Is the Internet a Good Teacher?

With the arrival of September in the northern hemisphere comes the return of a new academic year in schools and universities. When the initial phase of excitement and fun of catching up with old friends passes, the serious business of study, assignments and test preparation quickly takes over. And for most students now, this means turning to their laptops, tablets and phones as they scan the Web for information, content and answers. But how good is the Internet as a learning tool?

Not so good it would increasingly appear. A growing array of experimental studies have tested whether information gleaned online leads to better or worse comprehension and retention compared with information obtained through the linear fashion of textbooks and lectures. In these studies, two sets of volunteers are exposed to the same content – one group to material presented in webpage format with hyperlinks and multimedia while the other group gets the content in book page fashion. The two groups are tested afterwards on the content with the latter consistently outperforming the ‘internet’ group. In a similar further study, one group of volunteers watched a presentation played through a web browser that including only a series of text pages while another watched the same material but with an embedded audio-visual presentation of related material. In a subsequent ten-question test, the former group again significantly out-performed those that viewed the more media-rich presentation. Finally, of particular interest to educators is a study by Hembrooke & Gay that examined the impact of allowing your audience to use technology while participating in class, something that is becoming commonplace. Again those students who were allowed to surf the Web during class performed significantly worse in post-class tests than those that were not.

It is not just students but professionals of all sorts, including managers, that are using the internet to help them with their work. But why is it such a poor teacher? The problem is that surfing the Web requires us to constantly make fast and immediate decisions regarding which links to follow, which pages to stay with and so on. This, according to neuro-scientists, increases our cognitive load and simultaneously inhibits the transfer of information to our long-term memory. Your brain, as it were, cannot do two things at once. So whether it is making good business decisions or getting good grades, ration your dependence on the Web!

The Demise of Lucozade Energy Cola

Well that didn’t take long! Launched with some fanfare in October 2011, Lucozade Energy Cola was the latest in the long line of pretenders to the throne jointly occupied by Coke and Pepsi. But in recent months it has quietly slipped off the shelves and into a Cola hospital to hang out with the likes of Virgin Cola, Red Bull Cola and others, though it is still available online. Two questions are worth looking at in this case. Why did Lucozade enter a space where so many others have tried and failed and what explains the enduring dominance of Coke and Pepsi?

It would have been fun to have been a fly on the wall when the good people at GSK were discussing this possible brand extension. Was it all gung-ho and groupthink or were there dissenting voices? Only a select few know the real answer. We did have some seemingly compelling arguments to accompany the brand’s launch. It had apparantly compared very favourably in taste tests! The Cola market in the UK is worth £3 billion and even getting just 2 per cent of that would grow Lucozade’s annual sales by 50 percent! But there also seemed to be some doubts. It was initially a ‘limited edition’ and it wasn’t always clear whether it was going to be positioned beside colas or other energy drinks in the shops.

So why did it all go wrong? Well for a start, if the primary rationale for the launch was that this brand tasted better, then it was doomed from the word go. Cola has never been about taste no matter what consumers might tell you. Even Coca Cola themselves proved that way back in 1985 with their disastrous decision to launch New Coke which bombed despite extensive testing. Colas are pretty horrible sugary drinks but they sell so well because they are connected in the consumer’s minds with positive images like youth, fun, happiness and good times through years and years of powerful advertising and imagery from the leading brands. This level of emotional value takes a long time and lots of creative effort to build which explains why the big two stay strong while the pretenders fall by the wayside.