My first exposure to a CD Rom learning program was at least 10 years ago. Following closely after that was my first all-out venture into designing and developing my first e-learning course. In 10 years, the technology has certainly changed for the better, but the design... well... doesn't seem to have changed much at all. I'm still encountering glorified powerpoint presentations, page turners, and other snooze-fests where, for the most part, the desired learning never occurs because it never should have been delivered via e-learning in the first place. What's going on? (That's rhetorical - I have loads of information about what's causing the issues, but I'd like to know what others have observed, what they think is causing it, and what should happen to change it.) Grab a coffee (or your favorite beverage) and let's discuss!

Seems to me that one of the big problems is the trending for SMEs and trainers to build courses instead of instructional designers / graphic artists. Most SMEs and trainers have no idea what makes compelling, effective content, and they likely couldn't build it if they wanted to. They often just repurpose powerpoint and paper training into their publisher, add a test or two and call it done. Part of this is because it saves money and time, and part is because of the improvement of the GUI interfaced authoring tools.

My $.02!

I think Eric is certainly correct in stating that many courses are built by the SME rather than instructional designers with the help of quality graphic designers. I am not sure about everyone else out there, but our training department has 4 staff members and we only recently added a graphic designer.

Of course we face the typical challenges in a retail operation that management wants product information and skills training as fast as possible. Therefore, the path of least resistance is to create courses in the lecture mode with which we are all familiar. The problem is that telling is not training. I believe there is a place for this "lecture" information - but it is more of a just in time resource for individuals seeking knowledge on a particular skill/product/fact etc.

The real essence of training is to replicate the situation that the individual faces in their daily work. If it is a sales person then the task is to replicate the sales floor and throw sales situations at them and make sure they "make" their quota. If it is a manager then we should be throwing them into interview situations or project management situations, etc.

While I have rambled, it seems to me that current "powerpoint" page turning training is simply the path of least resistance for understaffed training departments. The key to improvement seems to be to help designers understand the process of determining how best to replicate the job environment for the skills that need improved.

John

quote:

Originally posted by John Zurovchak:
I think Eric is certainly correct in stating that many courses are built by the SME rather than instructional designers with the help of quality graphic designers. I am not sure about everyone else out there, but our training department has 4 staff members and we only recently added a graphic designer.

We've got 2 instructional designers (for over 50,000 employees) and no graphic designer. If we didn't have SMEs creating some of this stuff we'd come even less close to meeting demand.

quote:

Of course we face the typical challenges in a retail operation that management wants product information and skills training as fast as possible. Therefore, the path of least resistance is to create courses in the lecture mode with which we are all familiar. The problem is that telling is not training. I believe there is a place for this "lecture" information - but it is more of a just in time resource for individuals seeking knowledge on a particular skill/product/fact etc.

That's certainly not just a retail thing... I think that's what ALL managers want. Agreed that for the most part we go with lecture format, but not because it's familiar - more because it's faster to write, and faster to consume (though less effective) and it's what the managers think they want. (It's not, really - and it's certainly not what they need - but they're rather stubborn on that point, usually.)

Here's the problem we frequently run into (thankfully, there are exceptions). The manager comes to us asking for training 2 to 4 weeks before they want to roll it out. It's tied to a major initiative, whether it be a software rollout, regulatory, or process related, and the deadline has extremely little wiggle room. To build the training "right" would take 4 to 6 weeks or more (especially if you consider the other projects in the queue). To deliver a "lecture" would take 3 weeks or less. We push for the "right" way anyway. Manager complains and threatens to go buy Captivate or some other similiar software and create it himself, delivering it outside of our design and delivery standards, and likely with little to no design thought, and the training department would be blamed for the failure. We can at least put some structure around it if we take it, and the training will have some minimum level of success (even though in the long run it's much less effective and costs the company more in other ways), so we do it as a page-turner/lecture within their timeframe, working 15 hour days to get it as good as we can.

And then there is no time left for personal development, so we don't have the opportunity to learn other ways to work.

Maybe underlying these problems is the common assumption that information is learning.

Most of us spent years in school receiving information dumps and being tested on the information. Many of us continue to believe that's how it should be done because we haven't seen enough examples of other approaches. As Jeff pointed out, an info dump is often the quickest "solution" to what is (incorrectly) perceived as a lack of information.

If we assume we're delivering information, not experience, then we don't hesitate to use elearning for any topic, including interpersonal skills.

The result is that we have lots of elearning that inappropriately dumps information. The more of it we create, the more acceptable it becomes, just by its overwhelming volume. And since few of us have the chance to measure the effectiveness of each elearning project, we often don't have the data to support a better approach.

I think another problem is the common misconception that elearning has to have rich media to be effective. Elearning's strength is its ability to offer meaningful interaction, and that doesn't require rich media.

A text-only branching scenario that requires the learner to make challenging, real-world decisions can be far more engaging and effective than a slickly produced information dump. Of course, the branching scenario will take longer to design--but probably less time to produce. Unfortunately, some stakeholders won't like it because it's not impressively slick.

Maybe one solution is to ferret out examples of "good" elearning and send them to the people who need to see them. Maybe send them a steady trickle, like one a week, to nibble away at their current beliefs.

That raises the question of where to find good examples, which is probably another thread.

Cathy