A lesson from edtech’s early history (Weller, 2020) with immediate relevance today is a recurring failure across edtech’s evolution that corporations perpetuate: treating knowledge as a commodity to be shipped rather than an experience to be cultivated.
In 2000, the industry chased “Learning Objects”—modular content bricks designed for plug-and-play delivery (Weller, 2020, Chapter 7). But the decontextualization paradox set in: stripping away localized context to make content universally reusable renders content generic and pedagogically weak. By 2012, xMOOCs repeated this error at scale, treating education as a one-way delivery system for video assets (Weller, 2020, Chapter 19) .
To be clear, I am not against the “Lego bricks” approach or delivering content at scale; however, it requires intentional instructional design that aligns with how humans actually learn (Weller, 2020, p. 51). A simple metaphor illustrates this—learning is like a book club.
- The Reusable Content (Weller, 2020, Chapter 7) is the book itself—foundational, efficient to share, and unnecessary to rewrite from scratch.
- The Personal Learning Environment (Weller, 2020, Chapter 18) is your personal reading process—the decentralized, self-curated space where you annotate margins, take notes in your own tools, and process ideas on your own terms.
- Connectivism (Weller, 2020, Chapter 17) is the book club gathering—the shared physical, virtual, or mental space (what Nonaka & Konno, 1998, defined as Ba) where trust, dialogue, and collective sense-making transform static text into meaningful knowledge.
Collaborative sense-making and shared dialogue in a book club setting. (Photo: Getty Images / iStock)xMOOCs failed because they mistook building a digital library for running the club. Platforms like Coursera stall at the lowest levels of cognitive processing (Krathwohl, 2002)—relying on passive video watching and multiple-choice quizzes that test basic recall rather than higher-order synthesis or creation.
While Weller’s historical analysis proves that learning requires agency and social connection, current corporate practices directly contradict this lesson as learning is relegated to a “side-of-the-desk” activity. Organizations delude themselves that enterprise e-learning subscriptions equal capability building without providing relational dialogue or protected space for deep practice. Low return on investment is the predictable outcome.
Smart content reuse and digital delivery are essential for distributed workforces. But modern learning environments must intentionally cultivate personal reflection and shared dialogue—where real learning actually occurs.
References
- Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview. Theory Into Practice, 41(4), 212–218. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2
- Nonaka, I., & Konno, N. (1998). The concept of “Ba”: Building a foundation for knowledge creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/41165942
- Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech. AU Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01