Review by: Sjoer, Ellen (2005-09-26)

This is a relatively slim volume for the amount of information it contains. All the information is intended for educationalist, teaching designers, teaching staff in higher education and educational science students. They get a modern book to read that takes an ‘integrated e-learning approach’ as its point of departure.

Integrated e-learning is characterised as the combination of aspects such as face-to-face education, distance learning, and on-the-job training. This is a mediamix that mixes methods to create the optimum combination in terms of costs, usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and appeal. An important feature is that the combination of methods stems from a systematic design/development process. The book describes an ‘educational systems approach’, which works towards an integrated e-learning solution from three different angles, namely the pedagogic angle of approach, the technological angle of approach and the organisational angle of approach.

A similar three-part approach is found in the subdivision of the book’s chapters. Chapters 1 to 4 are on ‘instructional design issues’ and written from a clear teaching perspective. Chapters 5 to 9 are on e-technology and chapters 10 to 15 are on implementation and evaluation, the more organisational angle of approach.

Instructional design
The first chapters focus on the design perspective. They present the four-part instructional design model (4C/ID model) and the theoretical framework of ‘integrated electronic collaborative learning environments’ (IECLE; better known as CSCL – computer supported collaborative learning) from a socio-constructivistic viewpoint of learning. These chapters on the research/research programme of Van Merriënboer and Kirschner respectively are certainly worth reading but are not easy. They put paid to e-learning as a surrogate of face-to-face education, in which students read content from a visual-display unit and imitate face-to-face interactions on the Web. Integrated e-learning demands another teaching method, characterised as ‘learner-centred’ and ‘process-oriented’, with a backbone of rich learning tasks in which students are presented with realistic situations as a whole, in a certain order. Putting this into practice is no easy task for teaching staff. It would have been better to have used the text boxes with examples that were promised in the introduction but there are only three in the whole book, and they are all in chapter 11.

E-technology
The chapters on e-technology are in fact a mixed bag of subjects that have something to do with technology. There is actually only one chapter that is really technological, that being the one EML, the Educational Modelling Language (chapter 6). The other chapters discuss more general topics that are related to technology.

• Chapter 5 describes a conceptual ‘domain model’ in which a sort of architecture is sketched at the conceptual level of the subjects, terminology and structure of integrated e-learning.
• Chapter 7 is on the interface design for electronic learning material. This is a subject that has been receiving attention for decades in education technology. The chapter therefore contains many good guidelines for interface design that are based on research from ‘human-computer interaction’ and education psychology. Another good point is the state-of-the-art example of a graphical user interface for the Edubox player.
• Chapter 8 discusses ‘usability evaluation’, a form of evaluation in which techniques such as observing users are used to examine actual use of the system. Guidelines are provided and the usefulness and importance of this type of evaluation is stressed, during the development process for example.
• Working processes in the development of integrated e-learning courses are discussed in chapter 9. An important conclusion is that the development process is actually too complex for one person, say a lecturer. Integrated e-learning courses require a more industrial-like process of content development, in which various disciplines have their own role and tasks.

Implementation and evaluation
The final series of chapters starts with a discussion of the design of learning objects, which can be thought of as electronic building blocks with content (chapter 10). This is promising because learning objects are a good step towards being able to offer personalised learning in due course. We are not there yet; standards still have to be developed. Developing learning objectives is expensive and worldwide content sharing is not something that occurs automatically. It is therefore advisable to be cautious about setting off on any adventures.

Chapter 13 contains lessons learned from the introduction of Studienet at the Dutch Open University. The experiences are clearly recognisable to anyone who has been involved with the implementation of an e-learning environment, such as Blackboard, in universities. Managers have to show that they consider it necessary and they have to set clear objectives but the way of giving the objectives shape has to be left to the academic professionals (‘empowerment’), who try out things in pilot projects. There are some useful ‘lessons learned’ that are not explicitly substantiated with literature references (for this see chapter 11); an interesting subject is the question of the balance between cost-efficient operation and the possibility of unlimited exploration, with which the chapter closes.

Finally, e-learning evaluation is a difficult subject, especially if you want to get further than a questionnaire for measuring ‘what people thought of it’ and whether people think they achieved their goals (level 1: ‘reaction’). The Kirkpatrick framework, which is often used in businesses and is intended for evaluating business training courses, poses good questions for considering how far competencies have actually been developed and whether the development has led to performance improvement (chapter 12).

General opinion
Anyone looking for a good overview of current thought would benefit from this book. It deals with the subject at a good level, is based on research and it presents a realistic impression of the state of the art, the problems we face and the issues we already know about. It will be recognisable to readers who are familiar with the subject and describes everything sharply and clearly for them again, while presenting many eye-openers for those who are less well acquainted with research into e-learning.

This review is originally published on the SURF E-learning Themesite http://e-learning.surf.nl. The co-autor of this review is Eline Noorbergen from ICLON, the education centre of the University of Leiden.