"Make no little plans. They fail to stir the blood of men," said architect Daniel Burnham. Indeed, life's too short for mediocrity. When I hear someone say they wish their online learning were as effective as their instructor-led workshops, I wonder why they're shooting so low. They should be aiming to make their technology-enabled learning much better than the passive classroom experience. Let's face it, the classroom is often a mediocre learning environment.

Workflow Institute's Sam Adkins gave a presentation this morning on Advanced Learning Technology Today. He showed this graph to demonstrate what's possible.


Twenty years ago, Benjamin Bloom found that individually-tutored students performed as well as the top 2% of classroom students. Equalling this record in automated fashion has become eLearning's Holy Grail. The Department of Defense has achieved it, but cost is rarely a constraint there. The Advanced Computer Tutoring Project at Carnegie Mellon University claims even higher performance gains among Pittsburgh high-school students studying math. Did the students like it? One swore at a teacher so she'd get kicked out of school for a couple of days -- during which she learned geometry with her unrestricted time online.