Let’s Kill e-Learning

Over the past couple of days I have been in a variety of meetings, classes and conversations about e-learning. After processing the information I have heard I am wondering (only half sarcastically) if the current goal is to kill e-learning so we can all move on to the next big thing and buy new toys…er, I mean tools.

Allow me to expand on this. The central theme of these discussions is this: most compliance training has been moved to e-learning (70% is the number that is tossed about). No one likes this training. It is described non-verbally by most by the miming of an air-mouse click-click-clicking into the air of a virtual page-turner. The only thing that seems to generate any excitement at all in compliance training is the ability to say with authority that 100% of the target audience has completed the training, as proven by the detailed LMS reports, pie charts and graphs.

Let me restate that – a larger (and growing larger percentage) of e-learning now consists of training that excites no one who is developing, delivering or taking it. Having experienced my own share of requisite compliance training I think it safe to describe it as self-administered PowerPoint presentations, and if you thought death by PowerPoint was bad when you had a presenter in front of the room, imagine it without even that minor diversion.

There are 2 responses to this. OK you say, it's not a problem because "my" training is not like that. "I" am not developing boring page turners. "I" am developing fully interactive e-learning modules that take advantage of everything I can find to increase user involvement.

Yeah yeah yeah. But where is it being delivered? On the same platform that users have come to associate with those compliance modules? So having bored someone to distraction, you now are using the same platform and think they will be excited by your training. This is a great plan. Do you also think that everyone enjoys going to the dentist?

The other logical observation is that compliance training is by definition there to ensure that everyone is compliant with some requirement. There is nothing unreasonable there - or is there? If the only reason a class is offered is to ensure that everyone has clicked the completion screen, whether or not they learn anything, then is it time to question the need for these classes? I realize that this is a naïve question.

Almost as naïve as thinking that shifting hours of self administered PowerPoint's to a learning platform will have no effect on how people view that platform, the concept of training, or the people who are requiring it.

R

New Writing, New Reading

I have been involved of late with redoing the content of my web site. It may come as a shock to some that I tend to be a bit wordy, sometimes appearing to revel in the sound of my own fingers hitting the keyboard. This is actually intentional, a sort of filter I have decided to put on this effort. My thought is that I am attempting, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to comment on things that sit in the grey area – that is, that do not have quick/binary yes/no, buy/sell, go/stay responses. This may be vanity, but I would like to think that there are issues that deserve debate, and the intention is to draw people into the debate.

On the other hand…

Of late I have been working to improve the content of my website – that place that tells people about my company and what it does. (We deliver training and consulting on e-learning). I became aware that it was in dire need of updating when I looked at it and discovered that it looked too much like this blog (see above paragraph). I needed to redo the website to grab people's attention so they would engage my services and continue to provide me with a living.

So, I have been rewriting and it has been an interesting experience. The guidelines and experts suggest that I need to change the way I write to match a new audience. My goal is not to detail those guidelines here – there are multiple web sites that can suggest how to write for the web. As a common point of reference let's accept shorter paragraphs, shorter words, more to the point, less detail as very broad strokes of the advice. Instead, I would like to pause for a moment to consider how that new style of writing affects content.

As someone who has experienced college instruction in multiple decades and with multiple technologies, I have seen something of what happens when the medium changes. When I restarted my studies in the 1990's most of the lectures were presented using PowerPoint slides. Initially I thought this was great – I would not need to scribble furiously to record the course content; instead I would have an accurate record of the lecture that I could make notes upon.

But I didn't. One problem was that teachers often did not extend much past the PowerPoint, so there was nothing to write. Another was that the slides seemed to capture the class discussion well enough that I did not need to add notes.

Then a curious thing happened – I stopped listening to the content of the class and started listening to the presentation and noting my own reactions to it.

First, a change that had occurred in the time I had been away from school. Previously teachers had covered chalkboards with information that remained in front of the class as an artifact of the previous discussions. PowerPoint was very Zen-like, existing only in the moment the slide was on the screen. In this case the spare Zen experience was not necessarily a good thing for learning. Then I noticed that writing notes actually engaged my brain in ways that watching slides did not (kinesthetic learning for those interested)…in effect, class became bad television, with everyone sitting passively and watching.

(This may be an old memory, but I remember reading way back that watching television put the brain into an alpha state, which was associated with rest, i.e., even watching a horrid natural disaster on TV is at the core a peaceful experience. I wonder if anyone has studied brains attempting to learn while watching PowerPoint slides.)

In short I noticed that I was not learning very much in classes conducted via PowerPoint (which leads back to one of the reasons for the first paragraph of this entry). It also directly affects how content is presented in e-learning courses, since most that I watch are simply self-administered PowerPoint presentations (perhaps you can use that phrase the next time someone tells you that you need to create a course quickly – just use PowerPoint - because budget is small and turnaround needs to be quick).

I continue to ponder what to do with my website.

And no, I am not going to link to it until I have revised it ;-)

R