My Ph.D. is in education, but specifically in structural design for online learning, so it's one of my research specialty areas. Last year I developed a course through the University of Waterloo partnering with ICAO. It's called “fundamentals of the air transport system”, and it's a completely free course that introduces all the different sectors of aviation. It has now been completed by students in every global region—not just pilots, but all the professionals.
In looking at the history of e-learning and aviation, what became very clear was that early on they recognized that it was a lot cheaper. A lot of aviation companies were very quick to adopt that training without really understanding if it was effective in accomplishing the learning objectives that it should have. We saw the development of many, many ineffective e-learning courses, and it took quite a long time for the learning science to catch up and create principles of what works and what doesn't.
Today, even as we're talking about all the integrations of technology, I really want to emphasize that in general, the least expensive technology that accomplishes the learning objective is what we should do. It's what we call a task-to-tool framework: we figure out what the problem is and we find a tool that solves that problem. That's in contrast to what I think we've had a history of doing in aviation, which is going for the bright and shiny tool. We call that a tool to task: we find really cool technology and ask how we can apply it to aviation, and it's not really directly addressing a need.
I think there's also a lot of opportunity for e-learning for outreach purposes. I feel that elementary and secondary schools putting out aviation curriculums that are linked to STEM disciplines would have tremendous advantages. It has been shown that e-learning can be quite effective in ab initio and professional training as well, as long as it's implemented strategically.