An eLearning Course May Be Teaching More Than You Intended

After many years in instructional design and eLearning, I’ve come to question something we often take for granted about learning.

We tend to think of it in simple terms:

The learner learned it.
The learner didn’t.

The course worked.
The course failed.

But I don’t think learning works that way.

People always learn something.

The more important question is:

What are they learning?

Consider a poorly designed eLearning course.

An employee attends a course because they genuinely want to learn. But the content is difficult to follow, the activities feel disconnected, and the experience becomes frustrating. The course doesn’t help with the problems they actually face at work.

We might conclude that the learner simply didn’t get much out of it.

But they may have learned something very different from what we intended:

“I could have spent this time getting my work done.”

Or

“eLearning is a waste of time.”

That is still learning.

It’s just not the learning outcome we intended. And if that happens repeatedly, something else happens.

We spend a great deal of effort trying to motivate learners, get them interested, and hook them into the learning experience. But several poor learning experiences can work in the opposite direction. Learners may become more guarded and less receptive, even when they are later required to learn.

There is an interesting example in Taiwan.

The government has invested heavily in eLearning for public servants, offering a large number of courses across different topics and allowing employees to choose based on their needs and interests.

There are many good courses among them, but the quality is mixed.

In 2018, a proposal was submitted on Taiwan’s Public Policy Participation Platform calling for the abolition of the eLearning program for public servants. One of the complaints was that requiring 20 to 40 hours of eLearning each year was a waste of time with little effect.

The proposal received nearly 8,000 endorsements in just three days.

What interests me is not whether the program was good or bad.

It’s this:

If people repeatedly experience learning that feels ineffective, what are they learning about learning itself?

Maybe:

“This isn’t worth my time.”

And that may be a bigger problem than one ineffective course.

A poor course doesn’t simply fail to teach what we intended. It may teach learners to distrust the learning experience itself.

So perhaps we need to ask a different question when we talk about learning effectiveness:

Not just, “Did they learn what we wanted them to learn?”

But:

“What else did they learn from the experience?”