Designing World-Class E-Learning. How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, and Columbia University are Succeeding at e-Learning

Berglund Authority Level 3

by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>

Editor, Interface

Schank, Roger C. Designing World-Class E-Learning. How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, and Columbia University are Succeeding at e-Learning. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Roger Schank approaches this topic with a great deal of authority. He has written more than 125 publications, and is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, as well as involved in many institutes, including the artificial intelligence project at Yale. This work would come as a shock to many academics. Many are still busily debating questions like: "Can e-Learning be successful? If so, under what conditions?"

Schank demonstrates that not only can e-Learning be successful, but it is proceeding rapidly, and substantially outside the control of conventional academic programs. And Schenk repeatedly compares e-Learning successes with what he argues are the failures of conventional academic programs. He argues that the higher educational system is fundamentally not about education at all, but primarily concerned with credentialing. To Schenk, higher education is generally intended to serve as a gate-keeper, to grant credentials, and to employ the professorate, not to effect actual training and education.

For Schenk, training and education currently are proceeding most successfully in private industries, and in selected high quality institutions such as Harvard Business School and Columbia University, both programs with which Schenk has been associated. His indictment of higher education is firmly based in learning theory and pedagogy. Schenk believes that higher education has continually drifted from its critical foundations. There is no question but that Schenk is a disciple of John Dewey and his successors, who believe that learning best proceeds through "doing." He is particularly damning in discussing what assessment in higher education. He argues that we can only believe that we are successful because we manipulate our assessment methods so as to return the outcomes we desire, and that true assessment would quickly reveal our manifold failures.

His work contains many examples of highly successful training programs and of e-Learning sites on the World Wide Web. Schenk is well aware of conventional indictments of e-Learning, believes that such indictments were once warranted, but that the process can, and in the many cases he cites, has moved well beyond them. He is well aware of the strengths and the weaknesses of such methods; this book is much more than the sort of cheer-leading for computer-assisted training that once passed for analysis in this field.

While the work may contain a certain amount of hyperbole, the indictments that he makes should be very troubling to any experienced member of the professorate, and the examples that he gives of successful e-Learning programs have much to teach us.

Review by Jeffrey Barlow
Editor, Interface