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 We have pieces of the puzzle ( smaller chunks, content models) and we have the tools (individualized delivery, semantics), but putting them together really hasn’t been done yet.

 We still have to figure out what our design process would look like,

 It’s really trying to build a system that is more mentor like than instructor like.

The point is to take the fact that technology is no longer the limit, our imaginations are.

You have more small chunks of content, and more distributed performance model.

: "Are you trying to teach information or skills? Okay – a skill. Well, that will require practice.

that calling it “slow learning” gives the opposite impression of what it actually is

and one could argue that what you are describing could actually be FAST learning

“spaced learning”

" Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer in the industry classic e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, explain that seductive details are "interesting but irrelevant material added to a multimedia presentation in an effort to spice it up

Seductive details are those elements in a program that draw you in, attract the eye and engage the brain. They seduce your interest, but distract from the main point.

It's interactive! It's intriguing! But it's exhausting, and let's face it"—there's no point. Fatigue sets in and you move on

This is the premise underlying the arousal theory, the idea that entertaining and interesting embedded effects cause learners to become more emotionally aroused and therefore they work harder to learn the material.

. Designers who don't understand the basics of effective instructional design are committing what Clark Quinn of Quinnovation calls "instructional design malpractice.

CCBB design shines and sparkles wildly in the sun

When we force learners to practice without context, they've memorized facts but may not be able to apply them correctly in context.

Too much clicking can lead to learner fatigue, is distracting to the learner, and doesn't promote deeper understanding

We need to provide more contextual opportunities for drill exercises that will help the learner both retain and apply the knowledge they are practicing.

"Well-written, multiple-choice questions teach and assess knowledge within the context of a game. Poor questions simply allow the gamer to play the game without learning.

that the addition of interesting yet unimportant augmentations can divert learners from learning the main points that are being made

. You're best served to spend your time designing the right type of course and spending less time looking for ways to 'jazz it up'"

. Now, take a look at the screen and see where your eye lands first. Is it the flashing Next button in the bottom right corner? Or is it the important content bit at the center of the screen? Ask an objective outsider to take a look, too

Pilot your program with some test learners

heck in with them immediately afterwards, one week, three weeks. See what they remembe

, don't take this to mean that elearning shouldn't look good.

What about your LMS? At Kineo, where I work, we love using Moodle and Totara as an LMS solution for our clients, not only because of the great features and the fact that it's open source, but always because we can make it look like almost anythin

Brown (2009) reports, Recently, the Nielsen Norman Group study of teenagers using the web noted: ‘We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users’. The report added: ‘Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level’.

A new generation is behaving fundamentally differently – there seems little real evidence beyond the rhetoric that the net generation is in some way different from its predecessors as a result of having been exposed to digital technologies. There is some moderate evidence that they may have different attitudes. There is a general change in society which has relevance for learning – certainly the overall context is an ICT-rich one, and people are using the Internet for a variety of learning-related activities. People are learning in different ways – although firm evidence of informal learning is difficult to gather, there is much by the way of proxy activity that indicates this is the case. There is growing dissatisfaction with current practice in higher education – there seems little strong evidence for this. Probably more significant to the culture of education has been the shift to perceiving the student as a customer. There is certainly little evidence that the dissatisfaction is greater than it used to be, but what may be significant is that there are now viable alternatives for learners. Universities have lost their monopoly on learning, which reinforces the next point.

Higher education will undergo similar change to that in other sectors – there are some similarities between higher education and other sectors, such as the newspaper and music industries, but the differences are probably more significant. However, the blurring of boundaries between sectors and the viability of self-directed, community-based learning means that the competition is now more complex.

The first is that there is lag between society's acceptance of a technology and then its adoption in higher education. Brown (2009) suggests that in society the stages of technology diffusion can be defined as critical mass (ownership by 20–30 per cent of the population), ubiquity (30–70 per cent) and finally invisibility (more than 70 per cent). If higher education were to wait for the invisibility stage to be reached before it engaged with a technology, then given the time it takes to implement policies and technology, it really will look outdated. For example, in 2007, those using social networks might have been in the minority; now they will be in the majority. This is the problem with waiting for data to determine decisions – if you made a decision based on 2007 data that social networks were largely unused, it would look out of date in 2010. What is significant is the direction of travel, not the absolute percentages at any given time.

Anyone can open their own diploma mill, err I mean badge-selling operation? Of course not. Badges would have to be accredited by someone.

If you want to get a badge though, that's going to cost.

I think the presence of a badge could actually be a detriment to an otherwise genuine learning experience.

]The whole point of education organisations adopting elearning is to cut costs. They are not doing it to improve education standards. They say it's to educate more. But we know this is a smoke screen. Bean-counters run universities and colleges just like they run commercial companies.For example, The Briish Council is planning to move into distance learning big time. 10,000s of new students. Their reasons (am I #cynic) won't be to improve educational outcomes (mostly English language teaching) but to get more qualifed teachers for for their bucks.

In this chapter I have argued that we can view higher education as a long-tail content production environment. Much of what we currently aim to achieve through specific public engagement projects can be realised by producing digital artefacts as a by-product of typical scholarly activity. My intention is not to suggest that this is the only means of performing public engagement; for example, engaging with local schools works well by providing face-to-face contact with inspiring figures. As with other scholarly functions, some will remain, but the digital alternative not only allows for new ways of realising the same goals but also opens up new possibilities.

citation levels of articles that are published online versus those that are in closed access journals. Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras (2005) compared 1,307,038 articles across a range of disciplines and found that open access articles have a higher citation impact of between 36 and 172 per cent. So publishing in an online, open manner aids in the traditional measures of citation.

This section will look at the most concrete realisation of the open education movement, namely that of open education resources. In particular I want to revisit the notion of granularity and how changes in this, afforded by new technologies, are changing scholarly behaviour.

Zittrain (2008) terms ‘generativity’, which he defines as ‘a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences’. Little OERs are high in generativity because they can easily be used in different contexts, whereas the context is embedded within big OERs, which in turn means they are better at meeting a specific learning aim.

Big OER projects have a variety of models of funding, and Wiley highlights three of these demonstrating a range of centralisation: a centralised team funded by donors and grants (such as MIT), linking it into teaching responsibilities (as practised at Utah State University) and a decentralised collaborative authoring approach (e.g. Rice Connexions, http://cnx.org).

The reasons for this are varied, including technical complexity and motivation. One other reason which the OpenLearn team suggest is that the ‘content provided on the site was of high quality and so discouraged alteration’.