Learning Arrives at Your Doorstep!

The traditional learning mediums such as classroom teaching, LMS based eLearning environments (VLEs) and blended learning should tighten their belts to face competition from more modern methods.

Do you feel that there is something wrong with the above statement? Sure there is. “Aren’t VLEs and blended learning modern?” you ask. “Why should they be classified as traditional?” Things are changing, and they are changing fast. To explain this phenomenon correctly, I would like to bring into this discussion, the concept of half-life of knowledge. This concept, given by ASTD is quite interesting. This excellent concept can be understood as: The time taken by the knowledge existing in the world to double. This of course, is a simplistic definition, for there is no easy way to determine the exact magnitude of knowledge that exists in this world.

Knowledge is Dynamic!
This shrinking half-life of knowledge has a reciprocal cause and effect relationship with the evolution of learning mediums. The learning medium that most of us, who were born before 1975, experienced was the more easy-paced classroom learning. But soon after, things began changing. Computer revolutionized the paradigm of learning. Learning that was earlier teacher-centric became learner-centric. Earlier, the teacher or the trainer used to be the driver of the knowledge transfer process; suddenly the seats were swapped. The trainer became the guide and the enabler of learning, while the learner become the one who selected the routes, decided the speed, and determined the best way to negotiate a curve.

As the learner became the center of learning, learning became less structured and more organic. Internet brought about a revolutionary change in the way learning used to happen. Curiosity is one of the most important motivators for learning, and hyper-linking provided the learners an immediate solution to satisfy their curiosity. This led the learner’s knowledge to grow in the chosen direction rapidly, thus enabling the learner to keep pace with the shrinking half-life of knowledge (Today the knowledge in this world doubles every 18 months.)

So Time is Expensive!
Today, we need to change even faster. Time has been the most expensive commodity for humans since times immemorial. Yet, recently things have changed – If time meant gold earlier, it means diamonds today. The trend that helps us save tremendous amount of time and enables us speed up our learning – is that of RSS Feeds.

What About RSS?
Let us understand the concept of RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds through the traditional concept of bookmarks.

In the context of books, a bookmark is a placeholder. It enables us to find our place in the book that we’ve been reading easily, thus, helping us save time. In the context of websites, when we bookmark a site, it becomes easily accessible to us and we save the time that we would otherwise waste in remembering a URL. It also helps us reduce the risk of forgetting about a wonderful site altogether.

These bookmarks were fine for the almost static web that existed earlier. Today, the web is dynamic. Its content is changing continuously. The nature as well as the speed of change is also not constant. It too continues to change. For example, until about a year ago, blogs or (Weblogs) were considered to be casual undertakings of individuals. Now many blogs are considered to be serious affairs. A lot of blog owners today are serious professionals who prefer to share their ideas with like-minded people.

With content that is updated continually but not at fixed intervals (as in the case of blogs) even if you bookmark a site:

1. you may not visit it often enough to view all important updates on time.
2. you will have to visit the site to find whether or not the site has been updated. Whenever you don’t find it updated – you will be disappointed and you would also have lost precious time, navigating through the site and searching for the updated information.

RSS Feed is the mechanism that enables the learners/site visitors to receive updates from the sites that they have subscribed to through the RSS Feed from.

How Does RSS Work?
Here is how it works.

RSS or Rich Site Summary helps a content provider “summarize” or “synthesize” the updates on the site using XML to create what is known as a “Feed”. Subscribers can subscribe to this Feed through software called an “Aggregator.” The Aggregator is called so because it is capable of aggregating different feeds from different content providers and making them available for the subscriber at one place.

In this manner, RSS enables the content provider to make the content available to those who are interested in it (the subscribers) on a continual basis. It also makes the subscriber’s life simpler as by subscribing to the feeds of different content providers of his or her own interest, the subscriber eliminates the need to frequently visit the sites of interest (and also the dissatisfaction experienced in absence of updated content.)

Thus an Aggregator retrieves information from the RSS feeds that have been subscribed to and then displays the same to the subscriber.

A study puts the number of RSS Feed subscribers at 30 Million today. At the current rate of growth, it wouldn’t be long before most news, information, corporate, learning, educational, and entertainment sites will make RSS Feeds available for their site visitors. The best thing about RSS Feeds is that the subscriber subscribes to it, because he or she wants to – and so it is almost certain that the information disseminated through this medium will reach the right audience.

The use of RSS in learning is increasing with every passing day. Many teachers and professors today use RSS Feeds to enhance the learning environment for their learners. This brings us to blogging.

Here’s a short scenario:

Jyotika & RSS

Jyotika works as a content developer with a BPO organization’s training function. She is interested in the areas of instructional design, eLearning, training, and also the emergent learning mediums. Unfortunately her schedule is so packed that she finds it impossible to spend time going to each of the 15 sites that she has book-marked for obtaining the information that she is interested in.

One day, Jyotika’s attention is drawn to the “RSS Feed” footer on one of the sites that she often visits. This makes her inquire more about it, and to her pleasant surprise, she discovers that RSS could enable her to receive updated information on the content of the web site – All she requires is an aggregator. She also realizes that the aggregator would help her receive updated information from all the sites by “synthesizing” it together in a central feed. She also discovers that both desktop aggregators as well as online aggregators are freely available to her for use.

Jyotika realizes that she can thus find information of her interest faster; and that she can also receive important updates faster enabling her to act on them in time.

In the course of time, Jyotika receives an offer to facilitate some online courses and accepts the job on an online facilitator. She discovers that the online institute that she works for encourages the learners to set up their own blogs. She then realizes the potential of RSS with respect to imparting learning. Jyotika subscribes to the feeds from the blogs of her students and analyzes their thought processes. This helps her understand and appreciate the issues faced by the learners. She also sets up her own blog and begins syndicating her own RSS feed which helps her inform the learners about assignments, deadlines, references, and so on.

RSS & Learning:
RSS enables learning providers make learning more effective through use of teacher and student blogs, which:

• help the teachers reach the learners in time (for schedule changes, new assignments, other important information and so on.)
• enable the teachers create a discussion-based learning environment.
• enable the learners respond to the concerns, queries, and thoughts of the other learners.
• enable the teachers analyze the learners’ thought processes and determine the effectiveness of the training programs.
• help the learners as well as the educators make their information gathering and learning smoother and faster.

RSS is set to increase learning efficiency by leaps and bounds. It has a definite place in the learning technologies of tomorrow. In the days to come, learners will not be interested in spending time “looking” for the right information; they will expect “useful” information to arrive at their door-step. As eLearning designers and developers we should follow this technology closely and innovate our learning methodologies to include it wherever and whenever possible.

Author: Shafali R. Anand