E-learning is kind of a big deal—and it’s getting more popular every day. Roughly 80 percent of organizations use some form of online training and 30 percent of all corporate training is e-le...
Published 10 years ago
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One of the risks in elearning (inherited from its ancestors that ran on PCs or mainframes) is the ALAWHT factor: "As Long As We Have Them," meaning the learners, let's include:
- This nineteen-item list of expense-report policies, because they're important for people to see.
- Photos and bios for everyone with "vice-president" in her title, because staff really oughta want to see them.
- A sales pitch explaining the benefits of the new project-management system, instead of those tiresome instructions about how to record your time using that system.
It happens ALAWHT in instructor-led training as well, of course. In that mode, there's a hard-dollar sense of sunk costs: we're already paying people to be away from the job and in a formal session, so As Long As We Have Them...
On a related topic, I think organizations today are far more reluctant to pay training-related travel and living than 10 or 15 years ago, especially for front-line employees. As a result elearning isn't saving some of those dollars; they'd never be spent.
That's not to take away from the potential benefits you list: training as needed, when needed; easier access; the possibility of adapting to different backgrounds or abilities.
One additional feature: the ability to use elearning in combination with other tools and experiences. For a specific portion of our pension-administration business, I'm using elearning for an initial lesson to give an overview of key concepts and processes. Next comes an instructor- or coach-guided set of hands-on exercises in our training database. That's a faster, cheaper, easier way to provide realistic tasks than trying to emulate the pension system inside elearning.
Depending on the task and the experience of learners, you could even say "do exercise X, then compare your results with this one," where This One is an example or document inside the elearning course. You could point out, say, the five key areas where errors occur, relying on the adult learner to compare the example with his own work.
- This nineteen-item list of expense-report policies, because they're important for people to see.
- Photos and bios for everyone with "vice-president" in her title, because staff really oughta want to see them.
- A sales pitch explaining the benefits of the new project-management system, instead of those tiresome instructions about how to record your time using that system.
It happens ALAWHT in instructor-led training as well, of course. In that mode, there's a hard-dollar sense of sunk costs: we're already paying people to be away from the job and in a formal session, so As Long As We Have Them...
On a related topic, I think organizations today are far more reluctant to pay training-related travel and living than 10 or 15 years ago, especially for front-line employees. As a result elearning isn't saving some of those dollars; they'd never be spent.
That's not to take away from the potential benefits you list: training as needed, when needed; easier access; the possibility of adapting to different backgrounds or abilities.
One additional feature: the ability to use elearning in combination with other tools and experiences. For a specific portion of our pension-administration business, I'm using elearning for an initial lesson to give an overview of key concepts and processes. Next comes an instructor- or coach-guided set of hands-on exercises in our training database. That's a faster, cheaper, easier way to provide realistic tasks than trying to emulate the pension system inside elearning.
Depending on the task and the experience of learners, you could even say "do exercise X, then compare your results with this one," where This One is an example or document inside the elearning course. You could point out, say, the five key areas where errors occur, relying on the adult learner to compare the example with his own work.