I began the Challenges as an experiment. It was also a personal reaction to what I perceived to be the dumbing down of instructional design as a professional discipline.

When I started the Challenge, the term social software was only just gaining traction. Using a weblog format rather than a threaded forum allowed contributors to see a discussion develop. But even though I made it clear that the contributors should debate with each other through their comments, most posters chose to address me and refer to other contributors in the third person. This demonstrates that the weblog format is already well-entrenched as a one-to-many medium.

I had not intended to inject my own views into each Challenge, and I believe I was true to that. Early I tried to be rather silent after posing the Challenge. But it quickly became apparent that commenters were addressing me rather than the Challenge! I had no choice but to respond!

Generally, my responses questioned people’s assumptions. For example, many instructional designers assume that their learners will be intrinsically motivated. But in most situations, especially corporate, motivation has to be inspired. Often, that is the real challenge, not the delivery of content.

My biggest challenge was to build readership. I attended several gatherings here in Melbourne within the first couple of months of running the Challenge where I met people who knew about it, visited the site but not made a contribution.

Like all determined bloggers, I registered the Challenge site with every RSS feed disseminator I could find.

I sent friendly, humble emails to several respected names in the elearning community. Several published kind remarks on their blogs and linked to the Challenge site. Others chose to ignore me, for whatever reason, but that was their prerogative. I don’t answer all the email I get either.

I wrote to several long-standing developers’ newsgroups, listservs and discussion forums that deal with elearning, Macromedia (taken over by Adobe) Flash and Authorware. One response from a Flash newsgroup was to “take my blubber elsewhere”. Whilst my skin is thick, this was still shocking. The response from the Authorware forums, on the other hand, was positive. Several Authorwarians made contributions, as the product is aimed at elearning developers and instructional designers.

My ISP for the eLearning Design Challenge is Pacific Internet, who maintain useful traffic statistics using Webalizer. Over the past year I believe the Challenge averaged about 300 visitors per month, not counting feed crawlers or my own accesses. In the month when a Challenge was launched the Challenge was viewed by over 500 visitors. With a range of 10 to 21 comments per Challenge, the ratio of lurkers to comment contributors was in the order of 20:1. This would have to be a high number for a weblog, but since it was about inviting participation I was hoping for better.

It was disappointing that I could only manage to publish six Challenges. Only one of them was suggested by a visitor. While there were some other suggestions, I didn’t believe they were suitable for one reason or another. I had hoped that more people would send me their ideas for Challenges which related to their current work or experience. It turned out that I was the Challenge-master, and that wasn’t the idea at all.

During the Challenge series, my wife and I had our second daughter. Work and family commitments did affect my ability to keep up with posts and generate new Challenges. Several contributers also commented that reflection about the Challenges required time they just didn’t have. I marvel at bloggers who are able to post so prolifically.

The first two Challenges were focused and tight, although one person commented that I hadn’t set learning goals specifically enough. The intention was to teach quite a specific topic. Whilst there were some excellent ideas, most contributors wanted to broaden the scope or address an entire online product. It seemed that no matter how direct I was in trying to focus the discussion, I couldn’t get people to just limit their gaze to the topic at hand. I still find this frustrating from a professional standpoint. If, as a project manager, I give a brief to an instructional designer to come up with a solution to a specific problem, I want a solution to just that problem and nothing more. Anyway, I gave up in later Challenges and instead posed a situation in broad terms and proposed discussion about instructional design approaches rather than specific solutions.

It was in teasing out these approaches that I came upon what I view as the most serious challenge.

First some background. For a long time elearning was just computer-based-training (CBT) or computer-assisted-learning (CAL) courseware with new clothes on. We’ve had CBT/CAL for twenty years, whether delivered by floppy disk, LAN, CD-ROM or internet browser. For most of us, instructional design has been about the creation of tutorials, presentations or courses that get delivered at a computer. More recently, Learning Management Systems and standards for them have been developed to organise and track content delivery. Behemoth courseware has given way to chunks of Learning Objects. Custom design has given way to templated turnware. Automation has created ugliness and boredom, with nary an instructional designer in sight, let alone effective learning.

But a revolution has been underway in both educational and corporate settings with collaborative learning approaches, the application of social software and knowledge management taking hold. In each Challenge, I specifically recommended that readers consider collaborative approaches. Only a couple of comment posters ventured there. Everyone else stayed with didactic methods where the developer completely created the environment and logic for learning. There were some excellent suggestions for simulations where learners could work their way through scenarios and situations. But how many considered pitting a learner in one part of the country with another learner elsewhere to exchange experiences in some way? This is what I was hoping to see, but it never appeared.

So I have to ask “why not?” Perhaps there weren’t enough readers.

• By the time I started the Challenge, there were already dozens of weblogs devoted to elearning topics. Perhaps Feed overload syndrome was already affecting many.
• As an relatively unknown practitioner outside the Authorware world and certainly not an academic, it’s possible that the value of the Challenge may have been dismissed by many.
• The Challenges were too infrequent.
• Pre-announcements would have turned the Challenges into events that more people could have been geared up to.

Since many contributers came from the authoring ranks, perhaps they were predisposed to didactic authored solutions.

• Are too many of our clients and employers limiting our vision to asynchronous tutorials, Powerpoint presentations and contrived simulations?
• Are too many of us becoming insular and complacent in our work and no longer looking to advance in our discipline?
• Are we reluctant to give up control of the learning experience–must we always be setting the learning agenda?

Part of my motivation to set up the Challenge site was to familiarise myself with blogging software from a technical standpoint. I chose WordPress which proved to be robust, flexible and well-supported. To set it up and customise it, it was helpful that I know the PHP scripting language and MySQL database utilities on my ISP’s Apache server. I was not enamoured with the WordPress editor presented to viewers for entering comments. So I registered and bolted on the excellent WysiwygPro editor. It was so easy to do that I didn’t mind rescripting it when I updated WordPress from version 1.2 to 1.5.

What surprised me was that almost nobody took advantage of even the most basic styling features! This is all the more surprising since some comment posts were significantly longer than the Challenge post it answered. Perhaps, as WordPress demonstrates, few blog systems offer extended comment formatting facilities, so commenters are just not looking to use them.

In summary, the eLearning Design Challenge created many opportunities for learning, discourse, discovery, frustration and growth. I hope those who participated enjoyed the intellectual exercise as much as I did.

So where to now? I’m starting work on a Master of Learning Science and Technology degree next month, offered by the University of Sydney. It’s part coursework and part research. I’m really looking forward to this and I hope my experience with the eLearning Design Challenge will prove to be useful. Along with that I’ve started a new blog reflecting my work and study called eLearning Moments.

If you’ve read down to here, thank you for your interest. Please drop me a line.

ps. If you have a challenge of your own, why not submit it and see what your colleagues can suggest?

This Challenge was suggested by Susan Dilan, who lives in Puerto Rico. Recently her government has funded a campaign to encourage the populace to be nice to each other and return to the courteous, supportive, tolerant and respectful values of old. The campaign uses posters, newspaper and TV ads, the latter of which can be seen from this website (in spanish). Civility with national spirit is a powerful combination.

The Challenge to you is to design a corresponding online learning solution for schools which is capable of reaching teenagers. This is a tough call because many in this age group tend to be self-absorbed and even averse to some of these values. For the sake of this Challenge, assume you are developing a product for your own country, whereever you are, and that a comparable public campaign is underway (don’t laugh). The objective of the solution is not only to compel teenagers to behave well, but for them to promote such values at home too.

Assume you have a good list of examples of how to be nice to others. How are you going to effectively engage teenagers in these examples so that they can see the benefits and pleasure of civil behaviour? Before you jump up and say “let’s create some simulations”, how would you go about designing and developing these? What are the key features of your design that will get your audience’s attention and get the message through? To be blunt, your solution has to have personal impact.

With this resource available online to all schools, can you devise some form of collaborative activity?

Susan has suggested that such a project would probably be minimally funded, so don’t suggest anything that will would be incredibly expensive to implement.

What do you think?

ps. as far as I know, this is a fictitious Challenge. If anybody knows of a real project that is similar, by all means comment on it.

• casino-style gaming (eg poker machines, blackjack, roulette)
• lottery and scratch tickets
• sports betting, including horseracing, harness racing and greyhounds
• sharemarket daytrading.

• gambling is not a substitute for income
• gambling should be a choice rather than a compulsion
• gamble infrequently and in small amounts
• only gamble if you can afford it–think about your family and dependents
• like entertainment, consider what you spend as gone–winnings are merely a bonus
• set a budget and stick to it
• if it isn’t fun, don’t gamble
• if it’s going out of control, stop and seek help (eg gamblersanonymous.org)