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Renaissance e-learning. Why 2020 will show all the advantages of distance learning

E-learning or e-learning has been developing, practicing and improving for many years. The topic is relevant both in the media and among the scientific and educational communities. Since the beginning of 2020, distance learning has become even more relevant.

We at LANIT-TERCOM are engaged in custom development of e-learning platforms. Working with such projects, we are getting more and more information about the requirements of companies for educational courses and platforms. That is why we decided to talk about e-learning today and share with Habr our view on what is interesting and how this market is developing.

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Do you need e-learning? Quarantine decided for everyone


The problem with personnel and resources arose a long time ago. Due to the acute shortage of specialists in the rapidly changing modern world of technology, companies do not have an understanding of whether it will be possible to saturate some industries with people in the near future. For many years, large corporations in the USA, China and other countries have made huge investments in the education of their employees.

The volume of the corporate training market shows annual growth. Today it exceeds the mark of $ 366 billion . At the same time, the demand for highly qualified specialists is growing even faster: according to the chairman of the St. Petersburg Labor Committee Dmitry Cherneyko, it is planned to retrain 10-11 thousand people in the framework of the national program in 2020, although the need for Petersburg employers is already 50 thousand people a year .The higher education system, which faces the task of training personnel for the digital economy, is also experiencing a serious load. The declared indicators, which should be achieved in the near future, just cannot be achieved with the current acceptance figures for the relevant programs.

Therefore, business and universities urgently need a radical change in the process of training and retraining of personnel.

Optimists hope for progress in the development of educational technologies, and it is really noticeable - from simple tests that complete the video tutorials or chapters of electronic textbooks, we turn to complex platforms with built-in biological (in the sense of autonomous tuning) adaptive learning algorithms that change the educational path in real time in accordance with the individual characteristics of each student. But for now, the idea of ​​creating such an educational platform that would enable a person to quickly learn a new profession and change his occupation several times in his life (let alone receive recommendations on such changes) seems utopian.

Countries come to the introduction of e-learning in different ways. For example, about 15 years ago in Russia the idea of ​​creating training classes for programmers was actively discussed - courses on accelerated learning of Cobol, Java in three months without preliminary preparation. This did not find a big response with us. We immediately realized that somehow it was not possible to remake the humanities into a Java programmer in a couple of months. The maximum that was possible to do was to train testers, and that is not at the level of QA engineer.

Another example is Italy, where our company’s European office is located. The country supports and develops projects like “High-level .Net Programmer in 160 Hours”. Training takes place in the old manner with teaching in classrooms. Over the past two years, a huge number of classic courses have appeared in Italy. Even those who have a couple of years of experience, but already felt like a serious teacher at least at the senior level, decided to teach. True, the result is not the best: the already low level of writing code in the country continues to decline, while students in physical and mathematical departments continue to be the best. 


But it should be noted that even the Italian industry nevertheless recognized the lack of personnel and the need to use e-learning to train them. So, large banks (and the banking system of Italy is complicated and overloaded with bureaucracy for historical reasons) have introduced some kind of electronic training system for their employees. Trade enterprises and other industries began to pull themselves up.

The events of the beginning of 2020, connected with the pandemic, finally convinced even conservative Italy of the need for the availability and use of reliable systems for distance learning. Uncertainty about the future, a lack of understanding of the situation with the spread and protection against the virus, the introduction of quarantine and the need to work / study from home have convinced the whole world that e-learning is the solution to many problems. Many, perhaps, remember how in Soviet times there was an OBZH course and an explanation of the first actions in the onset of an atomic war. In this way, they tried in advance to reduce the level of informational unpreparedness and panic provided that events occurred. But the idea was not bad: if you want peace, get ready for war ... Area9, with the help of its partners in educational courses for doctors (AACC Learning Lab,NEJM Knowledge +) as soon as possible released a small freemicrocourse of adaptive training on the COVID-19 virus . Now it is available in Russian ... We have translated and distributed it. The effect was not long in coming. The level of anxiety decreased significantly.


Unfortunately, universities and schools in Italy were not prepared in advance for such a situation. While in many countries of the world, full-fledged courses for students at medical schools have already been introduced, and they are not afraid of quarantines, they can be trained without any problems from anywhere in the world.

Studying the experience of distance learning of millions of students and company employees, including negative ones, we have a clear understanding of what characteristics an ideal e-learning system should have: 

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And this is quite real - in Italy, security courses are required for programmers and managers. Until now, companies have to send people to classes. I myself took such a course in Bari in a group of 60 people. Before studying, they sent us 40 pages of the presentation in .pdf format for review. The effectiveness of such training, as you yourself understand, is very low: there are many students in one room, the presentation of complex material in the presentation format by email, the lack of interactivity, the time spent on working three and a half hours every day to sit in a noisy audience, and the lack of opportunity check the assimilation of the material - all this created a negative attitude of the business-active population to this type of training. An adaptive course designed for 1 hour per day with well-structured blocks would be much more effective.The Salute e Sicurezza sul Lavoro course is a classic example of an outdated model of training in Italy.

An electronic adaptive course would be very helpful here. An employee could pass it at home, spending a maximum of an hour of time daily for the same three days. 

A bit of theory, but not boring



This diagram shows the so-called four-dimensional learning model. It was first formulated by Charles Fadel et al in the short book Four-Dimensional Education: The Competencies Learners Need to Succeed , published in 2015. The concept has found application in innovative educational methods in 75 countries around the world, and our book has been translated into Russian twice and published by the Center for Educational Development of the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo and Sberbank's Contribution to the Future Charitable Foundation. 

As in traditional training systems, one of the most important components is knowledge.. The authors of the concept only urge to be more attentive to what knowledge is becoming available with the help of modern search engines, and which require a more serious attitude. But, in addition to knowledge, the model includes two more equivalent components: skills (the ability of a person to apply knowledge) and character - those personality traits that help us overcome difficulties, achieve goals, create an atmosphere of cohesion, etc. Among the main skills that can and should be formed using e-learning, the famous 4K stands out - communication, teamwork, critical thinking and creativity. It is these skills that determine our place in a rapidly changing world, help people adapt to new situations, successfully interact with machines and algorithms. It is becoming more and more complicated with the character, because it includes the notorious soft skills that have been talked about so much in the last few years, but it is not so simple to form them using exclusively electronic education. And here we are talking more about not a universal platform for the formation of an arbitrary set of character traits, but about painstaking work on a list of those traits that we can try to develop using remote systems. Every small success on this difficult path is important here.

If you look at the diagram again, we will see that the intersection of these three components gives an idea of ​​the ideal student of the 21st century. But if you move a little away from the screen, you will notice another circle that covers knowledge, skills and character. 

Meta training. The development of our abilities is moving from the particular to the general. It helps to comprehend the educational process as such: self-awareness as a student, a sober assessment of one’s level of knowledge, the ability to observe its changes, a vision of one’s pluses and minuses, and most importantly, an understanding of why I’m actually learning, what it gives me, how it will affect my work, prospects and plans. An accurate assessment of their current abilities allows the employee to move forward faster and more confidently, in fact setting the goal for growth and development.

The ideal embodiment of this model in practice today is adaptive learning . In its modern form, it is an automated platform that adapts in real time to the needs of each student. This is the same senior employee who “leads the handle” of a newcomer, given his knowledge gaps, correctly motivating him and implementing a personal, personal approach. By learning to use adaptive algorithms, you do not waste time repeating or mastering what you already know. The adaptability of the system is to identify weaknesses in your knowledge and skills, and to train these areas, as well as constantly monitor the student’s involvement in the process.

A great example is the Rhapsode platform .. The starting point of the idea of ​​its development was medicine, and medical students should not only know the theory by heart, but also support their qualifications. We all remember how quickly the information learned on the night before the exam at the university was erased. According to research, weathered new knowledge accounts for 70% after 24 hours . Medical students should not study like that, they thought at universities in Denmark. In the USA, they revealed an even more interesting fact.: the level of unconscious incompetence of employees is from 20 to 40%. That is, the doctor is sure that he knows exactly what to do, but in fact this is not so. The adaptive learning platform Rhapsode successfully copes with this critical problem not only for doctors, but also for specialists from many other industries, where it is also important to make the right and informed decisions.

The most effective one-on-one live dialogue remains. But if we imagine thousands or tens of thousands of students, we immediately understand that it is impossible to solve the problem of personalized training without the use of technology: we are tired of evaluating the teaching talents of these ten thousand mentors. Although in life sometimes we are faced with huge companies that use the principle of mentoring. In combination with staff turnover and poor training of the mentors themselves, this can lead to paradoxical results: when none of the employees understands who is teaching whom and why. 

Will technology cope with this challenge? By itself, no. The technologies are neutral, but the competent use by people of the most advanced of them allows already now to achieve amazing results.

The illustration below shows the individual trajectories of three real students taking the same course in one of the platforms mentioned earlier.

Synthetic infographics based on indicators of three real people who have passed the same adaptive course.

I note that the course was created with utmost responsibility. Each training goal, each task had several reviewers, often different. 

Each circle is one of the 25 learning objectives offered for development. The size of the circle shows how often the employee had to return to the goal for its development. The lines between the circles are the trajectories of the course from one target to another.

What you should pay attention to is a common feature of all three trajectories, that is, the final 100% of the development of materials. Each one spent different time for this (employee A spent half as much time as employee B and four times less than employee C), and each revealed not only knowledge gaps, but also those same areas of unconscious incompetence, where you had to not just teach, but retrain. At the same time, the course is not rated 5, 4 or 3. As a result, everyone passed it and can use the knowledge and skills (and someone else has developed perseverance and curiosity) in practice. We also received a lot of useful information in the HR department, as not only the level of knowledge of everyone is visible, but also the adequacy in self-esteem. 

But the course does not end on the course. No matter how sophisticated the methodology for identifying and filling knowledge gaps, as noted above, each of us very quickly forgets new information. That is why another important function of the modern educational platform is the repetition mechanism. In the ideal case, an individual forget curve (Ebbinghaus curve) should be built for each student and new materials for him will be repeated several times at the right time. By the way, in addition to the curves of forgetting, the German psychologist also discovered the so-called edge effect: the information obtained at the beginning and the end of the lesson is best remembered (remember, in “Seventeen Moments of Spring”: “Last phrase memorized?”). So,correctly designed adaptive learning algorithms are naturally “pushed” to the end of the module to repeat those learning goals with which the particular student had the most difficulties.

There is no limit to perfection


We see that the quality of e-learning is growing. But it must be taken into account that some of the areas of cognition remain still uncovered by technology. The practical part in certain areas can even be trained using the same simulators / robots or virtual reality helmets (colleagues from LANIT Integration in Vedomosti wrote about how this happens ). The manufacturers of training systems have high hopes for augmented reality technologies and devices such as smart glasses. In the last two years alone, a large number of startups have appeared (for example, this), which offer to solve the problem of training through wearable devices. The principle of operation is approximately the following: a student / specialist, putting on augmented reality glasses, is remotely controlled by his teacher. Working example: a mechanical engineer can pass an exam or take a practical lesson with a real engine of a car, and a professor / specialist from another city will monitor and adjust the process. 

We acknowledge that the quality of such training is still poor. To electronically restore an environment in which a student could feel like in real life, with the whole atmosphere, smells, sounds and all that in practice can significantly affect the result, have not yet learned. The situation when a medical student perfectly learned the theory, went through practice on simulators, robots equipped with hypersensitive sensors, but then in real conditions he cannot make the right decision or faints at the sight of the blood of a living patient, while he is not subject to technology. It is not yet possible to model how a specialist can feel himself in the world around, taking into account his personal qualities and characteristics of the outside world. And that meansthe topic of improving e-learning will remain relevant and will be developed both from a theoretical and a technological point of view.

The article was written in collaboration with the director of the digital solutions department of LANIT-TERCOM, a teacher at St. Petersburg State University Marat Nemeshev maratnemeshev. 

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