Creating courses online involves getting subject matter expertise into a course that takes learners on a logical and well-organised journey from ignorance to knowledge. That is a fundamental requirement for an online course to have any impact at all. But what about the delivery system – how do you package the learning content as a product that reaches learners?

Deepfakes and other manipulated media are now easy to make. The tools are freely available and the results can be convincing. It is now possible to put one public figure’s words in the mouth of another by superimposing and lip-syncing the latter’s face. It is also possible to have anybody appear to say things that nobody ever said in reality except the faker. The technology is now mature enough to fool the casual viewer. And since the media are consumed almost entirely by casual viewers, deepfakes are a new and pernicious danger to the public’s perceptions of reality.

Here’s a future scenario for online learning:

There are no or few institutions of higher education because there is no need to attend them. We build our own learning paths, our learning activities logged from multiple sources by something akin to xAPI and stored in a repository under our names.

Just after our recent post about (s)low xAPI adoption in the L&D community, Rustici Software have published some behind-the-scenes figures on xAPI use in their own eLearning content delivery and testing service, SCORM Cloud. The fact that SCORM Cloud offers a built-in LRS (Learning Record Store) might be skewing the figures somewhat since it offers a turnkey LRS solution in an L&D world that hasn’t yet really joined up the xAPI/LRS implementation dots yet.

Back in 2015 we published an article on elearningindustry.com about Rustici Software’s Experience API, aka xAPI, aka Tin Can API. It was one of many such articles in the wake of xAPI’s launch in 2013, and gave an explanation of how this new learning data tool worked and the great variety of systems it could theoretically gather and aggregate learning data from.

When it comes to the efficient transfer of knowledge into people’s heads, digital learning is still in its infancy. A student who sits clicking through the linear, restrictive activities in a typical LMS activity in 2019 is spending as much time complying with the demands of the technology as they are learning. Knowledge is dispensed in one direction in measured doses, like those internet-enabled cat feeders. Take this knowledge, says the LMS, pass the test, and be grateful. Just don’t ask me any difficult questions.