InformationWeek has an easy-read article on the uptake of e-learning (again) in the market. One aspect of the report I liked was a statement by SumTotal’s CEO Kegin Oakes who said:
"What started as classroom registration and tracking has turned into succession planning and informal learning …. we can now create communities of practice where we match novices with experts and people of like interests with one another."
One of the obstacles to e-learning has always been the mindset that it was a replacement of instructor-lead training in favor of online classrooms to reduce costs and increase student access/attendance. The reality is that these initiatives must be linked into your human capital management practices and measured by metrics that show up in analytics out of workforce management programs (e.g., skill/competency attainment, professional development programs, succession planning). It’s always been very difficult to prove ROI on e-learning since the impact is two or three degrees away from the learning event but if you look for process metrics and organizational productivity measures (e.g., the article refers to Century 21’s ability to gauge the effectiveness of its training on the sales force by looking at agent earnings), then you can infer benefits.
Another key point in the article was the notion that e-learning is inextricably linked to collaboration, content and communication strategies.
“One major challenge is how to handle informal learning, the typically unstructured learning that goes on each day in hallway or water-cooler conversations, company E-mails, or when employees have to learn a new task on the fly. It goes beyond what's taught in classrooms and represents as much as 80% of all learning, according to experts.”
The average line of business manager knows this as a general common-sense concept about sending workers off to class versus having them absorb what they need to know from co-workers, teams, communities and perhaps mentoring programs that might exist. When I talk to people representing corporate education groups, they focus on the benefits of “learning”. When I talk to people representing business units, they rarely talk about learning per se and instead talk about “training”. That subtle difference says it all. “Training” can have a somewhat negative connotation (it’s something we have to do, it’s a cost, and it’s a min-vacation while at work). These same groups that take a skeptical view of learning however will gladly fund projects to deploy portals, collaboration, content management, search and communication tools to improve sharing of information and insight.
In the end, the future of e-learning is to mainstream it into the everyday environment of users (in an integrated and seemless manner) and stop treating it as something that is done separately or in parallel to one’s work activities. Mainstreaming it includes letting it be free from overly engineered courseware, overly structured content and overly intrusive scheduling – not that those tactics go away, you need such frameworks for formal certification and compliance reasons. But if you look at the move towards people learning from each other in a more social manner, and the rise of mass amateurism, then learning strategists need to start designing much more immersive environments for people to exchange know-how. From a technology perspective that takes us beyond portals, virtual workspaces, IM, presence, Web conferencing, search and content management and so on. They are important elements in regards to a platform foundation but still inadequate when it comes to socializing learning. We need to include tools that provide users with a higher degree of cooperative ownership and influence around sense-making and the the exchange of know-how where “learning” per se disppears into the background. Examples include blogs, wikis, podcasting, tag clouds, shared bookmarks, folksonomies and social networking applications. Perhaps when we get to that point, the meaning of "learning" and "training" will be synonymous.
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