What do training managers need to know in the age of e-learning?

In the e-learning and organizational development forums I frequent, we all pretty much pretend that effective integration of technology into workplace training programs is a widely-accepted given.

But the truth is, there are plenty of companies who have not yet gone beyond the "it's something we've discussed doing someday" stage. Plenty of training managers who have heard about e-learning, read up on it, maybe even suggested or proposed it to their execs. But for a variety of reasons (a tangent to be addressed in some other post), they find themselves waiting at the edge of the pool.

For those about to dive in, we salute you! Let's talk a bit about a couple key principles to guide you as you get started.

Key 1

First, quite often, trainers and some training managers approach e-learning as an either-or proposition.

But online training isn't monolithic, any more than any other of the 1000 tools in your training toolbox. No one ever said books or chalkboards or PowerPoint will replace trainers, and e-learning won't either.

It's most effective for foundational training, and perhaps the best way to get all your learners on the same page BEFORE the hands-on training starts. Imagine a classroom session where all the learners know why they're there, no one is starting clueless, and no one is spending useless time listening to you answer the questions of the clueless!

E-learning is not about putting trainers out of work or throwing out everything you do and know about training. Ray Clifford of the US Defense Language Institute said it best: "While computers will not replace teachers, teachers who use computers will eventually replace teachers who don't."

E-learning is real. There are good reasons to add it to your training program. Learning how to integrate technological tools into your training program for maximum instructional effectiveness makes you more important than ever.

Key 2

Another crucial initial principle to have in mind. "Build it, and they will..." well, they will have no clue that you built it, and it will sit there and rust until you sell it to your learners and incent them to make effective use of it.

"Anytime, anywhere" has long been a crucial slogan of e-learning: it's super available and very convenient to offer. But that's a double-edged sword. Just because it's super available does not mean it will get used!

Too many times, we've seen implementation get derailed by execs or managers who assume that their job is done when the content is online and the learners' accounts are set up in the learning management system. The two keys to making sure this doesn't happen to your budding program: executive buy-in and involvement, and internal marketing and communication.

A posting much longer than this won't get read - there are a couple other key principles we'll write about later. Meanwhile, please feel free to download Maximize your E-Learning Investment with Change Management, the comprehensive workbook we put together to help our clients with the second point above - a step-by-step strategy for getting your learners to get in and get the most out of your new online learning program.

Do as I say, not as I... OOOPS!

Zaphod Beeblebrox: Haha. How delicious would it be if the crane was putting up the banner when this happened?

(Thanks to Thomas Keeble for the photo!)

Interestingly, just yesterday, Snopes had a story on a similar 2008 accident in Sydney, Australia: www.snopes.com/photos/accident/cranefall.asp

Narration, Text and Graphics - Best Mix Practices

In a recent LinkedIn discussion, Tom Pendergast asked, "What does research show about the benefits/ drawbacks of having non-redundant onscreen text and narration in e-Learning where graphics/animations are not the focus?"

An important question, as it seems to be the standard that an "online learning module" will mix narration, text and graphics almost by default. Stephen Schneiter posted some very relevant research links, the gist of which is that distraction is a bad thing, and if the brain is forced to try to comprehend two streams of input, distraction will ensue.

Based on our own experimentation with focus groups as well as feedback from clients, we've "solved" this quandary for ourselves in our courseware development. (I say "solved" carefully because there are always trade-offs with any approach, and no one solution can possibly be perfect for every learner.)

What we needed to accomplish:

• address multiple learning styles/preferences within a single product
• address accessibility issues for learners with visual/auditory/literacy limitations
• address the cognitive load issues mentioned above

Ted Finger wrote a succinct summary of his approach to mixing text with narration. To describe what we came up with, I'll play off some of Ted's points, in italics below:

• Make sure the onscreen text closely summarizes the narration. (Instead, we made sure the onscreen text matches the narration exactly.)

• Synchronize the onscreen text along with the corresponding narration as precisely as possible. (ABSOLUTELY! Also, we made sure the text animation reveals text in meaningful chunks that match how people read - i.e., revealing complete bullet points, sentences, or even short paragraphs, rather than something cute and clever like revealing each word as it's narrated. Some of our early attempts were very creative and cool, but ultimately annoying to learners! ;o)

• Keep the onscreen text as abbreviated as possible; for example, short bullet points. (As I mentioned above, we DON'T abbreviate the text. What we found was that abbreviated text increases the cognitive load. As Stephen pointed out, if the learners see something different from what they're hearing simultaneously, it's confusing and distracting.)

• If possible, offer an audio transcript in the interface. (CRUCIAL! We wanted to keep the screen real estate uncluttered - no overwhelming sea of text, and plenty of room for supporting graphics. So while the first piece of text may go away to make room for the next piece as narration progresses, full text is always available via a slide-out box at the bottom of the screen for those who prefer to read the whole thing at once or just want to review a particular part that may have left the screen.)

Learn more about research and decisions that guide our instructional design approach on our website.

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.)

What real good has Facebook done? and is it worth it?

Amidst all the hullabaloo surrounding recent changes to Facebook's privacy policies (and practices?), a friend posed a question to friends and family members connected via Facebook: "What real good has FB done? and is it worth it?"

For me, Facebook has been evidence of social networking coming of age. Not to come off as a fogey, but "I was there when it all started." In the past, I made some new friends online whom I've valued for nearly 2 decades, and I was lucky to reconnect with a couple people I'd lost contact with along the way through life. But the thing is, all the people I connected with online in the 90s or even the early 2000s were pretty geeky - a lot of lost old friends remained lost.

The real good that FB has done for me is as the vehicle that *actually works* to reconnect me with some favorite, far less tech-savvy people from every stage in my life. Several things had to shift to change that:

1) The online population had to reach a critical mass. Not just getting email accounts, but also becoming "present" online, which means building a version of themselves via providing information.

2) Tools had to get friendly enough for Grandpa Joe and Auntie Luddite to be able to use them. The tools we used in the 90s were primitive and non-intuitive, and presented a huge barrier for the vast majority of people.

3) Revenue had to be reachable in order to pay for the programmers and other creators required to make those tools. Plenty got built by hobbyists and academics back in the day, but the results were, as mentioned above, only friendly to geeks.

Facebook costs a bunch of money to run and evolve, but it is "free" for us to use. The cost to all of us users is the information we trade for access to all the tools and toys and people that we get to play with on Facebook.

As a businessman, I recognize the value of that information in a visceral way - if I can't get people to give me some information about themselves, I can't reach them to tell them about the products I create and sell.

Here's the thing I think it all boils down to for me: I am responsible for what information I put on Facebook.

They don't - and won't - have my social security number nor my credit cards.

They don't have any info I don't consciously give them, including in my status updates, the groups I join, the names of the albums of photos I post, and the people I connect with.

I don't post evidence that I went out and got hammered on Friday night. I don't "friend" old aquaintances who are too stupid to be discreet about youthful indiscretions that may or may not have allegedly occurred when I was an allegedly indiscreet youth. I don't post strong political opinions, or spout about things I wouldn't say in front of my mother. I give enough public info that old friends searching for me can find me, and shut down the rest of it to "friends only."

Through some clever algorithm, the ads I see on the edge of the page as I surf FB are relevant to me. I see more ads for snowboards and training conferences and mountain vacations and bands I like than I do for diapers or dating services or motorsports or whatever ads YOU see. I see that as a benefit! (and again as a businessman, hooray for effective targeting of ads!)

I'm not a pollyanna about all this. Someone I grew up with no doubt has a photo or two that would embarrass the hell out of me if they posted it. Some stranger might learn a little more about me than I would share with them in the physical world.

And I'm HUGELY RELIEVED that my kids think FB is stupid - I shudder to think of the things I see some of my friends' kids post and how it all may come back to haunt them! And the drama of teenage relationships just gets magnified in all sorts of horrible ways on FB.

But my friend asked - is it worth it? The way I'm using it, most definitely.

Some minor marketing we do for GCP has exposed a broader audience to our products and people.

It's a blast getting surprised by old friends from around the world and seeing what my cousins are up to while we all remain too lazy to write letters to each other.

It's great to be able to see where my friends are skiing next weekend so we can get together.

And it's very satisfying to see friends who don't know each other getting the opportunity to benefit from the mutual connections that "networking" means by definition.

g-LMS Pre-Press Release

We've got a big announcement that will probably take place next week, but I'm so excited about it I find I need to use this blog as a rough draft of whatever press release we end up issuing.

We've been sitting on some technology we had in our back pocket for quite some time as we concentrated on growing and improving our e-learning content catalog and getting it the heck out in the marketplace.

In the process of talking to the marketplace, though, we found we were hearing over and over again: content alone is often not enough (compliance training by definition needs to be tracked), but commercial Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are often way too much tech for small and medium-sized companies. The "enterprise solution" is made for really large enterprises!

Here's what our clients and prospects have been telling us they need to be able to do in order to efficiently manage training:

1. Add learners to courses (or assign courses to learners)
2. Manage passwords/logins
3. Quickly and clearly see who has completed the training
4. Quickly and clearly see who needs a fire lit under them
5. Download reports in a form that can be further manipulated, imported into other company record-keeping systems, etc.

Here are some of the features of standard commercial LMSs that our clients and prospects specifically did NOT want or need:

1. Elaborate succession planning tools
2. Automated gap analysis tools
3. A bunch of different reports on all the possible minutiae of learners' activities
4. Months of study and specialized training just to have a clue how to run the damn thing

Slap to the forehead - we realized we already had the roots of just what these people have been telling us in some coding for tools we'd created in the past, and all we needed to do was pull it all together with the features we're hearing this demand for, and voila, the GCP's g-LMS - Global Learner Management System - will most likely launch at the end of the week!

It's a super thin application - tiny on the server, very obvious and intuitive interface for both learners and training managers (and our administrators who will run it in the background). It's elegant without being fancy at all.

For now we'll be hosting it, as that's what the market's been telling us to do. But down the road, we'll be able to license it to clients who want to run it on their own servers - we built the basics into the tool to do just that and will only have to tweak a few things to be able to deliver on that capability.

Also... nope, I'm getting ahead of myself; let's just get this thing launched this week! Stay tuned for a real live press release, and a demo site where you can try it for yourself. Can't wait to hear what you think!

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...