[The following is reprinted from the technology issue of Torah at the Center, and educational publication from Union for Reform Judaism. Read the whole technology issue by clicking here.]

By Monique Cuvelier, Usability Consultant and CEO, Talance.com, Burlington, MA

The last thing you want a student to do in an online course is to think. That sounds wildly counterintuitive, considering most instructors want students to have thinking caps strapped tightly on and cranked to maximum when they sit down to learn. However, if students are thinking too hard about what to do with online course software, they’re not going to be engaged in the course materials – and that’s the reason you want them there in the first place.

The benefits of e-learning programs are clear. They’re convenient, bring students together who live in different places and can be adapted to address the various needs of students. But many organizations focus too closely on the benefits and not enough on usability, the ease in which students can navigate a course and accomplish learning goals.

The trouble is that creating good usability should look natural and easy, but it’s incredibly hard. What seems the natural way to work in an online arena is not natural; it takes planning and design. In the six years that I’ve been making online learning environments more intuitive for students and teachers at my company Talance.com, I’ve seen students drop out of courses, give up on their favorite topics and turn their ire to their hapless instructors all because they were confused and frustrated by the technology.

Below are a few rules you can think about when evaluating online courseware or creating a simple online learning environment from scratch.

Familiar Workflows

Students should move naturally from one task to the next. Tasks should guide the students to the right information at the right time. For instance, you may want the student to work through the course this way: log in, read any pertinent announcements, review reading material, discuss a project in the bulletin boards, submit a writing assignment. In this case, make sure the announcement appears on the course homepage and that instructions for the writing assignment are at the end of the reading material. Include enough shortcuts that students can navigate easily from one task to the next.

Free-Flowing Communication

Students should have open channels of communication with you (the teacher) and other learners, whether the course is synchronous or asynchronous. Add options for navigation. Icons on the homepage that take you to different sections of the course are OK – as long as you’re on the homepage. Use tabs at the top of the screen to create quick access to frequently used sections of the course, because they can be seen from any page. Course participants should find it easy to send course e-mail, and they should know at a glance if they have new messages. They should know where to find help, through an FAQ or an e-mail form where they can submit technical support issues.

Flexible Enough to Foster Creativity

Multiple-choice questions may be fine in some circumstances but are too rigid on their own to address all learning styles and encourage creativity in an online course. Present several ways for students to learn and interact, such as real-time chat rooms with whiteboards, and essay-type questions in tests. Allow students to upload Microsoft Word documents, which let them work in their familiar computer environments rather than typing responses into text forms.

Hebrew-Language Support

Think about how your software handles Hebrew, if you require it for your class. Support for Hebrew is often not included in the first release of software packages. Can you render characters in Unicode or graphically? Discussion boards in particular may have difficulty rendering Hebrew characters, especially along with English. Can you allow students to attach Word documents that are formatted for Hebrew?

Just the Essentials

One hazard of working with an online course is there is no page limit. Avoid information glut by presenting students with just the information they need. Create places for secondary information elsewhere in the course for those who want to learn more.

Following these principles is only the first step to creating a more usable online course. Make better usability an ongoing effort by constantly noting problems students have, asking for feedback and making adjustments. Eventually, you’ll find the more you think about how students learn in an online environment, the less your students will have to.

Now’s your chance to introduce yourself: two events are coming up where I’ll be making presentations online.

One is a show and tell event about our online learning services, which you can catch on the Nonprofit Technology Network (N-TEN), a good network you should get to know anyway.

The other is a web primer on what a CMS (content management system) is, why it matters and how to budget for a new one:

Both are free and open to the public, so sign up, pass the word and say hi.

According to an article in today’s New York Times, 500,000 kids in America take classes online, with many of those receiving all all their schooling from virtual public schools.

That’s right, public schools. These programs receive funding from the state, and they’re not considered home-schooling.

This calls for more people who know and understand how to use online learning. The same article says a state audit in Colorado “found that one school, run by a rural district, was using four licensed teachers to teach 1,500 students across the state.”They’re spread enormously thin, and there’s got to be a better push for education of online educators.

[The following article originally appeared in the FreePint Newsletter at http://www.freepint.com.]

My Favourite Tipples
By Peter Maureemootoo

As an expert in how people interact with computers, I always try to think of the simplest way to present information to learners when building and publishing online courses. I turn to these sites time and again for creating a better user experience.

• The Usability Toolkit from the Society for Technical Communication <http://www.stcsig.org/usability/resources/toolkit/toolkit.html> contains scads of checklists and templates that help you organise online course design.
• Q&A with Don Norman <http://digbig.com/4sdjj>. I respect usability guru Don Norman enormously, and in this excellent article, he shows what he knows about how people learn.
• Gadwin PrintScreen <http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/> is one tool I can’t live without when building courses. This free software makes creating custom-sized screen grabs a snap.
• Why People Can’t Use eLearning <http://digbig.com/4sdjk> is a compelling white paper that shows the other side of the hype – when e-learning goes bad.
• The WellStyled Workshop’s Color Schemes Generator 2 <http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html> lets you create pleasing colour palettes that always work on the Web.

Peter Maureemootoo is president and co-founder of Talance, Inc., <http://www.talance.com/>, a company that publishes and builds online courses and robust, large-scale websites. He has special expertise in creating intuitive and compelling systems for all users.

Despite my earlier report citing the Sloan Foundation that e-learning is catching on, not everyone is seeing the same trends. A Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CPID) survey from the UK found just the opposite online learning is on the decline. We’ve certainly seen some ups and downs at Talance.

This report from Martin Belton at Learning Technologies gives his findings on why e-learning initiatives fail, namely significant costs and high attrition rate. Still, it’s hard for organizations to deny 24/7 access, flexibility and elimination of travel costs. He also gives his top 10 ways for projects to succeed, very much worth reading. Here they are in short form:

1. Link training to performance reviews
2. Make managers accountable
3. Provide accreditations
4. Set time limits
5. Track performance
6. Ensure content is relevant
7. Provide formal rewards
8. Create a social dimension to e-learning
9. Launch a communications campaign
10. Tell them it’s important!

Even small universities can reach large student audiences through online learning programs. Take, for example, the University of Illinois, which has an exemplary online learning program and wants to reach 10,000 new online students by next year, according to a report this week by NPR.

Nowadays, many colleges require students to take at least one course online, so it’s little wonder that U. of Illinois, which has a relatively small on-campus student population, is looking for a new way to break ahead with this new learning.

The students, many of whom are plugged in 24/7 anyway, aren’t the hiccup to adoption. It’s the teachers. Learning the basics of podcasts, blogs and Second Life is a crash course for many of the educators, who are the same ones who teach in-person classes. The U of I puts teachers through a tech-ed bootcamp before turning them loose on the online sector of their students.

This makes me think the market for e-learning-only educators will continue to shrink as everyone becomes an expert in e-learning.

To that end, here are some handy tools that I share with the educators I work with so they can learn more about teaching online:

Illinois Online Network
http://www.ion.illinois.edu/Resources/tutorials/overview/index.asp

Simple Course Planning Worksheet
http://www.talance.com/planning.html

Weblogs, part II: A Swiss Army website?
http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Winter2002/feat.weblogging2.html

Second Life Education Wiki
http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki

Education Podcast Network
http://www.epnweb.org/

A fascinating report from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation indicates that more educators are finally catching on to online learning. The study indicates that “Online enrollments have been growing substantially faster than overall higher education enrollments.”

To wit:

• Almost 3.5 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2006 term
• The 9.7 percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 1.5 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.
• Nearly twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2006.

Heading the curve are 2-year colleges, which have the highest growth rates and account for over one-half of all online enrollments for the last five years. Surely because online learning is extremely valuable for working adults, who can squeeze the lessons into their work schedules.

I’ve been working in e-learning for five years, and battling skepticism has been an uphill struggle. It’s good to hear that more people are loosening up to the notion.

But as an online course software developer, I still see huge roadblocks with many of the online learning platforms. They can be ungainly, unintuitive, quirky and expensive. Especially in early days of adoption, we find making a usable system is paramount.

For more reading, listen to this related report from NPR.