E-learning and Telecommuting - Inequally Evil?

Telecommuters will invariably end up ripping someone off - someone ALWAYS gets shortchanged.

Either their company, or the teleworkers themselves and their families.

At least, that was the declaration of a former boss when I proposed working from home at least a few days a week. When teleworkers slack off, with no one to supervise them, he said, they're stealing from their employer. Conversely, when they have a strong work ethic, they feel compelled to prove (to themselves as well as their boss and colleagues) that they're not slacking off, and end up spending more hours at their desk than they should.

Of course, you're a better teleworker than that - I know I am! Right? You and I are always responsible and mature in our use of the gift of flexibility that our telecommuting situation provides, right?

Well... knowledge work - for the chronically curious, the compulsive reader, the ADD-inflicted - is like a distillery job for an alcoholic. The web is a million constant temptations, and each one links to a zillion more. I admit that I sometimes have to "work" 16 hours in a day in order to get 8 hours of tasks completed.

But in general, I am indeed a better teleworker than that. It's incredibly productive to walk downstairs rather than having to drive for an hour and a half, to set my own schedule, to work in the comfort of my home office dressed comfortably, to not be around an officeful of interesting people interrupting me (and I them) all day long. I get a LOT done, and more happily and healthily than when I drove to work.

John McDermott posted an interesting question on LinkedIn's Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group: "Remote learning is great, but no remote workers, please!" Why are employers willing to allow e-learning but not e-work? Is this a fear of employees slacking off, or a devaluation of the training/learning function?

Most likely both, I say. The lack of trust employers have for telecommuting demonstrates a strong acknowledgment of the value of teamwork but lack of recognition of the utility of online collaboration tools to facilitate that teamwork despite lack of physical proximity.

And the apparently contradictory acceptance of e-learning acknowledges the ability of trainees to take responsibility for their own learning tasks, while failing to recognize the social aspects of learning.

A crucial aspect of all of this is the fact that some of both our work and our learning tasks are best tackled in quiet solitude with singular attention, while others are enhanced (or even made possible at all) by nature of interaction with one or more teammates. None of us at GCPLearning ever tell an HR, training, or environmental health and safety manager that our training was designed to replace trainers, the classroom, or any other tool they're currently using.

E-learning - like teleworking - is one arrow in the employer's quiver, to be applied thoughtfully and deliberately where it will do the most good. Employers would do well to recognize - no, embrace - this key fact and make business decisions, related to both task and training functions, accordingly.

Photo courtesy of slworking

GCPLearning Website Review Needed

Hello!

Someone's getting another brand new iPod nano for in exchange for a chunk of thoughtful feedback! It worked so well the first time, we're doing it again.

Kent Pennybaker of River City Engineering was the happy recipient of a sweet8GB iPod in our last drawing. (We'd share a picture of him, but he's keeping the big win on the hush-hush so his kids don't confiscate it from him - seriously.)

In our last round, you gave us feedback almost exclusively on our GCPWorldwebsite - most of you didn't review GCPLearning. We can't tell you what a difference your feedback made on our GCPWorld website - we learned several key things that were missing or easily misunderstood. Check it out again - www.GCPWorld.com - and see the revisions we made.

But we'd love to get that level of feedback on GCPLearning.com, which is our most important site for selling our products. So once again, we're contacting people whose opinions we trust - friends, family, clients, partners, and some folks we've talked with in the past and would like to get to know better - to tell us straight out about the impressions our new website makes. We're asking you to look through our revamped www.GCPLearning.com and answer some questions that will let us know if we have succeeded in telling the GCP story.

Your thoughts and impressions will have a big impact for us moving forward. So to show our appreciation, everyone who sends us a review will have their name in the hat for another lovely new 8GB iPod nano.

Here's how to play:

- Visit GCPLearning.com

- Answer the questions below - thoughtfully and helpfully.

- And with brutal honesty - we're counting on your insights.

- No, really, we can take it! If something bugs you - we want to know about it!

- Send us your review to info@GCPWorld.com no later than October 16.

- Forward this page to as many friends as you like, the more, the merrier

- Names in the hat the evening of the 16th - iPod in the mail on the 20th!

Here's what we want to know:

1) What's the impact of the GCPLearning homepage - does it clearly answer the who, what, when, where, why and how of GCP?

2) Does the "flow" of the website work - do you feel a logic to the movement from category to category and detail to detail in the site's design?

3) What's your impression of the video testimonials? How do they make you feel about GCP?

4) Imagine you're shopping for workplace training - does the website answer all the questions you'd need to answer to decide to talk with us further?

5) Are the calls to action clear and enticing? Is it easy to know what GCP wants you as a visitor to *do* as a result of coming to the site?

6) And do you feel enticed to make that next step?

7) What's confusing? What important information did we NOT provide?

8) What's too much? What parts did we drone on and on unnecessarily about?

9) Any other thoughts or advice for us?

10) Bonus question (your name goes in the hat TWICE for taking time to answer this one) Check out our "follow us" links. What do these links add to the effect of our site? Do you feel that our blog, our twitter, our Facebook and LinkedIn pages add something of value to your understanding of GCP?

Please send us your review to info@GCPWorld.com no later than October 16.

Training That's Good Enough to be Great

I recently read an article that resonated so well with me, on a bunch of different fronts. The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine by Robert Capps appears in the September issue of Wired Magazine.

The basic premise: our tastes and evaluations have evolved; "quality" often no longer means the fastest and shiniest and techiest offering. QUALITY means the thing that is convenient, flexible, and cheap. The article gives a bunch of excellent examples, starting in with the Flip camcorder, and going on to illustrate how "...companies that focus on traditional measures of quality—fidelity, resolution, features—can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability." Capps cites the growing adoption of Skype vs. traditional phones, Hulu vs. television, cheap netbooks over fancier computers, and several more. "As the worst recession in 75 years rolls on, it's the light and nimble products that are having all the impact—exactly the type of thing that lean startups and small-scale enterprises are best at."

Our needs themselves have evolved. Or a better way to look at it, I think, is that our recognition of our true needs has evolved. As we shop, we're seeing more clearly what's most important to us in our real lives.

"The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price."

An example for me personally is cameras. I love to take photos. I love to look at photos. I can't seem to stop myself from taking photos. (Just ask my annoyed wife and sons!) I've got a beloved old Nikon 35mm I get out once in a... OK, come to think of it, it's been at least 5 years since I had it out. (I wonder what's on the roll of film that's still in there??) And I have dSLR ambitions, but most of the photos I take are with the crappy camera in my phone, or at best, with my waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof pocket camera. Why? Because the quality most important to me is, what camera can I have with me all the time? What's convenient and flexible? (The third quality comes into play too – cheap. My pocket cam was under $300, and in effect, I didn't pay for my phonecam... I bought the phone, and the camera's just an assumed part of it. And hey, in any given month, I don't seem to have a thousand bucks laying around after bills get paid – so no D90 for me, so far.)

Funny thing is, an evolution in taste has occurred - a cause or an effect of this revolution? I don't know. But there are those who actually appreciate this lower-resolution aesthetic in photography. Search Flickr groups for "phonecam" and find 691 different groups devoted to folks who love this or that aspect of the photos they get from their cellies. (example: PhoneCam Expressions is "...for all those who love to use their phone cameras, but with a sense of taste and beauty." And DBOLRL ("DBOLRL: a playground for a Drunken Bunch of Low Res Lovers") has a brutally light-hearted (light-heartedly brutal?) voting game that's been running for nearly 4 years, reveling in the wonder of chunky, noisy photos from cheap cameras.

So anyway... this is supposed to be my e-learning business blog, and I need to show why I'm babbling about all of this.

I propose that there is an elegance possible in a simpler e-learning solution for corporate training. I would like to suggest that there are bells and whistles in the more expensive "end-to-end, enterprise solutions" a lot of vendors push, that most training organizations simply do not need. I assert that if the training content itself is excellent, there are plenty of delivery features that upon examination, you might discover aren't as necessary as you may have thought when they were described to you in the sales process.

So I'm submitting for your discussion, that e-learning consumers need to ask themselves Capps' three questions as part of their evaluation: "Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time — or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don't have to think about price?"

If you have a staff of thousands, in multiple locations, by all means, you need to think Cadillac in selecting a tracking and scheduling and reporting system. But if you're training 20 people, or 50, is it really all that difficult to collect printed completion certificates from trainees, and manage your records by hand in a spreadsheet? Does your skill gap analysis really require the use of an elaborate database? Doesn't it make good business sense (especially in cash-tight times like these) to buy only the lean and nimble access to training that you need, rather than paying more for fat that isn’t adding any benefit to your training?

I'd loved to get feedback on these thoughts. For e-learning in your organization, what's good enough?