Hey publishers, you suck-diddly-uck!

Internet study tools, according to Homer

Have you seen what passes for study tools on the Internet lately? Online study guides with little if any useful content, broken links, “interactive” activities that consist solely of clicking Next to continue… To paraphrase Homer, “I’ve seen tools suck before, but these are the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked.”

Here’s an example of what NOT to do; click Demo and select the Interactive Marketing Activities. (This one is especially painful because I actually worked on this, over my extreme moral objections). While stylish and functional, this product is not worth the money they paid or the time I spent on it – are any students out there going to learn anything from this? I think not. (I’m especially glad they got another company to re-skin it and put their name on it instead of ours.)

Have publishers forgotten what it means to create something helpful for the student? Maybe they just decided it’s better to have any old thing so they can check it off on some list they pass off to instructors.

(Oh, and don’t forget that the cost for all this free crap got rolled into your hyper-expensive textbook.)

If you’re as dissatisfied with these tools as I am, don’t just refuse to use them. Let your instructor know how crapulent they are, and ask her/him to demand better from the publishers.

Just don’t expect the publishers to do any better.

Strange Fruit?

Are instructors prejudiced against free enterprise?

There is a strange paradox afoot in the halls of our universities. I have visited websites that attempt to catalog the wide variety of e-learning materials available on the internet. (“Mathtools” is one example; “Merlot” is another.) Members can post links to stuff they find, and their peers can comment on their choices.

So here’s the paradox: resources that are “for-sale” are generally trashed by instructors -- not because of their relevance or usefulness, but solely because their owners have the gall to actually charge money for their use. Instructors likewise wonder aloud that there must be other resources on the Internet that folks don’t have to pay for.

Wait a minute… aren’t these the same instructors that get paid for teaching? Aren’t they the same instructors that tell their students to go out and buy the $120+ textbook? Don’t some of these instructors teach Economics, or Entrepreneurship?

Isn’t there a saying, “Those who can’t do, teach”?

What the hell is E-Learning?

Within the university environment, the term ‘e-learning’ is tossed around like week-old jello in a food-fight. Many vendors tout their e-learning solutions, but what exactly is e-learning anyway?

IMHO, e-learning has been a whisper of a promise. It’s something we’ve been promised, like flying cars, but have yet to see in our driveway. It takes the basic learning experience – a student who wants information, interacting with a teacher having that information – and enhances that relationship in the unique ways allowable by the Internet.

It sure as hell isn’t an e-book – you can turn pages in a book yourself, you don’t need a $500 computer for that.

It isn’t an electronic gradebook or classroom management program – while nice and potentially useful, those help the teacher and give the student no real direct benefit.

It isn’t an email program and chat capability – both can help enhance communication, but you can’t really teach with them.

No, e-learning is an enhancement of the classroom experience. It captures the lecture, the examples scrawled on the board, and the illustrations from the text, and expands them as only the Internet can. It adds true interactivity (the kind where you can manipulate the environment or scenario given to learn new things). It offers specific, targeted help when and how that help is needed. It answers to the needs of the student, not of the teacher.

The folks at www.College-Cram.com have the right idea. Their library is chock full of tutorials, formula solvers, and other programs that deliver the promise of e-learning right now.

I hope that means there’ll be a shiny new flying car in my driveway tomorrow morning.