Why e-learning is killing education | Aaron Barth | TEDxKitchenerED

Well, when I started teaching as a college professor I did what we all do when we start out as educators. I trusted my intuitions about what good manners look like and I'm going to let everyone in on a little secret. My intuitions were really bad. they were based on my experience in the lecture model of

education

, which is where we talk to people for really long periods of time, give them some textbooks to read and then give them a test, that's what I did, I talked to people like right now, that was my original sin but I didn't stop there years later when I was working as an

education

al consultant I was asked to design some e-

learning

and I hadn't done it before and you'll never guess how I did it injecting all the same terrible intuitions and it looks like this, a virtual instructor in front of a virtual whiteboard delivering virtual vignettes.

I'm pretty sure that when we thought about using virtual reality and education, unfortunately this is not what we had in mind. this is what e-

learning

looks like nowadays and no one learns anything from it, think how absurd it is, so how did we get here? Well, I talked about intuition, but let's dig a little deeper, our first instincts around education are actually based on telling stories we know this from archaeological data people telling stories to other people people teaching other people using human stories like that it's how we learned and it's how we communicate quickly 40,000 years later, we now have a beautiful scalable, mobile-enabled e-learning that we can use to teach people on opposite ends of the world the same thing at the same time, but somewhere Between the caves and the clicks we focus so much on developing this technology that we forget about the only thing that matters in education: people can use e-learning. to teach everyone everywhere good hygiene practices to stop the spread of diseases e-learning can be used to teach everyone everywhere sustainable living practices to combat the climate crisis these are global problems that require global solutions and learning electronic should contribute to them but it isn't, it's not because we've forgotten about people, we've forgotten about the way that people actually learn if there is something that everyone in this room can do to begin to refocus their efforts on the people and start doing e -Learning that works is starting to tell stories again, not because it's what we used to do, but because science says it really works.

We know that scenario- and story-based learning can speed up our time to gain expertise on a given task. He does it because stories simulate. The way we learn through experience we know that scenario or story-based learning is more engaging than click-then-quiz e-learning. The reason is that stories create empathy, empathy in turn creates personal meaning and it is personal meaning, not clicking, that drives engagement and ultimately I know that scenario or story based learning is the best way. to teach complex skills like collaborative problem-solving and creativity—precisely the skills today's and tomorrow's workforces need to solve our biggest problems.

Let me show you how this works. Steven and his 12-year-old son. his granddaughter rose goes to the bank to open her first bank account, she just joined a traveling basketball team and he wants to be able to send her money while she is away, they are very excited, they booked the meeting well in advance and it is a great moment for her family when they get to the bank and start filling out the paperwork things start to go wrong a bank employee immediately suspects both of them she thinks there is a discrepancy in their bank accounts but the most important thing is that she thinks the identification that what have provided is fraudulent, she grabs the ID, abruptly leaves the room and tells her superiors shortly after, the police enter, handcuff Stephen, handcuff 12-year-old robes, take them to the police cruiser and arrest them, so I know you.

You might be thinking, I mean, maybe this is just a big misunderstanding or maybe the ID is actually fraudulent, but let's add a little color to the story. The truth is that Stephen and Rose are indigenous Canadians and the ID that the bank employee believes to be fraudulent is actually their official government-issued status card. This is a true story that happened a few months ago in Vancouver now, so For the sake of argument, let's imagine that at some point before the incident the bank employee passed his e-learning module on unconscious bias with flying colors, listened to the virtual instructor in front of the virtual whiteboard, handed out virtual bullet points, crushed the drag-and-drop activities, and then out of 12 attempts they got perfect on the questionnaire.

Do any of us think that this type of e-learning experience would really prepare the bank employee to deal with this? situation correctly, we shouldn't, we know that 20 20 minutes into a traditional classroom experience you have already forgotten sixty percent of the content. Now I want you to compare that to how you feel after hearing Stephen and Rose's story. I guarantee you all. In this room you will remember a 12 year old girl in handcuffs and you will remember her in a way that will really change your behavior. So what if the e-learning experience was simply a simulation of this story?

What if this story and others like it form the same one? core of the e-learning that bank employees had, if we did it that way we would be simulating a real-world experience and therefore accelerate the experience, we would be creating empathy for the lived experience of intersectionality and therefore deepen engagement and expose them to the nuances of unconscious bias and therefore improve their collaboration skills when we compare this story-based approach to a clickable module. There is no doubt which is more likely to change our behavior; It is the one based on the human history that we need to start.

Telling these human stories again won't be easy, it means you can't keep cutting and pasting content into an e-learning module, it means giving up avatars, giving up dragon drops, giving up quizzes, but it will be worth it. It will be worth it because if we can retell these human stories again, we can re-explain why we all got into education in the first place, we can re-empower people, let's start telling stories again, thank you.