Why is e-learning so boring? My top 5 reasons discussed …

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Posted on 24th March 2010 by admin in eLearning Development

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Admit it, most of the e-learning you have taken or created is dreadfully boring and causes this affect in you or your learners. You can get the same effect from reading a poorly written or irrelevant book. You may have this same experience in a poorly designed or irrelevant instructor led course as well, especially at 3 in the afternoon when the instructor is on slide 88. However, this has become all too common with online learning courses. Let’s explore a few reasons why this is the case. These are not all of the reasons by the way.

Why is this happening? Why do we as learning professionals continue to create e-learning courses that apply little if any research in learner motivation, adult learning theory and some fundamental principles that date back to the 1960s?

Here’s my list of top 5 reasons why most e-learning is boring and ineffective:

(1) Training professionals are developing e-learning courses without the training on how to effectively design and develop instructional technologies. Trainers are being ask to develop e-learning with little to no experience. They might understand how to design effective classroom instruction but do not fully understand the merging of technology and instructional design.

(2) Tools for rapidly taking classroom content and publishing it to the web have been placed into the hands of training professionals without training on how to use them effectively. Tools that take training slide decks and convert them into slick professional “looking” online page turners do not ensure that you will get effective behavioral change or even a minimal increase in knowledge. Designing an online learning experience is not the same as designing a set of slides to facilitate an instructor led discussion.

(3) When training professionals are introduced to well designed online instruction, they quickly become frustrated because they have neither the time, money or skills to do it correctly. As a result they fall back to narrating slide decks and putting a quiz at the end. Training professionals go to a professional conference or take a course on e-learning design and discover that in order to create engaging online learning you really need to have skills in graphic arts, animation, audio, video and web programming. The training professional who does not have these skills gets frustrated and does the best she can with rapid development tools.

(4) Individuals with the competencies to design effective instructional technology strategies are very rare. Yes, I know there are a lot of great instructional designers out there. Yes, I know there are lot of great Flash developers out there. Now find someone who can translate the instructional science, business process and the technology into a creative engaging and effective instructional strategy. I have tried to pass on the craft to others and I am baffled at how difficult it is. After reading Daniel Pink’s (2005) book, “Whole New Mind”, I believe the problem is that the craft requires both an analytical mind and an artistic design mind working in symphony and it seems like this is an anomaly that few people exhibit. An artist struggles with the analytical approach of object oriented programming design and systematic instructional design and the analytical person struggles with seeing the creative design appear on the white board. A competent instructional technology designer must have strong competencies in both the technology and learning sciences.

(5) People in the organization, both the business and training groups, may not “believe” that e-learning can teach, motivate or change behaviors. As a result there are no strong business drivers that would warrant putting effort into design or investing significant training dollars to create highly engaging and effective e-learning applications. The organization simply doesn’t believe that the investment in time or money is worth it. The unspoken opinion, is that e-learning is for online informational overviews and classroom is for teaching and learning how to do something.

Please complete this short 4 question survey in response to the comments in this post. I will post the results next week.
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I will also post a strategy for overcoming each of these obstacles to overcoming boring and ineffective e-learning.

Reference

Pink, D. H. (2005). Whole New Mind Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. New York: Riverhead Books.

e-Learning Vendor Partnerships: Ensuring Quality Learning Outcomes

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Posted on 19th March 2010 by admin in eLearning Development

In 2009 I was asked to begin evaluating and working with various e-learning development vendors. I will not mention their names. However, I will explain that my team took the time to evaluate three companies using an India outsourcing model and about four other companies located locally to our company in the U.S. Each of these companies have at least a decade designing and developing e-learning. For those of you that do not know, the term e-learning was coined around 1998 – 1999 and probably came from the term e-commerce which was a popular term in the mid-1990s. Prior to e-learning the term used by most of these same companies was Computer Based Training (CBT).

I will add one additional caveat to my 2009 unofficial e-learning vendor research project. I used to work for an e-learning vendor as a instructional designer and project manager so I have an understanding from the vendor’s perspective. I have sat on both sides of the table.

Type of e-Learning Vendors

There are different categories of e-learning vendor companies. You can select from small boutique e-learning shops that focus all of their energy on the design and development of e-learning. These companies are normally small with 20-50 employees and other then some web development related services, they focus entirely on e-learning. Secondly, you can look to the larger consulting companies (you know who they are) that will do everything for you in terms of learning and talent management. They offer a suite of learning services which include e-learning design and development. I am cautious about these larger companies because they might treat e-learning work with a little less respect then the smaller highly focused companies. Then there is a new and growing business model which offers a few account managers and learning technology specialists located locally with a larger highly skilled development team located in India. This model allows for the personal in-person touch with a cost savings on the development side of the business. Some of these companies choose to only offer in-person account management where others offer in-person analysis and design. I have found that this last model seems to work the best.

What does this blended model look like?

There are many ways to structure an internal learning organization or a corporate university including the “temple model” and the “pyramid model” (Allen, 2002). Which ever model you select you should have someone that has a set of competencies in conducting training needs analysis, defining measurable learning objectives and designing instructional strategies aligned with fundamental learning principles. For e-learning projects you also need someone that can differentiate between good and bad design. Your internal learning professional doesn’t need to be a programmer or a multimedia developer but they should have a good understanding of best practices in software development and project management. Keeping up with the technology and the learning theory is very time consuming and this is where the external local learning professional comes in.

You might consider having an internal learning technology center of excellence who’s role it is to keep up with the technology and learning sciences, but this is not necessary since your external partner should offer this service. You might also consider hiring an independent learning technology consultant as a broker or liaison between your internal learning professionals and your external development partner. It’s all a matter of trust and fit with your organizational learning goals. The role of the external learning professional is to ensure that your instructional goals are met through effective design and application of the technology. This person should be an expert of experts in instructional design and technology. There are vendors out there who have these types of people on their teams but I was surprised to find that not all e-learning companies have these types of experts on staff. These expert designers also have a very unique competency to input analytical data into their left brain and output a creative design using their right brain. There are very few people that have this capability. As a result the design process is needs to be a collaborative one where diverse cognitive abilities are brought together to come up with the right design.

Reducing Costs

You want to reduce costs but not sacrifice quality. If you post a poorly designed one-hour e-learning course on your learning management system (LMS) and one thousand people take the course, you have just wasted one thousand labor hours. So you want to reduce costs but not by doing things like converting slide decks to Flash and throwing it out on the LMS. This might provide valuable information to the organization but are you meeting your organizational learning objectives by doing this or wasting people’s precious time? So do not go cheap on design or the use of the appropriate technologies. Adobe Flash is the tool of choice to develop engaging and interactive web based learning but it is not an easy tool to develop in. So what many people do is sacrifice quality due to a lack of competencies. You wouldn’t wire your home with the wrong wire and do it yourself because you can not afford a licensed electrician. So why develop poor learning products just because you don’t know how to program and develop in Adobe Flash?

So here’s how you do it. Ensure that your internal learning professionals have a solid instructional design background and the foundational competencies to differentiate between good and bad e-learning design. Next, locate an external partner who can provide local design and technology expertise. You need this person on-site working with your learning professionals or through an online technology that makes them feel like they are there. Finally, find a vendor that has a team off-shore with Adobe Flash and a wide variety of online web development skills. Save on the developmental costs. Costs for well designed and developed e-learning courses should run you between $7,500 and $25,000 these days. If you are paying more, you are paying too much.

References

Allen, M. (2002). The corporate university handbook: designing, managing, and growing a successful program. New York: AMACOM.

Designing Learning Technologies to Impact Behavioral Change

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Posted on 9th March 2010 by admin in Cognitive Science |Instructional Strategies

In an earlier post I discussed the question, “can e-learning change behavior?” The answer is yes, when designed correctly. Let’s expand that out a bit to all learning technologies and ask the question, “how do we design our learning technologies to increase the probability that behavioral change will occur?” Dr. Ruth Clark and Dr. Michael Allen have provided us with excellent practical ways to apply learning theory to the design of asynchronous self paced e-learning. For example, Dr. Michael Allen provides several design strategies to improve learning motivation. (Allen, 2003). Clark and Mayer (2008) provide practical design guidelines for increasing learner retention. Skinner provided us with the fundamental principles of external stimuli and it’s impact on behavior and created the first cognitive technology tool referred to as the teaching machine. Skinner’s teaching machine provided quizzing with immediate feedback which is the principle employed in most e-learning courses today. The scene in this video below was a future vision to the use of computers in the classroom to facilitate self-paced learning.

Triadic Reciprocal Determinism (Bandura, 1986)

For this article I would like to take a look at Bandura’s (1986) model for explaining behavior and consider how this model should influence the design of learning technologies, not just asynchronous self paced e-learning alone. Bandura (1986) developed a model that combines two competing models. Researchers and philosophers going back to Plato, have argued as to whether our actions are directly influenced by the internal person, our thoughts, emotions, and our soul as oppossed to Skinner who felt that our behaviors are primarily influenced by our external environment. “Triadic reciprocal determinism” suggests that both the internal and the external influence our actions or our behaviors. In addition, each side of the triad influences the other.

What this model suggests is that our internal self, (e.g. our personality traits, preferences, cognitive abilities, emotional intelligence) not only impact our actions but they also impact the environment. The environment includes spaces, objects and social networks. In turn, not only does the external environment influence our actions or behaviors but it also impacts our internal self. We learn from both our social networks and from the things in our external environment.

Some Real Life Examples

Let’s consider the action of purchasing a home. What influences behaviors in home purchases? The few things that come to my mind are, good schools, a quiet neighborhood, and proximity to family, friends and employment. My personality traits as well as my cognitive abilities influence these decisions. Someone else might prefer a warm climate or a lake side view. Listening to one of my favorite radio shows yesterday, “Car Talk”, a woman explained that she has just purchased 12 acres of rain forest in Panama and planned to build a home there with her children. That decision is a behavioral action that was clearly influenced by her personality, cognitive abilities, and by the environment itself.

How do behaviors reciprocally  influence the environment? In a former job I traveled on business to Mexico. I love to return to this one old town about 3 hours north of Mexico City, called Querétaro. I love the old historical city. On a return trip to Querétaro I was shocked to see on the drive from the airport to my hotel, a Walmart. The environment had changed because of purchasing behaviors of the people. That’s an over simplification of how retail stores pop up but you get the point. I am sure that you can consider many examples of how your home town has changed over time as a result of the changing behaviors in your community. Both Chicago and New York City have changed for the better over the past 20 years as a result of changing the environment. When streets were cleaned, buildings repaired, criminals arrested, behaviors change and personalities even change. People are happier.

Impact on Design

How should triadic reciprocal determinism influence the design of learning technologies? First, we should add to our language the term “learning environments.” What are we doing as learning and knowledge management professionals to take the learning environment into consideration? I am going to guess, that for many of you, the first thing that came into your mind was a corporate training facility. How has the corporate training room changed over the years? You know the answer. It has hardly changed in a century. The students sit in chairs either in rows or in a circle and look forward at a facilitator presenting at a white board, or a chalk board in our academic institutions.

If we consider environment (E) as a variable in the behavioral equation, how is learning impacted by keeping this variable constant? Now consider learning management systems. Do you have the picture in your mind? It is a lesson plan or syllabus posted on the web. That’s all it is. Rather then a paper based syllabus, we now have a web based syllabus. We are keeping the environment (E) constant. However, social systems like other systems will adapt on their own in order to reach equilibrium. If the environment (E) remains constant while the person (P) is changing, then the person will seek out ways to change the environment. We buy books on our own, not included in the syllabus. We decorate our office or cubicle (don’t get me started on this ridiculous technology) to conform to our personality. We use tools like Google and Wikipedia to customize our information search. We join formal and informal social networks to expand our ability to engage in dialogue and seek out expert advice. And we blog and contribute to wikis to exercise our minds and contribute to the body of knowledge in our new global environment.

As a result, what we should be considering is how can we as learning professionals, assist our learners to create an environment that is as flexible and changing as a person’s actions, in addition to their cognitive and emotional development. We need to take ourselves out of the old mental model of the classroom and the linear syllabus and start to create learning environments that allow for ongoing change. We need to merge social networks with learning objects while still providing guidance through coaching, mentoring and instructional design. I am not an extremist on this topic. We still need well designed learning objectives aligned with organizational objectives. Learner guidance is needed for the novice. However as the learner moves towards competence, their environment should change as they change.

Here’s one very practical thing you can do. Rather then design your curricula down to the specific task, take it up a level to a competency. Help people make the connection between the competency and the task but allow people to expand their learning to adjust to their unique environments and individual cognitive and emotional intelligence levels. For example, rather then teach a step by step tasks for writing a business proposal, teach the competency of how to design a business proposal based on best practices. Then allow people to apply the learning in their own way. What I am suggesting is a merging of behaviorism and constructivism. That sounds like a good title for my next blog entry.

References

Allen, M. W. (2003). Michael Allen’s guide to e-learning building interactive, fun, and effective learning programs for any company. New York: John Wiley.

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action a social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2008). E-learning and the science of instruction proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.