Most Significant E-learning Tool? Strategy, Not Technology

In a recent discussion on LinkedIn's E-Learning 2.0 group, Curt Z asks, "What will be the most significant and relevant e-learning tools and technologies as we continue to move forward into the 21st century?"

He posits the following four: virtual environments, mobile access, advances in infrastructure hardware/software, and social networks.

Gerry Marcus responded with a statement which I think nails it: "As e-learning professionals, I believe our job is to get people productively using the tools we've already got."

It's true! We're running around like a boy scout with a 90-blade Swiss Army knife. There's an overflowing toolbox of technologies at all of our fingertips that we could, and possibly should, and probably will be using. That toolbox most certainly includes the four items Curt cited.

But for me, the "most significant and relevant" tool we need to be utilizing as we progress is a strategy, not a technology. A strategy for zeroing in on, defining, and communicating the value of a chosen tool or set of tools, matched to each of our respective learner audiences and the learning objectives they need to master. That's what puts the productive in "productively using the tools"

Brian D. McCarthy reinforces this, saying that "The biggest factor is the ability or desire for corporations to allow and adopt the changes from these advances." We as learning professionals have the opportunity to evoke and nurture that desire on the parts of our companies.

With that opportunity comes the responsibility of choosing the right tools for the right people and the right training/learning tasks.

Edwin Stonestreet points out that "Social Networking (In the hands of someone who wants to learn) is an exemplar of what good eLearning can be... However, the elephant in the room is that all of this learning reaches out to that small percentile of people who want it, who seek it out and who are driven to pursue it."

I agree. True of every tool. The tool works if it's matched to the target audience: "people who want it, who seek it out and who are driven to pursue it." The tool works if it's matched to the material and the learning objectives at hand.

So my vote for the most significant e-learning tools? Enlightened selection of the right tools (for the specific learners, and for the specific tasks), and educated and effective promotion for their adoption in our organizations.

In terms of that "educated and effective promotion" part, GCP has developed a powerful 36-page workbook that is free for our readers to download: Assess, Plan and Promote Your E-learning Business Case (Create a compelling business case for e-learning to present to the financial decision-makers on your team more accurately, efficiently, and effectively by working through the guided steps in this powerful workbook. Assess, Plan, and Promote provides the tools for assessing training gaps, comparing vendor options, calculating ROI, and preparing and making a powerful presentation.)

DIY Custom Training, Facilitated

Interesting article by Agatha Gilmore in Chief Learning Officer Magazine: The New Workplace Mantra: 'Do It Yourself'. That DIY theme is exactly what we had in mind when we put together Ultimate and Developer's Editions of our courseware.

In her article, Agatha says:

"According to new research from Novita, a talent recruiting and development services firm, 71 percent of organizations surveyed are now doing more tasks in-house than before the economic recession. The main reason? A smaller budget, according to 85 percent of respondents."

The predominant mode of purchasing e-learning content has long been handled via the tired and painful "learner-seat" model, in which a company basically rents access to courses they need from the content vendor who owns the courses. I've said it before: Whoever came up with the learner seat subscription model was a sadist, a masochist, or both. It's beyond onerous to try to predict how many employees need these seven courses, which subset of employees need these other two courses, etc.

And when you rent courses, you are sometimes offered the option of customizing the courses, but they don't belong to you, so the time, effort, and money you spend customizing is in the toilet as soon as you stop renting from that vendor. It's a terrible model, and I really do not understand how it's hung around as long as it has.

We've always had our ears open to the needs of those Do It Yourselfers, whom Agatha Gilmore says are growing in number.

Here's what we think: If you've got a person or a small team of people in your company who are charged with producing training content, wouldn't they be a lot more productive, effective, and profitable if they had a giant head start on the courses they need to develop? If the hardest part of the development were already done for them and available in a "kit" format that enabled them to tweak and refine rather than building from scratch?

I've developed a ton of courses. I've been involved in every step of course production, from needs analysis to determining learning objectives to creating a storyboard to gathering media elements to creating the multimedia, and through all the steps of testing, revising, and updating them.

The hardest part in all those steps is putting the content into words. Writing the storyboard takes the most time, requires the most smarts, is the most painstaking. It's the key to the course. It contains everything that everyone else involved in course development needs - the words and ideas to be conveyed, and the instructions that will turn the words into a living, functioning, effective course.

How much time, effort, and cost would it save your team to start the course development process with a completed storyboard? A well-crafted storyboard, with clearly stated learning objectives, elegantly-written instruction, and assessments tied to the objectives, in Word format for ready customization?

How much less time would it take to modify an existing course than to write it from scratch? How many more courses could your team put in front of learners each year - heck, each month? Would you save more money on development than you spent on the development kits? Only one way to find out...

Top Ten Insights on Top Ten Lists

Leo Casey posted a thoughtful list of his Top Ten Insights on Learning in the

Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group on LinkedIn this past weekend, as a summary of his recent blog posting.

Leo's list:

1. Learning is constructed
2. People are curious
3. We learn best in social settings
4. Much adult learning is child's play
5. We have a Learning Identity
6. Meet the Digital World
7. Adults learn what they want to learn
8. Learning can be additive or transformative
9. We learn throughout life
10. We strive to be all that we can be

After 8 years teaching at the university level in a VERY multicultural setting, and the subsequent 10 years developing online learning experiences in collaboration with adult learners and the training professionals responsible for their programs, I must admit I always worry that lists like this pretty much automatically reflect the listmaker's learning preferences or specific training environment/subject matter/audience.

I know I catch myself declaring that "learners want [insert preference here]" when in fact, I may want that thing, but others may not!

And that training "thing" that *I* am sure learners want or need might be the best way to impart safe work practices in a manufacturing environment, but at the same time be a terrible way to hone customer service skills in a retail setting, for example.

So item #3: "We learn best in social settings." I have to ask, who are "we?" Learning what? In what kind of social setting? Group work with motivated teammates on project-based learning is fantastic, but there are certain learning objectives best mastered in quiet solitude. My replacement insight: "Training modalities must be selected with both the audience and the learning objective in mind."

I also find that lists like this tend to idealize the learners. There's a big difference in attitude between happy lifelong learners who decide it would be fun to learn a new language, and employees who are required by law to receive training on how to choose the right protective gloves or eyewear for this or that workplace task. So I would revise a couple of the insights above.

For example, #2: "People are curious." I myself don't choose to spend more time than I have to in the company of non-curious people, but really, have you never met a person who was devoid of curiosity? Never had a conversation that consisted of you trying to get more than a grunt out of your interlocutor? The non-curious do indeed exist, and they are not exempt from compliance training. My replacement insight? "Training needs to engage even those who are not curious."

Likewise, item #10: "We strive to be all that we can be." But guess what! Homer Simpson is not a completely fictional character - you and I might strive for excellence, but my friends, there are slackers out there who feel as Homer does that "Trying is the first step towards failure." They don't have a mission of doing their best or being their best. Self-improvement is not among their core values. My replacement insight? "Training must sell its own importance to those who don't care."

My overall point is, lists like these can help us focus on important points and provide an excellent starting point for deeper reflection, but we have to be careful not to flavor them with our own biases.

Why Not Video?

People hear "training" and often assume "video." At GCPLearning, we've never included video in our online courses. It's not a mindless choice; we've considered our options thoroughly. There are technological, logistical, and pedagogical reasons for that choice.

Historically, trying to deliver video online to the typical e-learning client was just a bad idea. Existing bandwidth simply wouldn't support it. In the early 2000s, when we thought that most client companies would have at least a T-1 connection, we designed for 56kbps dial-up speeds, as we still had a significant number of clients stuck in the dial-up era. We even had a client in 2002 who still used a 28.8kbps modem in a shed to access our training when it was too rainy outside to work. (I believe they also walked barefoot in the snow to work and back home, uphill both ways, and they liked it like that!) Although high-speed connections are now entirely the norm, there are plenty of demands on a company's internet bandwidth without adding to that a lot of users pulling down video.

I mentioned logistical reasons for not using video. Regular readers of this blog know that I do tend to go on and on about AGILITY. Video is not an inherently agile medium (though it can be if you go lo-tech... topic for another day!). The content of our courses is necessarily dynamic - regulations change, best practices evolve, and the equipment pictured in the illustrations goes out of date. Besides, we provide source code with our content so that our clients can freely customize the courses they purchase from us. Video production is costly in both time and money; revising courses becomes a much more convenient, economical, and doable proposition when it amounts to rewriting sections of the storyboard, recording fresh narration, and swapping photos in the flash content files. Of course, in keeping with our key principle of agility, our Global Content Player is equally adept at wrapping Flash videos as it is our standard Flash screens, so the option to include video remains open. We are more agile without video, and so are our clients.

So that's technology and logistics, but most important of all is obviously the pedagogical principles. If it's not good instruction, it doesn't matter how easy it is to download it or edit it. Ultimately, video COULD be an engaging element in some of our courses, but the feedback we've received from countless clients and a few focus groups we've organized support our contention that a series of photographs is just as effective - or even more effective - than video. Photos capture decisive moments in time. (Henri Cartier-Bresson said about photography, "The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.") The photos zero in on decision points or the most important steps in processes, without the distraction of intervening frames that would be present in video. They allow us to meet our learning objectives through that focus.

When we balance the three reasons - technological, logistical, and pedagogical - photo series wins out over video in our media selection for our courses.

*Really* Global Training People. Dot Com.

All right - it's a perfect time to write this proud posting, the week after Thanksgiving... hope you had a good one! (I was on the road and didn't get this posted earlier.)

This is an exciting development at GCP. We've had a free training program for the past several years, which we hosted at acrosspublishing.com. It has been a big hit - we've provided training at no cost to way more than 10,000 registered users in over 100 countries around the world. At first our thinking was that people in other countries (who would never be our clients) ought to have access to safety (and other) training, and it costs us very little to put some important courses up on our website and let those folks at it.

What we discovered was that this was an even better idea than we'd imagined. Word spread, links sprouted, and you saw the numbers above. Without doing any marketing of this site whatsoever, it's become known globally as a place to go for free training that isn't just a demo or throwaway stuff - it's actually courses that will send you home from your job with all ten fingers and both eyes intact, or will send you to a performance review armed for getting a promotion.

And not just overseas, as we'd imagined. We get people from US companies registering and taking our free training as well. We recently discovered that a large construction company in the South has a direct link to our free training from their training portal. (You know who you are... and we maintain hope that you'll become a client and get access to more of our courses as well as all the perks of owning your training content, tracking your employees' training, etc.! ;o) Meanwhile, as I said above, the important thing is that people who need this training - who might not have another source for it - are getting it.

One of the cool things about the old site was that we got letters from grateful trainees worldwide. What we should have recognized from the start was that we ought to have been giving these people access to each other rather than just corresponding with us - we had the seeds for a worldwide training and environmental health and safety community, and we weren't doing anything with it.

Thus: www.GlobalTrainingPeople.com. We've redesigned the site, gave it a new name that actually has something to do with what the site is, and built in several networking and community tools. There's a Story Wall where people can post feedback on the courses, a Photo Wall where people can personalize the site a bit, and a discussion forum where we have finally planted the seeds of that professional community we should have been building for the past couple years.

We're very interested to see what happens with one other aspect we built into the site. All our training (except for a 30-title library of safety training in Spanish) is in English. What if we gave people an opportunity to localize the training so that it would be more useful in Uganda, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and all the corners of India where our learners come from? What if we set up a way for entrepreneurs around the world to start a business spreading this training around so more people work more safely and productively? We are already getting some interesting emails from folks exploring the possibilities of partnering with us to expand this thing out into the world in a big way. I can't begin to tell you how exciting this is for us!

Please drop by! Take some training, post a photo, give some feedback, join the community, and spread the word!

Adaptable Workers with Adaptable Tools

"Senior executives and managers say the people they work with are more adaptable today than a few years ago." CLO Magazine summarizes a study by NFI Research in a recent article entitled Recession's Silver Lining? Increased Adaptability. The article credits economic need and a new sense of frugality. According to the study's author, Chuck Martin, "Many in business today have had no choice but to become more adaptable considering the impact of economic conditions on business."

One participant in the study mentioned that "employees have become more adaptable since realizing the benefits and efficiencies that technology has brought to their work."

The relevance to training and the efficiencies technology brings to it should be obvious. The economic necessity for agility and the flexibility offered by e-learning create what should be a perfect storm for adoption of of web-based training.

E-learning is at its core flexible. The mantra has always been "anytime, anywhere." E-learning unbinds learners from the limitations of time (we don't have to shut down operations to get everyone into a class at the same time) and space (we don't have to all be in the same classroom to learn).

That's flexibility at its most basic. So why do so many consumers of e-learning speak of feeling trapped?

I talk to plenty of training and HR leaders who are feeling stuck, in three main ways. They're compromising on training quality with disputably relevant off-the-shelf content, they're forced to access courseware living on a server somewhere, and they're shackled into a subscription contract that requires them to predict how many seats in this course, how many in that course, and whoops, we're out of seats and have to buy more to get all our training done, and whoops, we hate this training but we're contracted through 2011 with this provider. (take a breath, Greg!) (OK! but how is any of that flexible??)

So what needs to happen to put training back into the realm of agility to match this newly increased adaptability of the workforce?

1) A number of e-learning content providers market their courseware as "customizable," but what that means is that clients can log into the provider's proprietary system, make minor changes to the existing course, and abandon their "custom" course when their contract with the provider ends. The only way to provide truly adaptable, agile course content is to provide source code and ownership of derivative works.

2) Via an internet connected computer is one way to access a multimedia course, but what happens when you need to train workers on site in the Congo or the depths of Siberia? What happens when your business has nothing to do with information technology, and your learning lab consists of a couple laptops in a trailer at the jobsite? What if you have 35 employees and no LMS? Courseware locked away on someone else's server isn't adaptable or agile - you need to be able to provide the same training via an LMS, company intranet, and CD-ROM or other portable media.

3) Whoever came up with the learner seat subscription model was a sadist, a masochist, or both. It's torture for clients - predicting how many employees need these seven courses, which subset need these other two courses, which population needs those five other courses... and in times of high turnover, those predictions go out the window, don't they. It's also no walk in the park for the hosting vendor - they've got to service all those changing needs, and assist in juggling someone else's learner seats. Painful all around! For max adaptability, a perpetual license for unlimited access to training content (especially when it's source code in the client's hands) is the only truly agile option.

If we don't capitalize on the adaptability of our people by giving them the most adaptable tools available, we don't win the economic battles we're fighting.

Getting Social, Getting Seen

Who knew when I first got online in... maybe 1993? and text-chatted for the first time with a distant friend using a text-based chat program called ytalk that I was starting to engage in the now trendy trend of Social Networking? I keep reminding myself of my office-mate's impression at the time.

"Dave! Check this out! I'm actually talking to a friend – in NEW YORK! Look! I'm typing, and she sees what I'm typing, and then I can see what she types!"

Dave nodded sagely. "I heard about another way to do that, where you punch in a series of digits and can then actually talk to the other person via voice."

"REALLY!?"

He grinned and pointed to the telephone. Groan! Gotta love tech-savvy luddites for keeping gear-giddiness in check.

MOO was next, with the announcement of the grand opening of schMOOze University for teachers and non-native speaking students of English. I started forming my long-standing hypothesis that human interaction was the best thing about the internet, and a key factor in any attempt at online learning.

In the past couple years, online human interaction seems to have finally come into its own as the web melded with the Internet, as apps got easier to use, and as more and more older people got online. My mom's got a facebook account, for goodness sake, and chats with us via gtalk using her webcam.

Social networking – used to be geeks and academics, now it's everyone.

So I'm finding it strange to have been at least a little bit of a pioneer in using the Internet for communication (as opposed to the old "information superhighway" idea of its main purpose being information retrieval) – and now feeling like a bit of a noob trying to figure out how to use it correctly for marketing. I've been using it forever to collaborate on projects, to co-author articles, to provide language learners with opportunities to interact in English, to communicate and share with my friends, but I'm feeling like a bit of a latecomer in trying to use it for marketing.

But we're diving right in, head-first, with both feet, or something like that. Micheal's up to his eyeballs in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), pimping every page in our websites (www.GCPLearning.com and www.GCPWorld.com) to help the spiders and bots find us and push us to the top of the list for people searching for what we sell. Meanwhile, I'm working in character – trying to maximize our human participation on the web by tweeting at www.Twitter.com/GCPLearning, poking and updating our status on the GCPLearning facebook page, becoming more active on LinkedIn, and lurking (for now!) on 4LearningExecs. Stay tuned!