Orientation

Elliott is a master at running a conference. Things kicked off on Sunday with Diane Hessan leading an orientation featuring some very agile jugglers.

"Take risks," as this member of the audience demonstrated as the jugglers tossed bayonets inches ahead of and behind his face.

"Treat TechLearn as an adventure." All were encouraged to take an active role. This isn't a conference, it's the start of a community. You are the main event; interact!

Corny as it sounds, this set a collaborative, friendly, "insider" tone to the entire event.

legend

Elliott is bringing out a new monthly newsletter, Learning Decisions. A subscription is $195/year. Every month, Learning Decisions will post survey questions, take in anonymous input, and summarize & publish the results. Elliott implied that the newsletter will take the tone of “this is good, and that is crap.” He mercilessly flogged the value of subscribing throughout the event. In essence, he’s upping the Masie Member fee from $295/company (for the TechLearn Collaborative) to  $195/person. Nonetheless, I bought a subscription.

Keynote

Sunday evening, Elliott delivered his keynote, sounding many of last year’s themes:

·        “Don’t lose sight of the learner in the transition to e-learning.”

·        Align training with business goals; talk business language.

·        No single delivery system, not even the all-powerful web can do it all. “The magic is in the mix” of online and instructor-led training.

·        62% of the attendees have never taken a course online(!)

·        “If we build it, will they learn?”

·        “We need to fundamentally change the way people learn.”

In the future, expect to see…

·        Enormous increase in the use of video, especially quick & dirty video because of its quick turnaround.

·        User-friendly authoring tools to capture best practices. (MS Word, for starts.)

·        Digital collaboration coming on strong.

it's business

Michael Milken. “Make training a profit center, not a cost center.” CEOs lack knowledge of the productivity potential of adopting computers.

To pull this off, training must function as a business. Business is a management function. It doesn’t require people who justify training in business terms; that’s backwards. It takes business people who apply training when it’s good for the business.

portal fever

Elliott convened an “impromtu” session with 16 providers of "learning portals."

“Learning portal” captures the imagination of managers because it’s easy to grasp – but though each of the folks on stage (e.g. Click2Learn, SmartForce, yipinet) offer comparable services.

One participant on the panel told me he was really turned off that the “impromptu” event consisted of pre-selected participants who had time to practice their lines in advance. Also, Elliott threw some very easy pitches to some vendors. How, for example, can Click2Learn offer everyone who visits the opportunity to create content but at the same time claim that they won’t accept programs below a certain quality level?

On Tuesday, Howard Block, BofA/Montgomery Securities sell side analyst, addressed around 300 people, giving his views on the training equity market. The e-bang era has arrived. (His recent anaytic report, e-Bang, is on file in our resources area.)

How will the valuations of e-learning companies evolve? E-theral? It’s all in the positioning. Who are the comparables?

·        Digital think – a hosted solution for online learning needs. Combination of CBT Systems and Exodus.

·        Campus Pipeline – back-office solution for students. A combination of Baan and GeoCities

·        Blackboard – building and managing e-campuses. Apollo Group and Adobe.

·        Saba – ultimate software solution for managing the learning enterprise. A combo of SAP and Verity.

·        SkillSoft – technology-based delivery of people skills, a combination of Provant and NETg.

Leaders of the e-business world are Broadvision – crm. Exodus – ASP, Verity – information management, Arriba – procurement, and Digital Impact – e-commerce. These companies get stratospheric valuations (18-70 x revenue) because they address basic business processes. E-learning’s a vital business process, too.

But… These e-business leaders dominate their markets. The e-Learning market remains fragmented. I think it’s too early to tell how this marketplace is going to shape up. Just because there’s a market position called CRM doesn’t mean there’s going to be a dominant approach to e-Learning.

exploratorium

TechLearn 99 was wired. 200 networked PCs filled the "exploratorium." These were loaded with conference information, sample courseware, handouts, commentary, and vendor URLs.

Lots of this will live on after the conference at a URL that I'll post here at the time.

Another couple of dozen PCs lined the halls for email access.

Elliott enjoyed mixing it up with Bill Cosby. (Elliott is clearly shooting for rockstar status.)

"Hello, Mom? You're not going to believe this but I'm on the stage with Bill Cosby in front of 2,500 people."

"Mom, this is Bill Cosby. Your son does not know the school song!"

ROI presentation(s)

As at any training conference these days, numerous speakers addressed “ROI” – What is it? How do you measure it? We’ve got it.

I attended several of the many presentations on return on investment. My notes and observations on one of them:

Training must:

·        identify business problems to solve.

·        go to the finance guys for help translating their solutions to ROI terms.

·        talk business-speak with top management.

<rant>

To my way of thinking, this is a recipe for disaster.

·        First of all, management identifies the challenges ahead, not training. Without business problems to solve, there are no training problems.

·        Second, industrial-age accounting is not the language of business. A return-on-investment figure may set the bar, to keep frivolous projects out of the running. Top managers don’t simply go looking for a bunch on unrelated projects with astounding ROIs; they seek what’s needed to carry out the corporate strategy.

·        Senior management is interested in doing things, e.g. increasing sales, launching a new product, dominating a market, or stomping the competition.

Continued in next column

The discussion then turned to a common training query, “How can one isolate the impact of training from everything else that’s going on?” How can you prove the results of training beyond a doubt?

Training professionals often act as if management is looking for 100% certainty – scientific truth. Someone in the presentation suggested not training a control group for the sake of comparative measurement.

·        In real life, all business decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty. The business environment is always changing.

·        Extraneous factors are always muddying results. Even if one could conduct business in a vacuum, outcomes would be subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – that the very act of observation changes what’s being observed.

·        Senior managers make decisions on the basis of logical argument supported by reasonable assumptions. To make your case, you state your assumptions.

·        You don’t need to “prove” anything so much as you have to convince the senior manager who is sponsoring your project.

Continued in next column

Throughout TechLearn, many speakers instructed participants to talk in business terms, as if this alone if enough to open the purse strings. Don’t buy it.

Learning to talk ROI will no more make you an effective business people than learning French will turn you into a Frenchman.

Selling the value of training interventions is not a matter of using a business framework to justify a project. The road to effectiveness is not to talk like a business person, it’s to be a business person.

You goal is not to find a home for training projects; it’s to find ways to improve people’s productivity in support of the corporate mission.

Your measure of success is whether your sponsor feels you’ve generated a respectable return on investment as measured by his or her beliefs.

</rant>

informal learning

Institute for Research on Learning

People are learning all the time, in varied settings and often most effectively in the context of the work itself.

“Training” – formal learning of all kinds – channels some important learning but doesn’t carry the heaviest load.

The workhorse of the knowledge economy has been, and continues to be, informal learning.

Informal learning is “…neither determined nor designed by the organization.”

Training focuses almost entirely on formal learning. But half to 70% of learning is informal. If you’re not addressing this you’re leaving a tremendous amount of learning to chance. Is that okay? Not any longer.

Wayne Hodgins talking "learnativity"

learnativity

The inflection point of learning, creativity, and productivity. When learning and working are a synchronous activity. Focus on learning how to learn.

Intervention = interruption.

The only sustainable advantage is the ability to learn and apply the right stuff faster.

Exercise to invent the future by planning the future. Focus on the target, not the route to get there. (like driving home)

Can’t create what we can’t envision. Michelangelo. (saw the finished statue). Plan from the future. Check immediately previous step.

                                1

                                                                2

                                                        3

                                                4

                                        5

                                6

On course, on target. The course model “then”

Homogeneous folksà process (the course)àoutput (homogeneous). Education is fine for homogeneous in and out; but diversity is rampant at both ends. Courses going out. Publishing revolution arriving soon (think mp3), net radio. Voice over IP. Clicks and mortar. (Grove: do the net or die. but it’s not all bits). E-Learning, not ibt, cbt, etc. Frequency fade. Me-learning. Standards – super card catalog via metadata. Pattern templates.

Off course, on target. The target is what matters. Apollo was off course 98% of the time. The goal was not to stay on course, rather focus on getting to the target. In learning, same holds true.

Learning is like hunger. Is ILT going to die? Stop this inane conversation. Learning is always there. Think about choices we have for eating…very broad. Does the eating industry fixate on the delivery mechanism? We don’t know how to make the best choice for learning?

Choose a restaurant. Fine French. Now kids in the back seat, yelling, hungry. Fast food. Choice matches the condition. The choice of the way to learn will be dictated by the conditions that define what’s the best choice.