SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
Sticky E-Learning
November 12, 2007
E-learning that sticks means moving beyond the "e," and into training strategies that promise long-term impact.
By Paul Kim, Ph.D.
If you think the "e" in e-learning just stands for "electronic," you're out of date. Today, educational technologists, think of "e" in terms of efficient, effective, engaging, enabling, and empowering—what you need to achieve the ROI you're after. E'learning isn't about replicating hard copy manuals on the intranet, or putting training audio/video streams online.
True, online learning saves the time and expense of travel, and provides employees with convenient, "on-demand" access to training, but to significantly enhance workforce skills, change employee attitudes, and alter behavior, stay away from one-way transmission (video on demand or presenter-led Webinars). People do not change behavior by simply knowing or feeling something. Plus, they tend to rapidly forget information and feelings. We know people need time to process information, and that retention rates and behavioral changes decrease if training doesn't involve active response.
Empower learners to take action and change behavior by following e-learning with training, retraining, modeling, and remodeling. If an executive emphasizes the importance of compliance issues to multiple branch managers through Webinar sessions, or prerecorded videos, will branch managers change their behavior the next day? Will financial incentives or scheduled auditing do the trick? Instead, ask employees to respond during the learning session. Ask them if they really got it. It's not about end-of-course surveys, but real-time, active response. Ask them to organize important points, and be as explicit as possible in their responses to you. Ask them to identify objectives, principles, or business models onscreen. That way, you'll see whether they really get it.
For interactive online training, consider adopting an e-learning system, such as Vyew, that enables employees to respond to information, rather than just sitting in. Vyew allows learning materials to be augmented collaboratively by online participants in real time, and shared best practices can be archived and reused in future sessions for retraining. All real-time interactions can be represented and organized visually to enhance retention.
E-learning should be initiated by good learning design, and accommodated by a training environment that encourages active response. Learning and assessment take place in real time, with every step of the learning experience explicit to both instructor and participants. Such a model supports an individual learner's cognitive style and learning pace.
Web-based training will continue to evolve, but without a focus on learnability, it will be an online event, not e-learning.
Dr. Paul Kim is the chief technology officer at Stanford University School of Education. He is an expert in educational entrepreneurship, higher education accreditation, e-learning technology and assessment for the K-20 education space. Dr. Kim also is vice president of information technology for Vyew, a provider of visual collaboration platforms. He has a Ph.D. in educational technology and currently leads various technology research and development projects and teaches graduate-level courses related to e-learning and for-profit education ventures at Stanford University.
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Training Index |
|
|
