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The “e” of eLearning is not the important thing. Neither
is the “learning.” What’s important is doing. It’s
like the tree that falls in the forest not making a sound
(because no one hears it.) If somebody learns something but
their behavior doesn’t change, they didn’t really learn anything.
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The head of HR for a Fortune 100 company told me, “Our senior managers will never do eLearning.
They like to learn at Pebble Beach,.” to which I replied,
“So if they wanted a ten-minute update on calculating the EVA
of human capital or assessing monetary risk in Brazil, they’d
go to a golf course?” eLearning entails a lot more than replacing
classes with online lectures. In fact, that’s rarely what happens. |
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She told me, “eLearning will never
be as effective as the classroom,” and I replied,
“Thank God for that.” Since most of us warmed the seats of classrooms
for sixteen or more formative years, we think class is how we
got where we are rather than what was holding us back from becoming
what we might have been. Truth be told, classroom learning is
horribly ineffective, unless you’re teaching unquestioning obedience
and short-term memory skills. People learn from engaging and
questioning material, not from spoon-feeding and exposure. |
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A professor asked me whose eLearning is best, so I asked
her, “Which is better, Berkeley or CalTech?” She told me that
depended on whether one wanted to study philosophy or rocket
science. I said you’ve got to look at eLearning in light of
what you’re trying to accomplish, too. |
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 Another
buyer told me, “eLearning for our
sales force is going to save our company $3 million in travel
costs annually,” to which I replied, “That’s not
the best part.” Assume that it used to cost $1500 per sales
person to attend the annual sales training session, and an attendee’s
sales quota is $2,000,000 a year. Any sales person will tell
you that attending a conference wipes out at least three selling
days – there’s travel to and fro, the wasted time at the meeting,
and the general disruption of getting ready and later dealing
with the mountain of email and phone messages that piled up
while away. Given that there are about 200 useful selling days
in a year, each day out of the field is $10,000 in lost revenue.
The lost opportunity of three days of travel and waste is $30,000
revenue. What’s the margin on that? At least double the out-of-pocket
travel savings. |
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 Grades
are meaningless. Study after study has found that grades
are related to nothing except predicting future grades. A few
years after graduation, the “A” student and the “D” student
exhibit no discernable difference in income, social status,
health, professional accomplishment, happiness, or golf scores.
Makes one wonder about creeping Certification. Don’t ask me
what I think of universal “achievement tests” in our public
schools. |
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 He
told me his company’s eLearning was blended, to which
I responded, “What’s new?” Classroom teachers have always blended
their methods – lecture, discussion, practice, reading, projects,
and writing, for example. Blended is only a revelation for people
who had been trying to do everything with just one tool – usually
the computer. The rest of us have always tried to use the right
tool for the job. |
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 The
teacher said, “There’s no replacement
for the instructor,” to which I replied, “But there
are many who can supplement the instructor.” Before communication
became cheaper than dirt, instructors wore many – too many –
hats. Now it makes sense to divvy up the duties among learning
partners, coaches, mentors, helpers, subject-matter experts,
guides, presenters, and aids. |
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| A senior executve told me, “Implementing
XYZ’s eLearning system is a no-brainer.” He’d
seen it at Online Learning” I told him the story of St. Peter
offering to show the recently deceased fellow heaven and hell
so he could make an informed decision about where to spend the
rest of eternity. In heaven, angels floated around playing lutes
and citing scripture. In hell, the locals were having a wild
party with live bands, frenzied dancing, wild women, designer
drugs, and ice-cold champagne. “I’ll take hell,” said the visitor.
Immediately he was whisked into a dungeon heated to 130o
where brutish guards poured salt in his open wounds and lashed
him to the beat of terrible Turkish rap music. “St. Peter,”
he shouted, “where is the party? The dancing girls?” St. Peter
replied, “That was just the demo.” That’s what the vendor had
showed the executive, the demo. |
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| An instructional designer told me “Simulations are
the pinnacle of learning events,” to which I replied,
“Except when experience is a better teacher.” Why simulate reality
if reality itself is readily available? |
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| A vendor told me “We tailor our
approach to the individual’s learning style,”
which led me to ask whether the content and context of what’s
to be learned weren’t fifty times more relevant than personal
style when choosing how to deliver learning. |
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| A designer at an ISPI meeting told me, “Information is not instruction,” to which
I replied, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.” Sometimes
information is all a person needs to get the job done. Debunking
the value of information is academic. |
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A lon g-time trainer told me, “This eLearning stuff is great for IT training but it doesn’t work
for soft skills,” to which I replied, “You mean
there’s no value in pre-workshop preparation online? There’s
no benefit from post-workshop reinforcement?”
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Content is not king. If content were king, shovel-ware
would be worthwhile. There are no kings. Content, delivery,
motivation, and relevance have to work in concert for learning
to occur. None are paramount. As Cisco’s Tom Kelly says, “If
content is king, infrastructure is god.”
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 “What
do you guys sell?” I asked the vendor. “Solutions.” Solutions to what? Problems. What sort of problems? Training problems. So you sell training. No, we sell solutions.
Uh-huh. |
 ROI
is often bunk, a delaying tactic, a mask for uncertainty
or fear, or an attempt to quantify cost/benefit with accounting
principles that don’t count people as assets. The business return
on eLearning investment should be large enough that you can
figure it out with words -- on the back of a napkin. |
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