In the haste to “get it out there,” organizations are ignoring some basic realities about technology and learning, and about today’s learners. This paper introduces twelve “truths” that cannot be avoided if distance learning is to be successful. These truths come from discussions in e-learning literature, from customer feedback, and from ej4’s experience in creating rapid deployment learning situations. The truths can be used as a roadmap to create an effective distance learning strategy, or as a checklist to evaluate the effectiveness of current approaches.
TRUTH #1: It’s All About Compelling Content
It’s the question asked more than any other by learning professionals:
How do I get people to take this class?
They need to have someone put a figurative friendly arm around their shoulder and tell them in the spirit of constructive criticism, “That’s not the problem. People vote with their time and attention, and they’re telling you that your content sucks. If learners clearly benefited from your courses, employees would be beating down your doors to sign up.”
TechLearn Trend’s distance learning guru Elliott Masie gets right to this crucial point about e-learning when he emphasizes, “It’s all about compelling content!”
Designers should not confuse bells and whistles with effective learning. In a race, content counts far more than delivery style—if the content is compelling enough. Buyers spend hours on the Internet pouring through a myriad of Web sites and chat areas looking for information about their next big purchase. They laboriously go through horrible text-only pages seeking medical information on a current illness or injury. No one is spoon feeding them anything. They are pulling information out of a user-unfriendly system because the content has such benefit to them.
Distance learning is not simply an inexpensive way to deliver ineffective training. If a course helps someone make money, save time, reduce problems, make life easier, excel at work, stay healthier, look better, have fun, etc., then learners will take the course voluntarily. That’s the primary requirement of all learning—regardless of delivery method or clever instructional design.
TRUTH #2: Single-event training doesn’t work
In an emergency, no one wants to get CPR from a person who had the course ten years ago and has never used it since. They’re liable to push on your face and blow on your chest. It’s just been too long since the initial training to keep those lifecritical skills fresh.
Most learning professionals operate on the philosophy of, “They took it. They know it forever.” Once a course is completed, then that’s a skills check-off for the rest of that student’s organizational life. Unfortunately, this attitude contradicts all known learning theory.
The key concept is what psychologists call memory “decay.” Most people can’t remember what they had for lunch two Thursdays back, much less recall 152 textladen PowerPoint slides they saw in a 2-1/2 day class 14 months ago. Over time and without reinforcement and use, we forget nearly all of what we learned in any single event.
Conducting a training event without also providing after-the-event continuing refresh learning and application learning is a waste of time. From a competency standpoint, refresh learning is actuallymore important than the initial event.
TRUTH #3: Management support is a requirement
We’ve heard employees joke that they stay away from their boss right after a managerial training class because he or she always comes back with all these weird ideas. If subordinates just lie low for awhile, the real world beats it out of the boss and everything is back to normal again in a few weeks.
Another factor that turns worthwhile learning events into total wastes of time is the lack of cultural and managerial support systems that reinforce the newly trained behaviors.
What happens during the first few trials of the new skill after a training event is critical. If learners attempt something they learned and are shot down for it, they’ll never do it again. If they do something they learned and no one seems to care, they’ll realize that it’s unimportant and let it fade away.
Performance management processes must specify the new behaviors. Management must expect and coach to the new behaviors. Employees must see that they will be formally and informally rewarded for using the new behaviors. And the new behaviors must work.
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