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(Appeaing in the latest issue of "training Australia Magazine", Volume 5 Number 3. Issued June 2005)
IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL THEY COME?
New Australian E-Learning Technologies
by Mickey Clark
Managing Director
The Learning Group Pty Ltd
A new phrase arrived in our e-learning learning lexicon in the past few years – "take-up rates". It’s a curious phrase – ostensibly being the measure by which employees take up the opportunity to learn online. It’s a wonderfully suggestive phrase as well – implying that a company’s online learning portfolio is on offer, and its value can be judged by how motivated the employees are to find and take advantage of it. You can just about hear a caterer in the background: "They must have loved the tiger prawns today – the take-up rate was 100 percent by 12.30!"
Unfortunately, most e-learning courses – whether product training, orientation, regulatory, IT or skills-based training – do not have the immediate appeal of a wonderfully juicy tiger prawn at lunch. This reality is – predictably – to the dismay of the business, which has just forked over tens of thousands of dollars to fund the training.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH E-LEARNING TAKE-UP RATES?
They may be low for several reasons – some are employee-related, some course-related.
1st – EMPLOYEES:
Employees cannot reach the e-learning course easily or don’t have the time. The link to the training competes with a mountain of other important corporate links. If they are time-poor, employees find that e-learning slips down their "to-do" lists and is sometimes never got around to. Employees do not know what courses they need to take. The course may not have been effectively rolled out, or perhaps left to managers to communicate its necessity to employees.
2nd – COURSES:
Some e-learning courses are too long and boring. They effectively condense the content of a workshop into several online hours, and do not adequately challenge employees – often doing a poor job of getting them to apply what they are learning to workplace situations relevant to their jobs. Some courses are simply things to "get through" and are not sustained. For most employees, a course is something to take once. There is rarely any follow-up – either by a manager, or a follow-up course – to ensure the training material has been digested and has had a lasting impact. In effect, the training material has fallen off the employee’s radar. As a result, many e-learning courses simply don’t create sustained behavioural change in employees. And hasn’t that always been our Great Hope for training? It seems there is reason for hope, however. Australian developers have built next-generation e-learning tools, designed to increase employee take-up rates.
"PUSHING" LEARNING TO EMPLOYEES
First, why not change the paradigm and "push" the training to employees, rather than wait for them to come and get it? These Australian technologies, for example, use standard email technology to "push" learning to employees as a kind of "learning mail". These new e-learning technologies are designed to keep training on an employee’s radar throughout the year and save L&D administration time by generating automated reminder and follow-up emails.
CREATING A SUSTAINED LEARNING EXPERIENCE
The second characteristic of these new e-learning tools encourages what might be called "sustained learning". A corporate training colleague of mine once said something I considered profound: "Employees love to learn when they don’t know they’re learning." To me, the statement meant that training that didn’t look like training was a good thing. First-generation e-learning courseware is certainly training, but essentially it took the model of instructor-led training, and replicated it online. We have "courses", which are sometimes quite large, generally with a start and end point, and "assessments" which quantify whether an employee gets it – and so on. Employees take the courses and two weeks later often struggle to remember what they were about, much less what they learned. The new e-learning technologies break the mould by managing smaller interactive learning objects, and stitching them together to form a more sustained learning experience throughout an employee’s year.
Think of it this way. If you can "budget" your employees to train in EEO Awareness for 60 minutes a year, it is arguably a more fruitful learning experience if they encounter smaller, more sustained EEO awareness training throughout the year. To create a sustained learning experience, these new technologies provide employees with quick bursts of learning experiences throughout the year – initially, perhaps, a 45-minute course followed by a 5-minute reinforcement case study, a 5-minute interactive refresher, and a 5-minute quiz, all delivered at 3-month intervals. Basic adult-learning principles advise us this is more likely to lead to a sustained application of the relevant learning principles – in this case EEO – throughout the year. Using these sorts of next-generation e-learning technologies, we have managed to capture an employee’s attention four times during the year, and we have "pushed" the training to them, rather than expecting them to find it and have a single, forgettable, learning experience.
The argument goes, you get higher employee take-up, better retention, better application in the workplace, and the organisation gets more behavioural change for its training dollar. Perhaps in the near future, when you build online learning, your employees won’t need to come – it will be part of their everyday work existence.
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