whether the e-learning is working.

John can be contacted at john.winkley@www.alphaplusconsultancy.co.uk