Are You Making Vanilla Pudding?

Is your online educational adventure plain or spectacular?

In the kitchen, there is a difference between a cook and a chef. A cook makes food ready to eat, a chef prepares a meal to delight the senses, tickles the palate, and soothes the soul.

One typically returns to a restaurant because of a memorable meal, or the staff remembers your name; whichever the reason, something clicked.

As instructional designers, are we cooks or chefs? Are we destined to a life of coerced confinement inside of linear lessons? Is the only way out to "Please click next to continue?"

More and more, I see less and less learning. Less self-discovery and more rote memorization. Less critical thinking and more compliance to standard procedures.

And, below the horizon, unbeknownst to many of us, there is a parallel universe of crowd training, social media learning pods, ephemeral learning experiences; it's here today and gone in an instant.

There's a time and place for Vanilla Pudding. It's easy to make. It's low cost. It's easy on the wallet. However, it is not memorable. It does not expand one's experiences. It does not challenge us to imagine.

It's no secret that eLearning designed for adults has not lived up to its promise of a replacement for instructor-led classroom style education. The apologists made their excuses. The web evolved. New technologies made eLearning faster, more media filled but where is the soul of creativity? Are we doomed to a future of drag and drop and multiple choice?

I reminisce about the days when I really had to think about designing a curriculum. When I could work with a client to perform a useful needs analysis and identify the behaviors in their people that were hurting them, hurting productivity, and risking the future of the organization.

I see less and less of this introspection. Managers seem afraid to admit the truth; they are afraid, period.

Fear seems to be driving a lot of the compliance training - fear of litigation, fear of failure, and fear of looking like a fool.

But, the people who truly want to learn so they can be better people and better professionals, these are the innovators who are short-circuiting the traditional LMS pathways.

At the threshold of something new (I know you can sense it, too), I challenge you to discover new modalities that are relevant to today's learners. The web has changed everything! We educators need to change along with it.