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E-Lessons Learned
May 21, 2009
By Patti Shank, Ph.D., CPT
People tend to flounder with new technologies, Those organizations and institutions that quickly learned from the fallout or never fell for the hype in the first place have survived and even thrived. Saul Carliner, Ph.D. (associate professor in the graduate program in educational technology at Concordia University in Montreal), and I started talking about this topic several years ago, and it led to co-editing our recently published book, "The e-Learning Handbook: Past Promises, Present Challenges" (Pfeiffer, 2008). We asked some of the best minds in our field to help us think through what we have learned in 10-plus years; Here are some of the takeaways.
Lesson 1: Online and classroom learning are not interchangeable.
Margaret Driscoll, EdD (managing consultant, IBM Global Services), says too many organizations tried to "do" e-learning by moving classroom learning online. For the most part, that didn't work. Online and classroom have different characteristics, and these need to be factored into decisions about which to use or how to combine them.
Patrick Lambe (founder of consulting firm Straits Knowledge, president of the Information and Knowledge Management Society, and adjunct professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University) describes how organizations initially justified e-learning by focusing on cost savings. But classroom training, says Lambe, is not necessarily interchangeable with e-learning. And they have different costs. Training budgets are typically recurrent and accounted as operations costs. But e-learning often involves large capital expenditures (for information technology investments) with smaller recurrent maintenance and upgrade budgets and amortization mechanisms as the system ages over time. These differences need to be understood when justifying costs.
Lesson 2: Traditional instructional design methods need to be rethought, especially for e-learning.
Instructional designers long have debated the value of traditional instructional design models even before e-learning. Saul Carliner points out flaws with typical instructional design approaches that are magnified in e-learning projects. He says they take too much time and focus on formal learning to the exclusion of informal learning. Plus, the models emphasize production of "courses," which often is not what is needed. They also don't include critical tasks in e-learning design and development such as as estimating costs, determining the complexity of projects, determining what skills are needed to complete the project, working with a team of people with different skills who may be at a distance from each other, and repurposing classroom content for e-learning.
In my own experience, e-learning projects also often suffer from not adequately determining technical and other requirements up front and "creeping features" (my husband's term of endearment for project scope increases). Traditional instructional design models don't account for these problems, either.
Lesson 3: Learners must be given what they need to be successful.
Patricia McGee, Ph.D. (associate professor of Instructional Technology in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio), explains that technology only supports learning if it is designed specifically to support learning and learners. She also implores us to recognize that learners often do not enter into e-learning with the necessary skills and predispositions. Are we supporting learners so they can get from where they are to where they need to be? If we don't, e-learning may fail, and it's not e-learning's fault.
For example, I recently interviewed learners in a client's workplace to get their opinions about current e-learning offerings. Two came from other fields and didn't understand the course terminology. Consulting a glossary while using the courses was too cumbersome and time consuming. Another was intimidated by online courses and felt compelled to print out the course pages and study them offline. All too often, we support content, not learners.
David Merrill, Ph.D. (instructional effectiveness consultant, visiting professor at Florida State University, Brigham Young University – Hawaii, and professor emeritus at Utah State University), reminds us that learners must be helped to integrate their new knowledge into their work and lives. Many online courses have no mechanism for taking knowledge and skills to the next level (where they actually get used).
Lesson 4: We need to work better with Information Technology folks…
… because we need them and their skills to be successful. Marc Rosenberg, Ph.D. (management consultant and speaker on training, organizational learning, e-learning, knowledge management, and performance improvement), and Steve Foreman (president of InfoMedia Designs, a provider of e-learning infrastructure consulting services and technology solutions, and founder of Q Innovation, provider of collaborative knowledge exchange and performance support software products) note the technology investment for e-learning is significant, and for the organization to receive the most value from it, e-learning must integrate with existing enterprise IT. Because e-learning applications require sophisticated networks, reliable servers, and sometimes 24/7 support, we easily can go astray when making these decisions.
Many training organizations view reliance on IT as a huge obstacle and go around it when possible. But that's shortsighted. We typically don't have the knowledge to know what to buy and whether what vendors are telling/ selling us is true. Rosenberg and Foreman's advice? Develop an IT liaison position in the training department.
Lesson 5: Buying e-learning infrastructure (such as a learning management system or LMS) before you know what you need is a great way to throw out money and time.
Wayne Precht, MS (assistant director for Development in the Learning Applications Development and Support unit of University of Maryland University College); Harvey Singh (CEO of Instancy, Inc., which develops Web 2.0-based enterprise learning and knowledge management solutions); Jim Everidge, MBA (president/CEO of Rapid Learning Deployment, a learning systems integrator in Atlanta); Jane Bozarth, EdD (e-learning coordinator for the state of North Carolina); and I explain that selecting learning infrastructure is a complex decision process with many ways to go astray. Because few organizations know what their needs are at the outset, infrastructure should not be one of the first things to buy.
The first step for most organizations should be to determine what kind of learning and support materials they need. And what, if anything, they need to track. Start tracking using a simple tracking system such as an Excel spreadsheet. If the data don't provide you with useful information or stop being worth the time to collect, chances are it isn't worth spending tons of money and time to implement more sophisticated (and costly) tracking.
Tracking mission-critical learning results and certification paths makes sense. Determining whether learners "touched" each page in the be-nice-to-the-people-you-work-with course often doesn't. When (or if) it comes time to buy infrastructure, make sure key stakeholders (including IT folks) are involved in the process.
Lesson 6: Worry about where your advice is coming from.
That's because much of the advice in this field is anecdotal and untested. Thomas C. Reeves, Ph.D. (professor of Instructional Technology at The University of Georgia); Jan Herrington, Ph.D. (associate professor in IT in education at the University of Wollongong, Australia); and Ron Oliver, Ph.D. (foundation professor of Interactive Multimedia at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia), say learning designers far too often use unreliable information to guide their practice. A research base with comparisons of traditional classroom instruction to e-learning provides very little guidance regarding the most effective ways to align educational objectives, content, instructional methods, learning tasks, technology, and assessment strategies for online learning. We need research that better informs our practice.
Patti Shank, Ph.D., CPT, is an information and instructional designer and writer and author who helps others build valuable information and instruction. The president of Learning Peaks, an instructional design consulting firm, she can be reached through her Website: www.learningpeaks.com.
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