There is nothing special however about CMC and its capacity to enable collaborative learning. If you are like me, it was probably in the last 24 hours. Some of us can recall that line from King Lear, others are good with word-processing shortcut keystrokes or the dosages of drugs. What it wants to do is demonstrate ways in which we can collaborate in our learning, and break down some of the barriers to it, based in an individualistic approach to how we learn about our environment. Issues of effectiveness and efficiency Effectiveness is the extent to which a process is suited to the objective for which it is designed.
Efficiency is the extent to which the process achieves the objective in reality.
One aspect of effectiveness is related to cost, and cost-effectiveness is a factor with which many of you will be familiar as part of the everyday life of health professions. Processes or technologies are evaluated against one another not only in terms of how well they are suited to an objective, but which can achieve the same result for least financial or other cost. Consider the cost of educating a doctor, nurse or therapist. Note of course that the efficiency of individual professionals may be higher or lower, and the cost-effectiveness of training will be based thus not only on the extent to which a professional training can meet the needs of providing health or services, but upon the capacity of the professional to actually deliver. So turning back to collaborative learning, we can see that in the light of the earlier discussion, there is both an effectiveness and an efficiency issue here.