e-Learning Leadership Blog

A Thanksgiving Tradition: Preparing an e-Learning Feast

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

Holidays are often a celebration of traditions, and in that spirit we’re doing something a little different this week with the blog.  One of the most popular posts of the last year was this one I published last Thanksgiving; re-reading it reminded me of some important considerations in creating the best e-learning possible and I hope it will do the same for you.
 
And be sure to appreciate your family, friends, and pleasures in your life on this long holiday weekend.

Happy Thanksgiving and safe travels!

Preparing an e-Learning Feast

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

As we all get ready for joining with family and friends for the Thanksgiving holidays and prepare for the big meal, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the endless advice on TV and radio about how to prepare the perfect feast.  As it turns out, so much of that advice can easily be turned to planning and preparing the perfect e-learning.

Plan Ahead and Allow Enough Time

People so often underestimate what it takes to put together a piece of e-learning.  Before you begin, create a realistic timeline, plan for how you’ll have the right resources in place, and conduct a thorough analysis.  Last minute changes, shortcuts, and substitutions almost always end up costing more and end up with an inferior end product.

Know Who’s Coming

Be mindful of your learners.  Try to find out as much as you can about them before they arrive.  Understand what they like, where they are coming from, how long they will study, what they don’t like.  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push your learners in new directions, but it will help you be most successful in creating a satisfying experience.

Get the Right Sized Turkey

Tradition suggests that big is always better.  By experience we know that isn’t true but it is so easy to fall into the trap.  Don’t try to prepare as much content as you possibly can and then be surprised that it’s more than learners can process.  Sometimes a very small, focused bit of instruction is actually a lot more satisfying than a comprehensive all-encompassing curriculum.  There’s a lot of evidence that smaller bits of learning spread evenly over time is more effective than the same content presented at once.

Don’t Overstuff the Bird

Many a good learning opportunity is squandered simply because too much content is forced into a learning situation that can’t support it.  A learner can only process, practice, and review a limited amount of information in a single session.  Even though the mechanics of an e-learning structure can hold an enormous quantity of content, in the learner it often creates short-term stupefaction with long-term insignificance.

Don’t Be Surprised When No One Eats the Brussels Sprouts

The more e-learning you create, the more you’ll know what works with your learners and what doesn’t—but only if you actually pay attention to users.  It is easy to keep on doing what we’ve been told to do even when we know that no one’s buying it.  For example, a hallmark of many designs is to start with a screen listing the objectives.  We know that communicating objectives enhances learning.  But that can’t happen if the learner doesn’t bother to read them.  This doesn’t mean don’t serve up the objectives; rather it means figure out how to communicate them in a way that learners actually comprehend.

You Don’t Have to Make those Canned Green Beans with the Cream of Mushroom Soup

So many people build e-learning by just recreating what they’ve seen others do: list the objectives, give a pretest, deliver content, insert knowledge checks, display a summary, and deliver a post test.  It’s a perfectly functional structure, but it isn’t particularly good.  And it’s utterly forgettable.  With each e-learning project, push yourself to make sure that each element is there because it serves a specific purpose, not simply to implement it because it’s something the organization has always done.

Go Easy on the Marshmallows on the Sweet Potatoes

Don’t decide your content is boring and the only way to make it palatable is to hide it behind elements of no lasting value—superficial animations, misapplied media, or irrelevant distractions.  Too often designers completely derail the real value in the content and distract the learner with elements that draw attention but actually make it harder to grow meaningfully.

Try Something Unexpected—Like Putting Horseradish in the Cranberry Sauce

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and try something new that might enhance motivation, increase engagement, and broaden the learner’s expectations.  Everything might not always work the first time, but it’s necessary to introduce variety and delight into your e-learning.

Set A Pretty Table

Experience matters.  Before learners read a single word of content in an e-learning piece, they’ve already made judgmentsabout the experience they’re starting based on immediate first impressions.  The look, feel, and visual appeal of the context surrounding the instruction can be invaluable in creating the conditions for effective learning to occur.

Plan to Use the Leftovers

Too often designers plan an e-learning lesson and make no accommodation for how the learner is going to benefit from the lesson moving forward.  Don’t be afraid to create take-aways, such as workbooks or performance support documents that learners can use after the e-learning is complete.  Or follow up with a second short review module (or even simple email challenges) a couple days later to extend the impact of the experience.  Your learners will thank you for it.

If you take care of these things, everyone will enjoy the feast!

The Progression of Award-winning Irises and e-Learning

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

Any of you who’ve been in one of my classes have probably seen this photo of my Mom in our field of irises.  I spent part of this weekend replanting a portion of this iris garden, accomplishing a project I’ve been planning for years.  The American Iris Society has given an award, the Dykes Medal, nearly every year since 1928 for the best iris new iris cultivar.  I’m a freak about collecting sets of things and so naturally I’ve made it a goal to get all the Dykes Medal winners; now that my collection is nearly complete, I’m putting out a garden exclusively of winners in which they are planted in chronological order.  As I was arranging the plants in order, I was thinking of the varieties and marveling at how consistently these represent an almost unbroken progression of improvement in clarity of color, substance, size, bud count, and flower form. Except for a few exceptions, there’s a very clear tradition of consistent improvement over time.  You could pretty much use the Dykes Medal winners as a ruler to place almost any other iris into the decade it was introduced simply because progress has happened in iris hybridization with such regularity.

Naturally, it made me think about the progression over time of improvement in e-learning.  I’ve been involved in designing and building e-learning for nearly 30 years, having started out in graduate school at the PLATO Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In many ways, some of those lessons created on that somewhat primitive platform 30-40 years ago still rank among the very best e-learning I’ve ever encountered. Of course there have been gems of training created consistently through the years since then on a wide range of platforms, but there also continues to be a significant amount of nearly worthless e-learning that seems to be churned out at the same pace.  I would bet that a random sample of e-learning lessons created in 1990, 2000, and 2010 would all probably represent nearly the same range of good and bad e-learning in terms of the learning experience accomplished.  The tools and media might give some indication of when the piece was built, but I don’t think there would be an identifiable trend toward consistently better instruction.

How can this be? Shouldn’t the bulk of e-learning be demonstrably better after 30 years?  It’s perplexing. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has defended the typical page-turner-content-dump-with-inserted-trivia-questions style of e-learning as good training, yet at the same time, the tools people regularly choose to use to create e-learning are primarily geared toward making it very convenient (even irresistible) to create exactly this kind of training.  In fact, it seems like the one universal feature of authoring systems is an automatic PowerPoint Import option.

What’s lacking, I think, is a shared agreement across the industry (among designers, tool companies, IT departments, and management) that learning and performance change are ultimately the measures of e-learning success. For too many organizations, simple production or output of lessons seems to be the goal. I understand the desire for rapid and cheap e-learning process, but there is little value to churning out lessons quickly if they don’t facilitate learning.  Of course there will be students that will learn under the worst of circumstances; and there will also be students who will fail to learn even under the best of circumstances. This conflict is what makes educational assessment so challenging and makes it difficult to pinpoint precise weaknesses.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear we’re not going to make progress until it’s as easy to create interactivity as it is to churn out thoughtless content-centered approaches. The paradox is that I firmly believe that it is the instructional design that creates value in e-learning, but as long as the development tools restrict the design ideas so severely, e-learning quality indirectly becomes a question of getting the right tools in the hands of designers.

The Road to e-Learning Success

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

This weekend I rode my bicycle in the Moonlight Ramble, a 19-mile midnight bike ride through the streets of St. Louis.  This was the 47^th year for the ride and I’m told that typically as many as 15,000 riders participate; I’ll have to take their word for it as there were too many to count!  While I’m glad I rode the route, I couldn’t help but wonder what motivated so many people to come out for an event, that in so many ways, was not really that enjoyable.  It was uncomfortably crowded, it didn’t get going until almost 1:30 in the morning, and the route wasn’t really very interesting. Yet 15,000 people were motivated to enthusiastically finish it.

We’re faced with a similar issue in training—and specifically with e-learning: how to create motivation in learners to do something that they probably wouldn’t choose to do on their own.  This event reminded me of some simple, cheap, and powerful things that we too often fail to do when implementing e-learning courses.

• Create curricula and courses of study with an identity.  Call it the “Moonlight Ramble” and people want to go; call it “19 miles through city streets in the dark” and it sounds like punishment.  Just like “The XYZ Leadership Passport” can be something recognizable, unlike 19 undifferentiated lessons on an LMS menu. Create a logo or graphic that becomes a visual and immediately-recognizable identifier of each course.


• Engage in advance marketing.  I think trainers are far too apologetic about training events—leading with the message “We’re sorry, but you’re required to do this” instead of “We are so pleased to be making this opportunity available to you.”  Distribute promotional emails, plan registration events, create partnerships with internal or external co-sponsors.


• Engage the community. e-Learning can be isolating, but it need not be.  Create teams, create a community of simultaneous learners with discussion boards, encourage support networds, celebrate completion with public recognition.


• Provide tangible evidence of completion.  All sorts of things—some free, some costly-- can be used to publicly recognize effort: a printed certificate, a program-logo coffee mug, listing on a hall-of-fame, access to a preferred parking for a week, invitation to a Friday lunch cook-out, a gift card to a local restaurant.  The actual value of the recognition is not nearly as critical as the cultural value your organization places on it.  But it is really so much easier to focus and use that attention productively with some tangible symbol.

So while you continue to strive for improving the actual instructional design of your e-learning, don’t forget that there a lot of things that have comparatively little to do with actual instruction, but everything to do with achieving success within your organization.

The Best Content for e-Learning

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

People often wonder how to choose the best content for e-learning.  It would be great if there were an easy formula to apply to provide guidance.  Several possible answers that come to mind:   “Everything is suitable for e-learning;”  “Nothing is suitable for e-learning;” or “There’s no straightforward answer.”  And all these answers might be correct.

First off, you have to first articulate why you are considering applying e-learning in the first place.  There are a number of reasons, and the reasons that are driving your organization will likely determine what content should go onto e-learning.  I’m going to list of few of these motivators and some of the reasons for and against e-learning.  Your actual decision, I think, would rest on how you balance these factors.

Cost Saving

A lot of organizations seek to cut costs by implementing e-learning.  But good e-learning (poor e-learning, too, for that matter) can be relatively expensive to develop compared to other forms of training.  Any cost savings is going to be realized through the volume of delivery—the cumulative savings in class time, teachers and other instructional resources, classroom real estate, travel, printing expenses, etc.  So e-learning makes sense when you have an extraordinarily high number of people to be trained on a topic.

But on the other hand, sometimes the cost of delivery that you are striving to reduce is really is a result of having an extraordinarily LOW number of students for a particular topic.  The cost of offering classes and certifying instructors for training that needs to be done for only a few individuals over the course of several years could very well dictate that e-learning makes huge sense then.

Currency of Content

Many people point to the immediacy of e-learning as a great selling point.  Instruction can be updated immediately, and learners all around the world have immediate access to latest ideas, without waiting for new materials to be printed and distributed.  So this suggests that content that changes frequently is a good target for e-learning.

But on the other hand, unless you are able to invest in sophisticated, data driven interactivity models, e-learning can be extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming to update.  If narration and video are involved then another layer of complexity is added, which may suggest that if the content is going to be changing frequently, then it may not be a good target for e-learning.

Knowledge Delivery

When learners have great diversity in background and prior knowledge, you can use e-learning as a leveling device to bring learners to a consistent level so that instructor-led instruction will have an informed pool to address and classroom activities can focus on higher-level skills and applications of the knowledge.
But on the other hand, it is exceptionally difficult to use e-learning effectively if your goal is to dump content on learners and expect it to have some effect. e-Learning requires meaningful activity in the design, and simplistic reading comprehension testing typical of this approach accomplishes very little.  In practice, this strategy also fails to take advantage of a primary strength of e-learning:  adaptive instruction.  Major instructional opportunities are lost when the focus is to tell everybody exactly the same thing, rather than the more useful approach of telling each student exactly what he/she needs.

Skill Building

The individualization of performance that e-learning can provide is ideal for practice and application, so a better strategy, in many ways, is to use e-learning for problem solving and application topics.  In a classroom or in any group structure, it is very difficult to provide sufficient practice opportunities and individualized feedback as learners struggle with complex challenges, or even when learning simply requires extensive rehearsal with feedback.
But on the other hand, this kind of e-learning, in general, requires a less dictated approach to design and also flexibility in use of development tools that is out of the reach of some designers or (foolishly, I think) restricted in corporate procedures.

“OK, but you still haven’t given me a clear answer.”

There are plenty of other factors, too, but the interesting thing to note is that only some of them actually have to do with instruction.  A lot just have to do with cost/benefit business decisions.

Now I know you’re thinking, “This isn’t helping.”  There are simply too many, often contradictory, factors to suggest a simple solution.  And as long as tools continue to dictate so much of what actually gets built, we are going to be in a position where too often the real potential is lost due to operational constraints.  And sometimes one factor will completely trump another.  For example, an ideal training experience might require one-on-one personal consultation; but if 20,000 people need to be trained within two weeks, the right decision very-well might be to create a less-effective online strategy that will at least reach the people (or else decide that the quality of the experience is more important and scrap the idea of putting it on line). No one can make that decision for you, but as the old song goes: “Somethng’s gotta give.”

In a perfect world, I would say that e-learning is most uniquely-effective for teaching skills heavy in internalizing and applying concepts in more open-ended environments that require critical thinking, experimentation, exploration, self-assessment, and individualized feedback.  To achieve this, though, requires investment in instructional design, media excellence, and development tools.  I would also say that the least effective e-learning I’ve encountered is that which is limited to content delivery with interactivity focused entirely on immediate recall (unless, of course, the goal of the instruction really is strictly one of memorization—like memorizing three-letter city airport codes) and simplistic testing and scoring.  But I have seen e-learning lessons across the entire spectrum of learning that you could make the case for being the perfect example of e-learning, given the constraints in time, budget, skills, or technology that needed to be balanced.