Email bombs

Grrr. I'm connected to the net with my laptop and a modem today, so I'm more conscious of download speeds and hassles than usual. The SoBig worm arrived just as I was leaving on this trip, so I didn't have time to innoculate my computers. Hence I am using webmail (via Horde). I've been getting 150 virus-generated emails a day. Re: Wicked Screensaver, Re: Your Report, etc.

Email, until recently the easiest networking tool of all, has become a pain in the ass. Once a tool for everyone, now it requires a specialist to explain worms and viruses, Symantec vs. McAfee, updated definitions, disinfection, and why an email from Aunt Tilly may have been sent by a cyber-terrorist spoofing Aunt Tilly. In an instant, you could lose the photos of the grandkids, last year's income tax figures, and the beginning of the Great American Novel. Opening email has all the thrills of walking alone in a dark corner of Central Park at 3:00 am.

eLearning relies on email for scheduling, assignments, announcements, and peer networking. Once upon a time, email seemed more reliable than snail mail. No longer. If an incoming email makes it through my Spam filters, it can still get lost among the junk that still gets to my email box. What's the world to do? Return to copy machines and paper memos?

Maybe the "e" stands for "entropy."

Level 4, forever out of reach

Einstein said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them," e.g. if you think only in training terms, you'll never attain Level 4.

Other Einstein thoughts relevant to Training ROI:

• Imagination is more important than knowledge.
  
• A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.
  
• Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.
  
• People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
  
• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
  
• The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.
  
• There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

Which brings me to a posting on ROInet by one Phil Rutherford, who wrote me, "Please feel free to re-post my mental wanderings. A lot of my current thinking is actually coming out of my PhD research coupled with nearly a decade of experience trying to get management more interested in the domain that trainers for so long have claimed for their own, but which is clearly belonging to managers. "

Take it away, Phil.

...I for one share your frustrations and hope I'm not being too bold in offering what I've found to be one solution.

You talk about the problem of transference between training and on-the-job performance, and this is something that I grappled with for many years until I realized that by training alone I didn't have a hope in Hades of influencing what they would do when they got back to work. The truth is that training was actually only a very minor part of my wider responsibility when it comes to bringing about change in the workplace, and done wrongly it actually worked against change. But more on that shortly.

In my opinion the heart of the problem with transferability centers on the fact that much of the training is not based on what the people need to be able to do on the job. In simple terms, what I have found is that trainers generally spend a great deal of time concentrating on what they are going to provide, and use this as the basis upon which their effectiveness is measured, and overlook what the customer wants to buy and what they will, at the end of the day, actually measure the trainer's effectiveness by.

For example, in a stationery store I might sell someone a pen but what the client is actually buying is a means for communicating. I can wax lyrical all day about the beauty of the pen but if all they need to buy is something to scribble their lotto numbers out with then I'm wasting my time. When it comes to measuring how effective I am at my job, or how well I'm meeting the client's needs, if I'm trying to justify my position by the beauty of my pens when in fact I'm being measured, by others, for how well I'm providing them with the means to communicate then we are never going to have an agreement on how well I'm doing. In fact, if the store is more akin to a supermarket then a specialty store, and customers can walk around picking out what they want and taking it to the cash register (exactly the way some training centers are run) then some are actually going to question whether or not I'm needed at all if all I can use to measure my effectiveness is the beauty of my pens.

In this day and age most people already know how to write and can do so using anything from a gold-plated Parker pen to a stick dipped in ground-up clay. So, rather than concentrating on trying to get people to write using our preferred writing tool we should move a bit further along the continuum and find out what they need to write and what they would need to do if what they wrote was wrong. Here we are moving into the world of what they intend to do with the skills/tools rather than the skills/tools themselves. Anyone can provide the skills/tools (sorry folks - the world is full of trainers/stationery store attendants), but not everyone can work at the next step in the continuum and help people apply them.

By way of example, I would venture to suggest that one of the main problems you had with your particular leadership program in SA (and it is fairly clear which one you're talking about) is that it is almost entirely theory based and trainer driven (ie, pedagogical). This fact that has been more than done to death on other lists so there's not much to be gained in denying this. Sure, it has been around for a while and has some very special videos, wallcharts and handouts, and is in fact a trainer's dream when it comes to running a nice little training program, but very little of it is based on what actually occurs in the workplace What you needed was a more practical and reality based model such as John Adair's Functional Approach which has been shown to work simply because it doesn't rely on theory. More importantly, such an approach actually relates to what happens in the workplace when people apply their leadership skills.

I'm not talking simply about coaching and mentoring here. I am, in fact, still wearing my trainer's hat. What I'm talking about is not teaching people what we want them to learn (usually 'cos it is easy for us) but teaching them how to learn for themselves what it is that they need to know, the issues they will face when learning what it is that they need to know, and how to overcome them. By teaching them to be more independent and effective on the job we are actually working alongside them at a point when our effectiveness is much clearer.

What helped for me was to separate training and learning. Training and learning in the training room happened when I told/showed people what to do and they learned to do it (the way I told/showed it). While I could successfully run a barrage of tests that proved they knew how to do 'it' in the training room, the real problem was they still needed to learn how to do 'it' back in the workplace. And so often I (and, I dare say, we) left them alone to figure this out for themselves.

Your mention of Skinner and the relationship between training and behaviorism reminded me of the research I've been conducting over the past ten years. I'm in my final year of a PhD and would like to share a couple of paragraphs from my thesis that demonstrate where my thinking now is:

"Most commentators (such as Somerville 2000:35, Smith 1998:143-147, Bowden & Masters 1993:20, Bowden undated:3, Merriam & Caffarella 1991:128, Bass & Ryterband 1979:46, Galloway 1976:80) agree that competency-based training is drawn predominantly from the behaviorist field and, when used to support off-the-job training and individual development it leans very heavily towards the behaviorist traditions. Such traditions include the classical or stimulus-response theories of Watson and Pavlov and the concept of instrumental or operant conditioning of Thorndike and Skinner.

On the other hand, there is considerable evidence (see for example Brantley 2000 and Brown 1998) that the application of competency-based training on-the-job and in the pursuit of work-related objectives is more closely aligned to the cognitive and developmental perspectives of Piaget and Dewey, the cultural and interactional aspects of Vigotsky and Bruner, and the mental models and schema of modern management systems theorists such as Senge and de Geus.

Other theories, according to Stacey (2001:41), go even further and suggest that such an approach centers on a constructivist teleology (i.e., knowledge as a cause of learning rather than as a result) in which knowledge and meaning are constructed and continually grow from the social interactions that take place at work. This, according to the theorists, is how learning occurs on the job and organizations grow as a result of it."

When we link pedagogical behaviorism to training we're generally talking about training that is aimed at achieving learning or training objectives (and usually off-the-job) and not organizational objectives. This is the training/learning that we (the trainers) drive. On the other hand, when we look at achieving organizational objectives (and this has got to include having people apply new skills and knowledge in order to develop and grow with the job) then we have got to think about workplace andragogy, in other words learning that is driven by the trainees - in the workplace and in line with their workplace needs.

I would suggest that much of your frustration comes from concentrating too much on the behaviorist approach to training rather than the constructivist approach to learning. After all, ROI is not so much about how well you have trained but about how well people have learned and, more importantly, do on the job.

Finally, we say that people don't apply any newfound skills and knowledge on their return to work because their attitude is wrong or because of a whole host of other reasons, and it is because of these reasons that we can't prove how effective we've been. I agree with your sentiments on accountability, but to me your example was a little like telling a parent telling a child that "We've spent $1000 on your teeth and here you are eating candy!" What I say is that we have been providing a service for people that they don't always need because we are concentrating on how to make our lives easier and not theirs. The problem is, they are the one's who measure our effectiveness so if we're not meeting their needs then it will be that much harder for them to accept that we can have any impact on them at all. (Yes, I agree with your suggestion that staff can provide evidence of the manager's competence. We just need to get right the criteria by which such competence is measured.)

Just a few thoughts.

Regards

Phil Rutherford

News Release

Enterprise Suites Will Absorb eLearning, Study Finds

Standalone eLearning Doesn?t Work in a Zero-latency Environment

"Enterprise technology is in the midst of an accelerating process of integration and convergence. Previously distinct product categories are being assimilated into integrated enterprise application suites. SAP, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Siebel and PeopleSoft all added eLearning to their suites in the last year."

So says Sam Adkins, author of "Simulation in the Enterprise," the 375-page roadmap to the next wave of eLearning released today.

Adkins foresees three watershed developments in learning:

1. Migration away from courseware as a corporate performance improvement method
   
2. Fusion of skills, knowledge and affective learning in workflow applications
   
3. Integration of contextual collaboration and Web Services technologies with learning technology

"Courses are nearly dead. Real-time learning is starting to support getting the job done. Workers will learn what they need when they need it," says Jay Cross, Adkins? publisher and CEO of Internet Time Group. "This is not science fiction; it?s happening right now," he says."Standalone eLearning?s heyday is over."

This summer, Sam and Jay talked with an unlikely group of panelists in a session of the eLearning Forum. For the first time anywhere, the major enterprise vendors (e.g., PeopleSoft, Oracle, Sun, Siebel, SAP) and the top LMS vendors (e.g. Docent, Saba, Plateau, Click2Learn, etc.) came together under one roof to discuss the future of eLearning in the extended enterprise. The issue was not whether eLearning would be integrated into enterprise systems, but how soon; it wasn't whether LMS would become enmeshed in enterprise webs but how.

Author Sam Adkins is well-positioned to see the big picture. In his eight years at Microsoft, he worked with the leading research vendors in the industry. He forecast training channel trends and performed advanced product research on nascent developments with the potential to impact the elearning market. Previously, Sam built the world's first commercial online university, known as the Microsoft Online Institute.

Adkins' extensive new reports map the correspondences between enterprise technology, instructional simulation, learning design, Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma and ISO9001:2000.

He describes why integrated business application suites are superior to point solutions. These suites contain not only eLearning but also business process management, business intelligence, content management and, increasingly, live collaboration.

Chief Learning Officers will see many new names popping up as specialty software companies demo new products that use simulation, workflow, and collaboration to improve human performance.

Content management vendors are buying collaboration companies. Enterprise vendors are bulking up by acquiring performance support, simulation and virtual classroom capabilities. Workflow by-products include interactive manuals, business process demonstrations, coaching inside applications, and even virtual workers and environments that collaborate in what is now called WorkSpace (what the military calls BattleSpace).

Structured knowledge management and expertise mining add Workflow-based eLearning, Workforce Analytics, and a range of new innovations to the mix.

The reports single out a select group of companies as "pioneers of innovation:" IBM, Sun, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Microsoft, PeopleSoft, Knowledge Impact, Nobilis, VCampus, Element K, Teamplate, Ultimus, Lombardi, XStream, Knowledge Products, and Hyperwave. Standalone profiles of each highlight their extraordinary products and their likely role in the extended eLearning environment.

In today's economic climate, customers demand immediate, measurable and observable workforce improvement results (concepts familiar to both performance technologists and CFOs). As a result, says Sam, "Corporate learning is finally being recognized as a business process. It will be monitored, measured, and managed like any other business process."

"Level four and nothing but level four," says Jay. "Sam and I are canaries in the coal mine. We?re fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time to glimpse the future. Our mission is to help bring it to fruition."

The two offer free white papers, articles, and an overview of their research at the newly established Center for Expertise Learning Excellence online at www.internettime.com.

An annual, single-reader subscription to the full Simulation in the Enterprise series is $750. Individual reports are available for $250.

About Internet Time Group

Internet Time Group helps organizations improve the performance of their people by speeding up their learning. Founder Jay Cross designed the University of Phoenix's first business degree program. He converted a startup into an Inc 500 winner, training a million professionals to make sound decisions and sell services. He is CEO of eLearning Forum, an 1800-member think tank and advocacy group, and author of Implementing eLearning.

Center for Excellence in Enterprise Learning

Irony

Marc Rosenberg passed along this tidbit from the Arizona Republic:

My email to the reporter:

The Lance & Jay Show

ASTD and WebEx are offering a passel of free seminars over the next few months. Only one will be led by the dynamic duo of Lance and Jay. Mark your calendars! Register now! You don't want to miss this one. See Jay and Lance as you've never seen them before, live from their Northern California habitat.

Wednesday, 10/08 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern

Click here to score your copy of the Implementing eLearning Action Plan Template.

Blogs > newspapers

Blackout!

Camworld posted a list of several dozen blogs about the blackout.

John Wehr's photos made me feel like I was there.

The Gothamist's photos appear worthy of framing!

Ten tips from Jane Knight

My friend Jane Knight is the founder of and driving force behind the e-Learning Centre.

The e-Learning Centre Information site contains links to thousands of selected and reviewed e-learning articles, white papers, research reports; examples of e-learning solutions; vendors of e-learning content, technology and services; as well as  e-learning conferences, seminars, workshops and other e-learning events. The main focus is on adult e-learning, i.e. e-learning in the workplace, in Higher Education and in continuing professional development. The e-Learning Centre Services business offers a range of independent e-learning consultancy services to both Higher Education and corporates.

Remember the old Volkswagen commercial that pictured a Beetle cutting a path through virgin snow and asked "Have you ever wondered how the man who drives the snowplow gets to the snowplow?"

Well, if you've ever wondered where I go when I'm stuck for guidance on an eLearning topic, it's e-Learning Centre. Jane's site is my online learning thesaurus. I don't mean it's a book of words; I am referring back to the original meaning of thesaurus, "treasure house." She picks the crème de la crème. Here, for example, are ten things you must know about eLearning.

Top ten tips for implementing e-learning

by Jane Knight