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E-learning - what the sales rep doesn't tell you

Martin Hale, Information Age

20/04/2005 13:44:53

A major Australian corporation has just signed a considerable contract to deliver e-learning to their IT Professionals. The library includes thousands of titles covering all the major technologies and platforms across the corporation.

The CEO announces the e-learning initiative with great fanfare to the corporation, e-mails go out and the internal newsletter carries the initiative as a front page story. Staff are given training courses on how to access the e-learning and IT line managers across the corporation write "do relevant e-learning" in their staff development plans for the next year.

In a magnanimous gesture, corporate HQ announces that the e-learning is free because corporate will absorb the cost of the e-learning contract.

The CIO and his or her line managers are happy because they can now put a tick against the technical development for the IT staff. The library covers every conceivable topic, from basic introduction to the very advanced, and is available 24 hours a day from any computer at work, home or anywhere.

The CFO is very happy because the e-learning contract has allowed the corporation's training budget for the IT division to be slashed by 70 per cent.

So let's fast forward two years:

IT line managers have started questioning the value of the e-learning and report difficulty in getting their staff to use the packages. HR uses the corporate learning management system (LMS) to calculate that the cost of actual training completed on the e-learning courses in the two years has been $5458 per hour of training actually completed. The CFO is heard to mumble under his breath that "it would have been cheaper to send them to instructor-led training courses in Monte Carlo".

The CIO issues an edict that all IT staff must use e-learning for all development. The CIO's message causes a flurry of usage and over the next three months, the cost plummets to "only" $4851 per hour of study. However, usage rapidly drops off and after a further 12 months, the LMS shows minimal accessing of the learning packages. The CIO thanks the heavens that the three-year e-learning contract is coming to an end and vows never to touch e-learning again.

This is not an isolated example; the scenario described above has been (and is being) repeated across corporations, here and around the world, since the beginning of the 1980s. Does this mean that e-learning is flawed and should be sent the way of the BetaCam video? No: the advent of the Internet and tools such as LMS, online simulations and continuous assessment are amongst the most exciting development to ever hit adult education.

The reason that commercial e-learning implementations are such dismal failures is not because the concept is flawed, but because the implementation ignores certain fundamentals of human nature, in particular the way in which people learn.

The first thing we need to do is to get rid of the notion promulgated by e-learning sales representatives, which is that Learning is all about content delivery.

To see the potential of e-learning, we need to leave the corporate world and move into a sector where there is an exponential growth in the use of e-learning; there is a select group of Australian universities which have focused on supplying the tools, infrastructure and support necessary to deliver remote education successfully.

This group is dominated by Charles Sturt University, which, with over 35,000 students in 2004, is one of the world's largest suppliers of distance education.

Source: Australian Dept of Education, Science & Training

The thing we learn from studying the model used by Charles Sturt University (CSU) is to discard the concept promulgated by e-learning sales representatives that learning is all about content delivery. If this were true, schools and universities would be closed and we would all be sitting in front of television to learn.

The fact is that the reasons why, and how, we learn are much more complex than simply giving people access to quality course content - whether it's in a book, on television or the Internet. The success achieved by CSU clearly shows that we need to expand the concept of simply delivering content via e-learning to one that embraces the whole concept of what is required to deliver education successfully without locking people up in classrooms.

1. People need structure About 400 years ago universities realised that most human beings are busy with their day-to-day lives, and have a tendency to put off today what they can leave until tomorrow. In learning, this equates to endlessly delaying the scheduling of learning.

The universities' answer to this was to introduce a structured unit of learning (called a semester) and a way to drive students to conform to that structure - an end of semester exam.

How important is having this structure in place? Since the introduction of semesters, a number of institutions have trialled "learner-centric" or timeless learning whereby students elect their own exam dates. Without exception, these trails have been abject failures with the majority of students never quite getting around to undertaking their studies.

2. People need people One of the big disadvantages of e-learning is the lack of interaction with lecturers and fellow students. Personally, I generally struggled to keep awake in lectures and found that tutorials were dominated by students spouting endlessly about stuff that I was not interested in. However, I have still found lecture-based delivery to be far more palatable than locking myself away in a room trying to learn from a book or a computer.

The advent of the Internet and a whole range of online learning aids have come to the rescue. I was recently allowed to look in on an online forum of IT professionals studying for their Masters via distance learning with CSU. From an adult learning perspective, the interaction between 40 IT pros was one of the most exciting things that I have seen in a long time: someone would post a query to the forum and then you would see a flurry of responses from other students. The course convener rarely got involved and students were expected to go away and come up with the answers themselves.

3. People still like paper I make a habit of regularly visiting the computing section of the major bookstores. I do this not because I am going to buy a book (I have trouble spelling "computer"), I do it to gaze in wonder at all of the computing professionals queuing to buy paper-based reference manuals. All of the information from the books that they are purchasing is available via the Iinternet but here they are, spending their hard-earned on what will rapidly become expensive doorstops.

Now these are the professionals who make a living of out computers and they still revert back to paper when they have something complex to learn. The fact is that you do not change a lifetime of learning habits simply because it saves money - e-learning is here but its adoption will be gradual process and in the interim, students need to be provided with paper-based resources to supplement e-learning.

So should CIOs should run screaming out of the room when someone suggests using e-learning for their staff. No, doing this would be like continuing to use the Pony Express after the advent of the steam engine. What it does mean is that before signing on the dotted line of the e-learning contract, CIOs should go through the following checklist: • What is the timeframe for the learning and why will staff keep to that timeframe? • Are tools in place to monitor usage and performance? • Who is going to support, encourage and drive students to keep to the timeframe? If the answer to this is line managers, who is going to support, encourage and drive them to fit this into their already busy schedule? • Is the e-learning contract based on actual (as distinct from projected) usage? (I can assure you that the e-learning sales representative will get very upset when you propose this change to the contract but you will also find that the e-learning vendor will become interested in making sure your staff actually use e-learning.) • Are the tools in place to allow students to collaborate and support each other?

Okay - I can see you thinking that ensuring that all of the above happens looks too difficult so let's just go with stand-alone e-learning anyway.

Rather than going down this path, my recommendation is that you take your IT training budget and put it in on the favourite in the sixth race at the local races.

Experience has taught us that they have a far better chance of getting an ROI on the corporation's money.

Martin Hale is director, ACS Membership Standards Board and CEO, IT Masters. He is Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Charles Sturt University, has a Graduate Diploma in Adult Education from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Business Administration from Southern Cross University, both while working full-time.