Penelope Trunk : Throw away e-learning

[Anol Bhattacharya]

Penelope Trunk (of Brazen Careerist fame) suggested in her blog Throw away e-learning. To quote

I recently received an email from career coach and corporate consultant, J.T O’Donnell. She attached a link to a new e-learning course that she gives to young employees, and she asked for my input. For days, I debated how to respond. Eventually, I replied and told her that I hate all e-learning. She said that most millennials she works with dislike e-learning. So, she only designs e-learning tools that are coupled with personal teaching and discussion.

After mentioning my desire to write a post about doing away with e-learning, J.T gave me some great insight. She told me, “It helps save companies thousands in training costs.”

Bingo! Now I know why companies are using e-learning to replace hands-on mentoring and teaching - it’s cheap. Clearly, a company’s main goal is to make a profit, and this means minimizing costs wherever possible. However, training and developing your employees, especially the confused new hires, is not the right area to cut costs.

At orientation, the first time my peers and I logged in to complete an e-learning course, we all looked at each other with puzzled faces. I thought, “Is this serious?” Others snickered throughout the whole assignment and most of us jumped through the course totally bored. Without discussion or one-on-one teaching e-learning is cheap, ineffective and gives the impression that a company does not care enough to invest time or money into training. Which in turn, gives the impression that employees are unimportant.

I don’t necessarily think that loathing e-learning is a millennial trait. My Gen X co-workers constantly complain about the thoughtless “busy work” that comes from e-learning tools. My mother even called the other day to rant about the stupidity of her e-training classes. So who actually benefits from this?

Maybe companies use this cheap training because they expect people to job hop and don’t want to waste budget dollars on employees who won’t be around for long. But in reality, not focusing on personally training and developing entry level employees is probably what causes them to job hop in the first place.

If an e-learning tool can somehow be coupled with actual face-to-face learning or mentoring then I am all for it. Just don’t use it as a replacement for real teaching. I crave the personal connections that come with one-on-one or classroom teaching, even if the rest of my life is spent online.

Your thoughts please:

[Clark Quinn]

eLearning works in different ways for different people. And there's good and bad elearning. For novices, I'd use a blended approach, and use the elearning first to motivate the learners (elearning motivate? Yes, can be done), and to provide knowledge so that F2F is more productive (and make sure the learners know the role the elearning is playing). I wouldn't substitute the 'soft touch' of new employee induction by elearning.

On the other hand, for experienced and motivated employees, asynchronous elearning can be a blessing, compared to time out for travel/F2F/accommodation instead of at my own time.

If it's just being done to lower costs, not to be more effective or at least as effective but more efficient, she's right it's wrong.

And bad elearning is a bad idea for any audience! I can understand the reaction you cite, but it's a bit stereotypical, not nuanced.

[Bill Bruck]

Yah - I pretty much agree with you, Clark. It's important to use the right tool for the right job, and a poor quality tool may not even be able to do the job or which it was designed.

On demand eLearning runs the gamut from boring page turners and e-textbooks on the one hand to compelling social simulations with professional scriptwriters and superior instructional design. Sounds like Penelope might have been talking about the former.

I tend to believe that basic vocabulary and concepts can be taught quickly and effectively with eLearning. Well designed eLearning (not powerpoint-with-narration-converted-to-flash) can also teach critical thinking and how to implement standard procedures -- depending on the learning style of the learner.

True proficiency, however, is attained over time -not in a single trainign event (F2F or via eLearning), and is often best learned in relationship with other learners and/or someone who can provide feedback borne of experience. In addition, the ability to ask questions about content of a live instructor, and get real, adaptive answers that fit the questioner's situation is invaluable.

This type of interaction can be done live, or (in our experience) using a combination of synchronous and asynchronous online collaboration tools - and HERE is where the excitment of technology mediated learning really exists - IMHO.

[Jay Cross]

There's good eLearning and there's bad. College taught me there are good lectures and bad. There are good books and bad. There are good wines and bad.

The existence of the bad stuff should not be allowed to push out the good.

[Janet Clarey]

The author pretty much said she hates all e-learning because:
-Companies use it to replace hands-on mentoring and teaching because it’s cheap (only reason given)
-[Using e-learning] to train and develop employees (especially new hires) is not the right area to cut costs
-She was exposed to [what sounds like] a page-turner at orientation
-[Self-paced] e-learning is ineffective and gives the impression that a company does not care enough to invest time or money into training [culture = employee is not important]
-It's busy work. (Loathing e-learning is not a millennial trait. GenX workers (and the author’s mother) also complain about the ‘busy work’ of e-learning)
-Traits of learners. E-learning maybe is used because people job hop and companies don’t want to waste money on training (which may cause them to job hop)
-E-learning is not ‘real teaching’ (personal connections)

While it's unfortunate that she seems to have suffered through what sounds like a real page-turner, most e-learning is not cheap (to develop) in the short term but can have a positive return on investment over time when compared with f2f training (depends on a lot of factors - big audience, geographically dispersed, training on real equipment cost prohibitive, etc.). I think we'd be hard-pressed to find companies that turn to e-learning only because it is cheap.

I am a believer that blended learning provides greater learning outcomes than either f2f or e-learning alone so I do think connections are key. I also don't limit the definition of blended learning to f2f + e-learning. In fact, I take issue with the need for connections to be face-to-face. I went to Capella University - totally online - and learned more than I could have imagined. The program did not suffer from a loss of connectedness because it was designed well. This aligns with other comments - bad elearning, bad f2f training, bad blended learning is just bad.

[Andy Jones]

I can't agree with Janet more. Bad eLearning is a terrible advert but unfortunately tarnishes the rest with a bad brush. However, terrible eLearning is generally what you get if you go down the "lets do it cheaper" route. My take is that eLearning, virtual classrooms, virtual surgeries, simulations, virtual labs, even real classrooms all have some great points and some rubbish ones. So use them for what they're good for.

As a side point, it does seem that companies (mine included in some senses) are opting for the "save money - make it online" approach which tends to produce page turners. Anyone else having the same issues?

[Meir Navon]

When somebody encounters bad eLearning, usually they don't blame the instructional designer, that did the bad job, but goes around saying that eLearning should be finished.
I'd accept it, if every time we see a bad film, we blame the projector, whenever we listen to a bad lecture, we blame the walls or when reading a bad book, we'd blame the paper...
Common Penelope, let's get over this populist anti eLearning trend!
It's just a learning method, which is appropriate for some learning needs and inappropriate for others...

[Anol Bhattacharya]

Thanks all of you for the wonderful replies, I have very little to add here. It's really great to be part of a community where members really 'get it'!

[Lee Solon]

I hate elearning seems a huge statement to make.

Who among us didn’t have a bad experience when learning to drive in Dad’s car?
Or just after we got our licence?
Do we drive today or did we just condemn automotive technology across the board and decide it was not worth the space in our lives?

I agree wholeheartedly there is a multitude of bad elearning examples out there

(Volumes of web-based information presented as elearning. Downloadable Word documents containing questions you ask yourself after you have viewed a course delivered in PowerPoint! If you are really lucky you get to click through to another site and tell them what your score was!!!! Yeah, right!)

But there are also highly successful applications of elearning. I offer several below:

1) A team of 5 senior marketing people from five different countries
(Spain, Germany, USA, New Zealand and Australia) Different companies, different markets, working together through a 6-month elearning course which saw them immersed in a shared process as new knowledge was examined, new understanding gained and new skills transferred.

All learner activity (individual and group) was tracked and measured in real time. The tutor could see in graphic format who was on target and who might need some remedial intervention. In fact, tutor intervention to the group is minimal as the real learning happens between the students as they debate the business value of the medium they are currently experiencing.

Result: Each gained a complete understanding as to how the internet was going to impact their company’s relationships with their markets going forward and how to plan for and capitalize on the enormous changes the internet brings.

This course consistently achieves -100% Completion Rate as the loyalty created within the group drives them through the process as a team.


Some other highly successful and current projects:

- Training all Australian front line immigration personnel on how to protect themselves and their colleagues from the (ever hovering) Bird Flu Virus (H5N1) At the time of writing (05/07), isolated human cases have been confirmed in both the U.K. and in the US. However, all under control, thanks to the WHO

- New General Practitioners
_____________Immunisation Changes - Meningococcal B Vaccine
_____________How to interpret and input psychological screening data

Roading Engineers

- New Budget Submission and Control Procedures
-100% web-based course – 2-3 hours
- Held in computer labs with facilitator, to enable post-course review/discuss – the distillation of the learning.

Nationwide Industry Wide First Aid Course (blended - certification)

• Computer Skills to the Rural Sector
(Blended > Computer Laboratory Facilitator and Web-based Tutor)
• Electrical Engineering Recertification processes – theoretical requirement
• Call Centre Industry Qualifications -Unit Standards Qualifications
• Tracking and measurement of all learning activities online.
• Full audit trail provided
• ‘Blended’ - supervisor observations and exercises
• ‘Blended’ - Certifier

In the list above, I have deliberately listed some mundane everyday courses to illustrate how elearning is here to stay. It is both effective and cost-effective.

Key Benefit of eLearning for Trainers
They can increase their earning capabilities by running different groups concurrently.

If the training industry focussed on harnessing this technology and folding it into their current activities, there are enormous benefits.

By using:

 Pre-seminar web-based training (results to trainer next morning before face to face seminar
 Enables more effective use of face to face time
 Post seminar web-based training – results in real-time

When you do the math, a trainer can increase their face to face capability by using the elearning technologies wisely.

Hope this creates new thoughts or reinforces existing progress. Welcome comments. Thanks for your time

[Ignatia]

apart from the good versus bad eLearning, there is something to say for indirect factors that influence the necessity of e-courses.

If you need to provide eLearning to rural areas were there are only a few district health workers, it definitely is a solution. At the institute we provide master courses, but we are now redesigning those courses into online courses. If you take a medical doctor or a health worker out if her or his environment, the whole district is without this health professional and in many developing countries this effects the community greatly. So in these cases eLearning definitely is a benefit to learners as well as the complete district.