eLearning is not a big cost-cutter
Corporations are flocking to eLearning for all the wrong reasons. It’s cheaper: no travel, no facilities cost, no instructor salaries. This sort of fanciful thinking tripped up eLearning ten years ago.
In that first wave of eLearning, venture capitalists and the learning industry saw fortunes to be made by replacing instructors with computers. It didn’t work. Clive Shepard wrote about this a few months back. Here’s what I was blogging five years ago:
When I began writing about eLearning in 1998, some of us felt the training industry had struck gold! We were going to change the world and pick up some dot-com riches while we did it. Irrational exuberance? We didn’t think so at the time. eLearning was going to make email look like a rounding error. It reminded me of the spirit of Woodstock. People in the business exchanged knowing smiles. “We must be in heaven, man!”
What happened? We fumbled the implementation. We naively expected workers to flock to the glowing screens. We thought we could take the instructors out of the learning process and let workers gobble up self-paced (i.e., “don’t expect help from us”) lessons on their own. We were wrong. First-generation eLearning was a flop. Companies licensed “libraries” of content no one paid attention to. PowerPoint became the authoring language of choice. (Personally, I get more content from a Jackson Pollock drip painting than from someone else’s PowerPoint slides.) Dropout rates were horrendous. After-the-fact finger pointing is not productive. I don’t use the term eLearning much these days.
If you want outcomes that are comparable or better than what you were getting from instructor-led workshops, you have to do more than just throw things online. You have to support electronic offerings with mentors, guides, help desks, FAQs, reinforcement, and organizational support. eLearning is not a free lunch.
Poorly implemented eLearning is a more expensive alternative to doing nothing at all, and often the results would be the same.
Well-executed eLearning makes learning more accessible but it’s rarely going to double or triple one’s return on investment. eLearning is an incremental improvement, not a game-changer.
Natural (“pull”) learning has the real profit potential
Corporations can make the learning function many times more effective by shifting their orientation from push learning to pull learning.
Concepts at work in pull learning include:
- Learning on demand, immediate reinforcement
- Learning while working, not separate from working
- Self-service, flexible delivery, convenience
- Peer learning, communities of practice, collaboration
- Small chunks, links for further discovery
- Holistic, process orientation
Facilitating pull learning requires building learning ecosystems that bind workers together instead of developing courses and events. Replacing instructor-led events with living networks yields astounding gains in productivity.
Pull learning is not always appropriate; its application calls for judgment. For example regulations specify push learning for compliance training. Highly structured learning is appropriate for learning some technical skills. Face-to-face is unparalleled for changing behavior and rallying emotions. Simulations fall into a space somewhere between push and pull. Virtual Princeton will never be the same as being there in person. Nonetheless, most corporate learning is informal; improving the channels for pull learning makes it more effective.
Related:
Origins of term eLearning
Hi Jay,
I’m with you all the way, but I think we need to get away from this blanket statement that ‘e-learning doesn’t work’. At least with regard to talking to business owners. The large organisations I do work for have amassed some great financial returns on e-learning, have the test statistics to give some comfort that the courses had some effect and some have even done deeper evaluations and seem convinced some of the learning sticks. So, I don’t think they’ll be receptive to someone just saying ‘it doesn’t work’. Their evidence seems to say otherwise. Sure, this model may become outdated and perhaps a more ‘pull’ approach is the way to go, but I can’t say i’m seeing it take hold in many places at all. Also, most of the businesses i’m in contact with seem to have rather traditional business models rather than the crazy pace of change we all seem to talk about. ….hmm…not sure where this is leading. Like I say, i’m with you in spirit but the training/developoment world just seems to move at a glacial speed.
Mindful
Mindful, I didn’t say that ‘eLearning doesn’t work.’ I said eLearning didn’t work when it first came out because people expected it to implement itself. Properly supported, eLearning can work extremely well. In fact, I wrote “If you want outcomes that are comparable or better than what you were getting from instructor-led workshops, you have to do more than just throw things online.”
I still maintain that really bad eLearning is a waste of time and effort. It’s demoralizing.
I hear you regarding businesses and training departments that are not innovating. It’s frustrating as can be. Frankly, I’ve written them off. Organizations that can’t adapt and change are dead men walking. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”
jay
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Hi Jay, haven’t talked in a while. I agree with your statement that elearning needs support and not more powerpoints. I empatically agree with your statements about learning on demand and pull learning. While there is a small learning curve to RSS I think we should rename RSS to the learning on demand center. Thankfully RSS is part of MS Office 2007 so it is right there next to your email. Now getting folks to stop blasting emails and use a reader/blog is the behavioral change that will take time.
Going to respond with two things here Jay:
1) I totally hear what you are saying about eLearning failing as a solo soution. For years I’ve been trying to influence my managing homies to consider eLearning solutions as part of a larger system. Instead, we have continued to treat them as isolated interventions. In fact, each solution thread has lived in its own stovepipe and never shall they meet or cross paths. eLearning is to total solution as diet pills are to magical weight loss. This is not an exaggeration – you can’t lose weight in a healthy way without a balanced program. In my opinion, the same applies to learning.
2) It bothers me when we compare fresh juicy apples to rotten oranges. It is extremely difficult to change a culture to value a solution component when at every turn we are comparing face to face solutions that existed before to what could be and in some rare cases is a superior solution. The face to face solutions that folks refer to are rarely a perfect intervention.
So take care not to generalize about face to face solutions ‘always’ being better. Since this implies that all (name the solution) is always a fresh apple. And that eLearning is always the rotten orange. It’s just not a fair comparison. And this comparison makes it hard for the folks that see the path to change to move an organization down that path.
I like the page.. no it is not the answer to all.. but to some types of learning. It really depends on the subject matter.
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Great post, thanks Jay!
The trick is to understand how to organize information so only they essentials are delivered by a push learning and all other information be available via pull learning.
Matthew Bibby.
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