Joke

How many e-learning vendor staff does it take to change a light bulb?


I don’t know … one to execute the task, one to adapt for the Web, one to provide the hosting, one to provide the annual software support and maintenance contract, one to explain the e-learning standards specification, one project manager, one to manage the account … how big a budget do you have?


Sound familiar?

Venus and Mars

One of the regular complaints from learning and development professionals about technologists (hereafter, techies) is that they talk ‘Martian’, so much a specialist jargon that it's an alien language that serves to exclude everyone but themselves.

It’s a harsh judgement, but I think a fair one. There’s just one problem, though.

Learning and development is just as bad! Our professionals have their own alien language that often excludes others. If techies speak Martian, trainers speak Venusian.

When I worked with the eLearning Alliance, I found my main task was to bring together these two distinct professional communities and get them to communicate. Which was when we found great synergies, as both sides realised they had a lot to learn from each other. Effectively, we were bringing Mars and Venus down to Earth.

I used this metaphor once too often, and one wag looked me straight in the eye and said “you’re talking from Uranus”. There’s always one!

Have I got a serious point? Yes, I think we could all stand to use a lot less jargon and a lot more plain English.

Social networking

There’s been an explosion of interest recently in social networking as it applies to learning and especially e-learning. Hence the appearance of the pointless jargon “e-learning 2.0” and “learning 2.0”. There’s an ‘idiot’s guide’ here.

As someone who has posted regularly on discussion forums for at least six years, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. I suppose it’s about the increasing numbers of people starting to use the Web to participate, rather than just to read. These opportunities have been about for years, but perhaps they are only now reaching critical mass as more and more people have computers with broadband connections.

Some HR managers have been getting worried about what people are talking about on their Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo sites. Which is a bit like worrying about what people chat about in cafes and pubs – the only real difference is that these comments are written and saved. I understand CIPD have been conducting some research into this, and have concluded that there’s nothing for employers to worry about.

As for learning, it represents a step in the right direction. The more people can use this sort of connectivity to support their learning, the better. And anything that encourages active learning, not just passive reading, has got to be a good thing. I'm glad to say that blogs, discussion forums, wikis, etc, seem to be here to stay, in the world of learning.

L plates

I’ve been having debates on-and-off for the last twenty years about what to call learners. Twenty years ago, trainees was going out of fashion, but people were slow to embrace learners. All sorts of other terms were mooted: students always sounded better-suited to the world of academia, and had too many other connotations. Just referring to staff or employees was a copout. Organisers of public courses would use delegates, but they might as well have just said customers or clients.

One term I still occasionally use is participants, suitably vague and devoid of any pejorative meaning. But is learners now acceptable? I’ve often been told people don’t like to be referred to as learners because it implies they’re thick. And, although we were all learner drivers ourselves once, people do tend to sneer at drivers with L plates.

I sense that learner has come of age, and is now more widely acceptable. There’s always a danger that I am too immersed in my profession and have lost touch with what people in the real world think. But I prefer to believe developments like e-learning, and the work of the learning and development profession, have contributed to the proper term becoming more acceptable. Am I right?

There I go, worrying about language again. But it is important – how we speak to each other conveys all sorts of unintentional meanings we should be more guarded about.

Writing Again

I’ve just noted that my last post was over a month ago – I think this is the longest gap between posts since I started this blog. As you can guess, this points to me having been very busy recently. I’ve just completed a major consultancy project, setting up a corporate university for a client, including initiating their first e-learning. I’ve also started work on a new project, writing a book on e-learning strategy. Clients I’ve helped with this subject, and delegates to my public workshops on the same theme, will recognise some of the ideas when the book is published.

But don’t rush off to Amazon just yet – the process is akin to the gestation of an elephant. I submit my final manuscript by the end of July. Not literally, of course – put aside your images of me and my quill pen, blotting my vellum and leaving it to dry. Then the publisher’s work begins: reviewing, editing, index-compiling, typesetting (again, the word doesn’t really describe the modern process), designing, print and production, etc. All of which means you shouldn’t expect to see my magnum opus until early in 2009.

Working title is How to Implement Successful E-learning. I’ll keep you posted on progress, and if anyone’s got any ideas to contribute, I’d love to hear them.

Limits of e-learning?

People often tell me that they believe e-learning is great for information exchange but not for behavioural change, that it’s good for factual, knowledge-based learning, but not skill or competence development.

I don’t think this is true.

The reason people believe this is because of the limitations of e-learning programmes they have seen or can imagine, not the limitations of e-learning’s potential. It would be true to say that, so far, it is easier to develop e-learning that meets knowledge rather than skill needs, but this is changing.

I’ve created a matrix to show the impact of different kinds of e-learning. Each of the two dimensions that form the axes of this matrix is a continuum. On the horizontal axis, the continuum is from knowledge to skill.

Learning can include varying proportions of knowledge acquisition and skill development, some learning being very fact-based and other learning being more about acquiring a capability. Thus all learning can be placed somewhere on this continuum.

On the second, vertical, axis, there is a continuum from generic to bespoke content.

The content of a learning programme can be common to the needs of any organisation, or it can be specific to the needs of a particular organisation. It needn’t be entirely generic or 100% bespoke, but can be placed somewhere along the continuum.

Putting the axes together yields a classic two-by-two matrix, so beloved of consultants. In the bottom left-hand box, we have most e-learning programmes, especially those offered by vendors of off-the-shelf courseware, typically very generic and very knowledge-based – I describe this as the cash cow. But few vendors of generic courseware offer more skills-focused programmes, so I call programmes that fall into the bottom right-hand box question marks. Companies implementing e-learning, perhaps for new employee induction or to introduce corporate systems are getting quick wins in the top left-hand box – these are stars.
But we’ll know when e-learning has really arrived when organisations can readily develop bespoke programmes that impact on employees’ skills and competences – thus the top right-hand box is the holy grail.

There are many ways to use this matrix, but I hope it at least shows it is possible to do more with e-learning than simply transfer information from one to another. Perhaps I’ll revisit this in future posts.

Happy New Year!

At this time of year, I'd like to wish my family and friends, clients and associates, and everyone who reads this blog, all the best for a peaceful and prosperous 2008.

May the New Year bring you everything you want, and if there's anything I can do to help bring that about, please let me know!