Chapter 6
Where Does e-Learning Fit?
If (and it's an important if) there's a performance problem, then, in most cases, the problem can be addressed effectively with learning. Instruction and consequent learning cannot overcome performance barriers such as the lack of necessary equipment and resources. It will not change behavior when there are greater rewards for continuing current practices. It will not change behavior when the focus is simply on providing information, such as extoling the damages caused by smoking, poor diet, or lack of exercise. Performance improvement requires a combination of knowledge, performance practice and rewards.
But whatever business you're in, whatever content and outcome behaviors you're dealing with, if better outcomes can be achieved through enhanced skills, e-learning can probably have a valuable and cost-effective impact.
Of course, e-learning can be effective only if it is designed in ways that address the need. It's an obvious truth, but too often e-learning's capabilities are used simply to present information as shown in Figure 6.1 regardless of the need and desired outcome.
Figure 6.1 Misaligned instructional strategies.
Fitting Strategy to Targeted Outcomes
We need to take quite a few situational parameters into account in order to select an appropriate e-learning strategy, but even without digging deeply, it's critical at least to get the broad strokes right.
Consider simply the primary outcomes of (1) preparing learners to follow instructions (as in preparation to use Electronic Performance Support Systems), (2) preparing learners to perform without real-time aids, and (3) helping learners become expert performers. We find providing information is adequate only for the first—the outcome of following instructions. Even then, as we'll see, it's rarely sufficient.
- Practice is necessary if people are expected to remember and perform tasks that have any amount of complexity, which is likely to be the case if we're undertaking development of e-learning.
- Challenges with simulated outcomes are optimal for creating expertise. Experts not only know how to handle common cases but also are able to extrapolate to new and unpracticed situations effectively.
It's important to note that the outcomes listed in Figure 6.1 are simply points along a continuum. For example, between Remember Instructions and Perform Expertly is an important range of skills. In this region, we'd likely find situational assessment and decision-making skills required.
Although using this rudimentary framework could help improve effectiveness, there's much more to be considered. But let's continue to keep this as simple as possible.
The nature of the task and prior preparation of the learner are important to take into consideration. If the task is simple and safe for the learner, then the e-learning strategies suggested in Figure 6.2 are fitting. But if the task is a complex one for the learner or involves risk, such as physical harm or costs, then instruction needs to borrow from the more powerful strategies to the right as shown in Figure 6.3.
Figure 6.2 Adapting e-learning strategies to primary performance outcomes.
Figure 6.3 Appropriate e-learning strategies considering (1) desired outcomes, (2) nature of the task, and (3) learner readiness.
So, for example, if the desired training outcome is simply to prepare learners to follow available instructions but the task involves considerable risk, then a good measure of practice will be essential.
Note that a task that's simple and/or safe for one individual may be complex or risky for another person with less experience. It can be very important to adapt instructional strategies to the level of readiness of the individual learner. And this is something e-learning can do readily when designed and built to do so.
Type of Content
When we talk of instructional content, we need to focus on the type of outcome skills the courseware is designed to develop. When addressing the question of where e-learning fits, does e-learning work with the major classes of skills?
Cognitive Skills
Procedures, facts, and conceptual knowledge are all natural types of content for e-learning. These are vital components of learning almost anything. From food preparation to accounting, from aircraft navigation to marketing techniques, from quality manufacturing to drug abuse prevention, e-learning can help build cognitive skills.
Soft Skills
Sometimes it's thought that soft skills, such as management, leadership, interpersonal relationships, client management, and dealing with upset customers, are beyond the reach of e-learning. Yet, experienced e-learning program designers know that these are, in fact, areas in which e-learning has been singularly effective. Pioneering work done by the Internal Revenue Service to teach agents to deal with upset taxpayers, for example, and work done at Carnegie Mellon University (Andersen, Cavalier, and Covey, 1996) to teach ethics has demonstrated how uniquely powerful computer-supported learning environments can be for learning soft skills. We'll examine some sample applications of this later.
Psychomotor Skills
There are, of course, skills that need physical practice. e-Learning is probably not the best way to learn to play the drums or to hit a baseball, yet these activities have critical knowledge components, such as knowing how to read a musical score or knowing when to bunt. Knowledge components can be taught through e-learning very effectively, as can various mental imaging techniques in which learners practice improved performance by visualizing and imagining it with little if any physical movement. These techniques are surprisingly able to improve performance (Korn and Sheikh, 1994). Don't overlook the opportunity to use e-learning as an appropriate and effective part of a training program for behaviors that are primarily based on motor skills.
Interface devices and sensors are now being developed for application in various simulators and virtual reality systems and to assist persons with disabilities as well as recovering medical patients. Striving for perfection, some golfers and Olympic athletes analyze their performance using such technologies (Sandweiss and Wolf, 1985). These devices are rapidly becoming available for use with e-learning applications designed to teach a great variety of psychomotor skills. It's clear the applicability of e-learning will expand ever wider as our experience grows and technologies develop.
You Have Choices
You don't have to live with e-learning programs that don't work. You don't have to pretend your e-learning application is good when you know it isn't or see no evidence of its benefit. You have options. Because a good e-learning program is a cost-effective way to get people to do the right things at the right times, it can help achieve vital business goals. Cloaking poor training with an on-the job training cover-up (whether it's done consciously or not) neither fixes the problem nor achieves the many positive competitive outcomes that might otherwise be possible. And it costs plenty. This shouldn't be a difficult choice because there are reliable ways to produce effective learning experiences. Going about it the right way won't be a risk of replacing one ineffective program with another. But you do need to go about it the right way.
Smart e-Learning
There are critical and often overlooked fundamentals to being smart about e-learning (see Table 6.1). When the goal is not just to get some training in place but rather to change defined behaviors, you're off to a good start. Then, you have to accept that good e-learning applications, while far less expensive than poor e-learning applications, are still an investment. Good training isn't cheap in absolute dollars, and the major expense for e-learning is up front for design and development. This is why the rich can get richer and the poor do get poorer. The rich can more easily afford the up-front investment and enjoy the long-term benefits. With smart instructional design, however, good courseware is less expensive than you might think.
Table 6.1 A Smart Approach to e-Learning
| Critical Elements | Critical Because |
| Goal is to change behavior | It's easy to assume that e-learning is only about teaching things, but success isn't the result when people know the right things to do, yet continue to do the wrong things. Both the e-learning and the environment in which it is applied must be designed to enable, facilitate, and reward good performance in order to achieve maximum success. |
| Adequate financial investment | While the return on an investment in a good e-learning program can be incredible, it takes an up-front investment in design and development. Inadequate investment can severely reduce the ROI, even making it negative. (Don't go with the lowest-price option unless you're sure that what you'll get will meet your success criteria.) |
| Partnership between business managers and e-learning developers | If business managers abdicate their critical role in the process of achieving needed human performance, it's much less likely that e-learning will succeed. Training designers need a continuing partnership with management to know exactly what behaviors are needed, to understand the challenges trainees will face on the job, and to provide post-training support and incentives. |
| Partnership with subject-matter experts | There are many ways to inadequately fund e-learning projects and thereby ensure their failure. One is to provide inadequate access to subject-matter experts (SMSs)—the people who really know what behaviors are needed and what must be learned to enable people to perform them. Almost continuous availability to SMEs is required to ensure a training program will be worth the investment. Note that SMEs include not only the people who perform tasks being taught or teach courses and write manuals, but also the people who supervise operations and know exactly what their teams need to do. |
| Partnership with learners | Learners should not be the blind victims of whatever instructional approaches experts think would be effective. Learners can be helpful throughout the entire development process, from definition of what needs to be taught, through the design process, and into the final evaluation. |
To be sure, neither the rich nor the poor benefit from just doing something, from just going through the motions. If you don't focus intently on changing behaviors, there will be no winners, and e-learning will look like a frivolous undertaking. Even with little to spend, using what's available wisely to address key behaviors can make a big impact. If you have little to spend, you can ill afford to waste what you have.
Over $51 billion was projected to be spent on e-learning in 2014 (Docebo, 2014). The likelihood is great that $25.5 billion of that will be wasted. If money is available, it will be spent, but it will achieve little of importance if we stay on the same path most are on today with their e-learning applications. You don't have to take that path, rich or poor.
Partnerships
It takes careful planning, organization, and support to build and deliver good training solutions, regardless of the means of delivery. Design of successful e-learning systems can be done in-house or contracted to outside developers, but neither approach is successful enough to justify the costs without the involvement of management, subject-matter experts, and learners throughout the process. Many projects fail to reach their needed potential because these supportive people are not available enough or are not even asked to participate. If you're planning e-learning development for your organization, be sure to make arrangements for adequate participation by representatives of each group.
Management Participation
Organizational leaders may provide financing for training development and assume their involvement is done, but this is often a serious mistake. Management needs to provide not only the financial support but also continue to help clarify the vision, define success criteria, and provide a performance-centric environment.
Achieving an organization's vision depends on human performance. If everyone understands the goal, including those developing the training and support systems expected to help deliver critical performance, the probability of reaching the goal is much higher.
The criteria for success translate portions of the overall vision into specific performance requirements. The larger vision gives designers a vital context within which to work and to motivate learning. Everyone needs to be clear that success won't be achieved if the e-learning program doesn't result in specific levels of performance required by and emanating from the overall vision, and that this is what the effort is all about.
Finally, financial support is only one kind of support that management needs to provide. Although financing is critical, it's insufficient by itself to ensure success. Behavioral patterns are established in response to instructions, rewards, effort, available resources, perceived risk, observed behavior in others, team values, and so on. Being able to perform as management would prefer does not guarantee employees will be willing to perform in that way. Management must understand that change is difficult, that there is inertia behind existing behavior patterns. Change will not be accomplished unless management provides strong intentional support for change.
A visual is helpful. Management is responsible for one of the pillars needed for a successful e-learning program but the project still needs the skills of an on-target design and development team to turn the vision, criteria, and support into a successful investment in e-learning (Figure 6.4).
Figure 6.4 Success requires management support and performance-focused design.
The design team's challenge is to provide a strong matching pillar. After defining the behavioral objectives that will get learners ready to perform correctly and adequately, designers focus on creating ways to ensure high levels of learner motivation. They then make sure that the enabling instructional content is clear and accurate, as a base from which to evolve meaningful and memorable learning experiences (Figure 6.5).
Figure 6.5 Bridge over troubled e-learning.
Both pillars are needed to achieve success in e-learning, although designers often struggle for success without much support from management. What they achieve is often commendable given the circumstances. Management, in turn, needs designers who will strongly resist building superficial solutions, provide needed insights about instruction, learning, and human performance, and lead development through a participative process that effectively involves all needed people and resources.
Subject-Matter Expert Participation
Obviously, subject-matter expertise is important, but what is surprising to many is that this expertise isn't just needed at the beginning of an e-learning development project; it is needed throughout. As application prototypes are built and reviewed, for example, needs and opportunities arise for additional content and revisions. If experts aren't available, or aren't available without considerable advance notice and scheduling, projects suffer—sometimes fatally.
Interactivity can be viewed as a dialogue between the learner and the e-learning application. The e-learning application represents the combined subject-matter, instructional, and media expertise of the design and development team. The application becomes, if you will, an expert mentor with whom the learner interacts.
Interactive events evolve through the process of design and development (see Chapter 14 for details on the process). As they evolve, the design team looks for ways to make the learning experience as beneficial as possible. This frequently involves searching for ways learners can be allowed to make instructive mistakes. As this occurs, many possible learner behaviors are identified, quite often including a number that were not originally anticipated. Appropriate responses to these behaviors can be provided only if subject-matter experts are available to specify appropriate consequences and feedback. For example, a design team might ask, “What would happen in real life if an employee accidently held the on/off button down while turning the ignition key instead of just pressing and releasing the button first?” To which a subject-matter expert might respond, “The whole thing would blow up, and we'd have to evacuate the north side of the city.” In that moment, a potential behavioral mistake would have come to light and a learning opportunity would have been born.
Learner Participation
Many e-learning development teams seek the participation of prospective learners only near the end of the project. Learners are invited to use the application so that functional problems can be observed, ambiguities and problematic elements can be corrected, and learning effectiveness can be measured. Unfortunately, this is too late in the process to gain insight on structuring learning events and or to get input on shaping the experience as a whole.
All too often, organizations are ready to speak for their people—including their learners—to make assumptions about what they will find interesting, what they do and do not understand, where their learning problems will be, and so on. When learners are put in a situation in which they can contribute their perspectives, many such assumptions may be disproved. Just asking potential and recent learners some basic questions often reveals important information for design that would otherwise have been missed.
Beyond answering initial questions, learners can make vital contributions when asked to review prototypes and interact with evolving e-learning applications, even if they are quite rough and quite incomplete.
The Takeaways
Because of its interactive nature and ability to integrate multimedia, e-learning is suitable to training a wide range of subjects, including cognitive and soft skills and even some essential components of physical skills.
Developing optimal e-learning applications involves sensitivity to many perspectives and values. It involves the interplay of knowledge, technology, art, and design. It's not at all like sending out for a pizza—listing a few parameters and getting a hot product delivered to your door. The effectiveness of the involvement and partnership of all key players will determine the ultimate success of any project. Unfortunately, this means management needs to be available, just as do subject-matter experts, designers, recent learners, and some prospective learners.