Rapid e-learning means more than quick tutorials

It seems that if you come from the traditional instructional design community, which means you've spent a lot of your time designing formal, interactive, self-study lessons, then rapid e-learning means doing the same thing, only quicker. There's an assumption that digital learning content must be structured into sequences of screens containing informational material interspersed with interactions of some sort - what I've always referred to as 'tutorials'. In fact, as someone who has spent a large proportion of my life designing CBT/interactive video/multimedia/e-learning (all essentially the same thing, implemented on different machines and with varying media richness), I've always made the same assumption. That's why the 30-minute masters project (which aims to help those who are not e-learning professionals to make a decent showing as enthusiastic amateurs) concentrated almost exclusively on the creation of tutorials.

Now don't get me wrong, I like the tutorial format. When exposition and interaction are combined with care and creativity and used to address the right sorts of learning requirements, the resulting materials are capable of standing alone as a form of instruction, obviating the need for human support and collaboration. But that doesn't mean that other formats might not be more suitable in other circumstances and more practical to produce.

One of the really exciting consequences of the web 2.0 revolution is the emergence of all sorts of new learning objects, designed for quick access when you need something that's just-in-time and just enough:

• Short videos
• Slide sets
• Podcasts
• Mini e-books

Each of these media can be developed using commonly available tools and skills, something that can't be said for interactive tutorials. They are better suited than tutorials to performance support applications, where learning is not the primary objective. What's more they can be as powerful as interactive materials when used in combination with other media, in the classroom, in a distance learning course, in a blended solution.

It's still quite hard for non-specialists to create good interactive tutorials, even of the rapid variety. So if we want rapid e-learning to fulfil its promise, we should not forget that there's more than one way to skin the proverbial.