XplanaZine

When you’re talking about integration, the bottom line is ultimately user experience. Whether it’s the battle for home entertainment of e-learning portal dominance, the user, like the customer, will always be right. Online teachers face this phenomenon everyday. We are integrating learning styles, tools, technologies and stuff we can’t even imagine into this thing we call a course. We do our best to anticipate what the users want in this integration and try to guess how they will respond. Sometimes we are successful while, other times, the results are interesting, disastrous, or just funny.
My good friend Laura Gibbs is teaching an online Mythology and Folklore class. Below, I have pasted a recent selection from her blog that recounts an experience with a student.

10:14 am. Friday. 02-21-2003. Subject: CAPITALIZATION: or what happens when Word thinks for you I had a breakthrough with a student the other day in my online course: sometimes her assignments would come in with no capitalization whatsoever (not for the names of characters in her stories, not place names, not the pronoun I, not the beginnings of sentences: no capital letters), and other times with perfectly normal capitalization. I really couldn’t figure this out, and would send her notes explaining that this was a serious problem; the assignments she posted on the Discussion Board for example were completely without capitalization, filled with misspellings, and sometimes incomprehensible, but the other written assignments she turned in were mechanically correct. it was not that she was getting someone else to write the assignments for her (the style was recognizably the same - kind of garbled, and distinctively her own!). so what was the deal? she assured me that she had “checked the assignments as carefully as she could” which was a true statement, in her own mind at least… and then a coworker of mine figured out what was happening: this student uses all the automatic spellchecking and capitalization features in Word. and whenever she writes using a tool other than Word (posting to the Discussion Board, writing webpages with Netscape Composer), she is completely incapable of capitalizing and punctuating on her own. even though Netscape Composer has a built-in spellchecker, she does not seem to know how to run that, because she uses the automatic spellchecking in Word as she goes along. so there it is: the phenomenon of the calculator in the world of writing. when I went to school we had to learn how to do our times-tables up to 12×12 in our heads, and we had to learn spelling and capitalization… but Word has now even taken away the need to understand capitalization. this student does not know how to use the shift-key when she types. and that is too bad… because CREATIVE capitalization has accidentally become one of the most useful tools we have for conveying intonation in writing. I’m not especially interested in conventional capitalization - especially at the beginning of sentences, since it is a redundancy now that we have punctuation like periods and question marks and exclamation marks to indicate the end of a sentence. but you still need to know where your shift-key is so that you SPEAK UP when you write… for now, though, instead of trying to get her to type with the shift-key, I’ll just ask her to do all her typing in Word. also known as: Evil Word.
In part, the problem is about Word and the power it has to let students turn off their brains. At a deeper level, it is a problem of unexpected results due to integrating multiple technologies into learning. The bottom line is that we cannot determine (yet) the end results of integrating so much different technology into the learning process. Our assumption is that, at the very least, students will be able to learn the same amount they do in traditional classes. At best, they will be able to learn more and find new ways to evolve. But one thing is for sure — user experience should drive the development of online learning models. If you’re looking for more information on user experience, you might begin with this great interview by Jesse James Garrett about UX (user experience) and the role it plays in design and development. And, if you want further evidence of the affects of user experience on the elearning world, it appears that Macromedia and Lotus have been listening to their users, albeit different sets of users with different needs. The result is two different visions of tools for training and communications via the Web.
Macromedia Breeze Presentation (formerly Presedia Express Presenter) is a presentation/communications tool that allows you to fully leverage PowerPoint and the web “so people of all skill levels can create, deliver, and share online presentations with ease. ” In the words of Norm Meyrowitz, president of products, “Macromedia Breeze helps companies reduce training and presentation costs by enabling non-technical users to quickly, easily, and conveniently share information with a global audience.” This is interesting because Macromedia. over the past two years has honed in on user experience and the one thing they have heard and integrated into their products is ease of use and deployment. Technology should be easy and you should be able to work the way you prefer to work in a familiar environment. So, instead of continuing to push Flash as a replacement for PowerPoint (which they used to do), they bought Presedia and started pushing MS PowerPoint (the way people are accustomed to doing presentations) inside their easy-to-use Web publishing system. An excellent example of user-driven integration.
A different type of product is IBM’s Lotus Learning Management System a flexible, standards-based portfolio of e-learning components that can scale smoothly from departmental implementations to enterprise-wide applications. “he Lotus Learning Management System is designed to connect learning to an organization’s core technology such as portals, ERP, HRIS, CRM, as well as other learning systems. With the new e-learning solution, IBM is responding to customer demand for a true enterprise-class learning management system that enables integration with existing infrastructure as well as other e-learning systems.” IBM is a leading consultant to large corporations and organizations and understands that user experience is extremely negative if all their tools are not integrated. So they designed their latest version to integrate not only with global standards (a tight integration with data from other learning systems), but also with major CRM and other ERP solutions. That’s smart and it demonstrates a product evolving toward a better user experience (at least at a macro level).
Is there a place at which ease of use and convenient integration diverge? Probably. Is there an unknown factor regarding how users will react to change in technology? Most definitely. And what we learn is that listening and adapting to user experience will help make products and learning experiences successful, even if there are a few hysterical moments along the way.