The Core of Elearning

"What do you think is the Core of Elearning?" asked my interviewer, calmly as he sat across me in the meeting room. After a few seconds of thinking, I nervously (as I alway find myself during an interview) stated that according to me, the core of elearning is making learning effective and efficient. It is delivering content in a manner that it would be understood and applied in an effective manner. He calmly looked at me and said that was not the core of elearning and encouraged me to take a couple of seconds to think about the question. So here I sat and racked my brains about the possible answer, after all I wanted to create a good impression about my knowledge (somehow I always underestimate my ability). And then I slowly, and not so confidently, stated that it was how well we delivered and how effective we could make learning for the audience. Yet my interviewer state that it was not the core of elearning. My answer spoke about the mean but not the core. He said that the core of elearning was "Learning".

Later, as I walked back dejectedly from the interview (obviously I knew that I had blown the so called opportunity), I kept thinking what the hell did he mean that the core of elearning was learning, after all all the Gagnes, Blooms, Merills, Kellers, Kirkpatricks, spoke about how to make the delivery of learning effective (or at least that was what I thought). So what was he talking about. And so my mind refused to see it any other way, at least for the next couple of minutes (or hours, or days). But as I let this thought marinate in my head the more I started to see it from my interviewer's point of view. And so I put  forth this question to my peers and friends to see if they could help shed some light on this topic, I felt they were better equipped than I was on this topic :).

And as I kept reading each response and liking each of them, I realized the answer (as usual) was staring at me in the face. Yeah, all the ID theories spoke about effective delivery of elearning and making learning meaningful and fun but at the center of all this is indeed learning. We design content in order to aide learning. We create WBTs, CBTs, ILTs, SGs, FGs, in order to help learners to learn, to understand new content, to form new neurological connections, and in the end effectively apply what they have learned. An elearning is successful only when the learn is able to learn and understand the content and apply what they have learned.

Yes, all the ID theories talk about making learning effective, an insight into the psyche of a learner, and provide us with guidelines on how to go about developing content, but in the end in the center of all this learning. Our whole world (I mean an ID's world) revolves around learning (of course it is already present in the industry name). Whether it is about the transfer of knowledge and information, learning new processes or being on-boarded into a new company, our job is to facilitate learning and make it more effective. No matter what and who our learners are, we look towards help them to learn new information and gain better knowledge.

So I found the answer that I was looking for. So to all the respondents, and of course to my interviewer, I thank you for opening up my mind and helping to look at my chosen career path in a light that I had (unfortunately) not considered in the past. Can't say I gained enlightenment, but I know I gained a lot of helpful information and came pretty close.