E-learning and online publishing converge beyond the book

The printed book has been referred to as the most significant breakthrough ever in learning technology (bigger even than the blackboard). Surely it’s unimprovable as a means for conveying ideas, facts and knowledge from one mind to another? Well perhaps not.

Now that online publishing has moved beyond simply putting books online as pdfs, we are beginning to see a far more active development of the possibilities when it comes to extending the use of texts online for learning. An important next stage in this maturity curve is adding interactive features such as assessment, and learner feedback. Beyond that, we are also beginning to see use of more advanced, ‘Web 2.0′ features, such as the ability to add user-generated content.

And something that’s becoming clear, as academic and reference publishing develops in this direction, is the emergence of areas of convergence between e-publishing and e-learning, which up till now have been distinct fields.

Learning and the Professions

In a previous posting on this blog I highlighted the curious disconnect between the worlds of e-learning and online publishing. I put this down to the fact that the e-learning world is largely focused on organisational training, where books tend to be dispensed with wherever possible. Professional Services, however, is one industry sector where authoritative texts are usually an indispensible part of learning. Becoming a lawyer or an accountant involves ingesting numerous weighty volumes, as the bookshelves in their offices attest. The authoritative text plays a central role here, both for learning and for reference.

One such source book for professional practice is The Royal Marsden Manual of Clinical Nursing Procedures (RMM). A legend in the nursing profession both in the UK and around the world, it is regarded as the standard reference on nursing good practice. RMMonline, the online version of The Royal Marsden Manual, which Semantico has developed for Wiley-Blackwell, makes an innovative use of User-Generated Content to extend the usefulness of this authoritative textbook of nursing best practice. Local trusts can add their own trust-specific procedures (and comments on procedures in the Manual) within a controlled workflow. On the face of it, this might not seem that exciting a concept, but it provides a model for an exciting development in the way professional practice is taught and regulated.

Localising the rules

The trouble with rules, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, is that they need interpretation. All areas of professional practice from banking to marketing are regulated in some way, whether by statute, by guidelines and regulations administrated through regulatory bodies or simply by a requirement to observe codified best practice. But in all these circumstances, the rules need interpretation and localisation. Data Protection legislation, for instance, won’t mean the same for an employee of Facebook as it does for an employee of HMRC. Each organisation has its own issues, its own culture, to which it has to train its employees to be responsive.

No printed book, however comprehensive, can cater for such diversity – but an online manual like RMMonline, mediated and augmented through user-generated content, can do just that. RMMonline has been shortlisted for an ALPSP award, and we expect to see many similar examples springing up in other areas of professional practice.

Blackstone’s Police Manuals Online from OUP, is another online resource that goes beyond the book model, in this case by adding a self-assessment and Q&A tool with allows users to create subject-oriented mock exams on the fly.

Examples from e-learning

On the e-learning side of the fence we have seen analagous developments with, for instance, online versions of revision guides produced by Epic for Letts and Lonsdale. These extend the print version of an educational text by adding personalised revision or test sessions, instant marks and detailed feedback – as well as exploiting the motivational possibilities offered by multimedia presentation.

Personally, I have not seen anything similar in the e-learning marketplace to the RMMonline example, despite much hype and rhetoric about using Web 2.0 for learning, but it is probably only a matter of time before the true possibilities of UGC start to be explored more actively on both sides of ‘the great divide’.