E-learning for the Future Workforce

By Wendell H. Laidley, Managing Director of New Media Learning

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Derek Bok, former Harvard University President

The recession of 2009 is delivering serious messages. Free lunches are now gone for good. The bankruptcy of General Motors shows even America’s once largest and most profitable business can fail. Unlike Enron, WorldCom and the banks, GM did not fail for fraud or excess risk but for inability to survive economically in an increasingly competitive world market. The world ahead will be not only more productive but also more competitive and less forgiving of laggards.

In that more competitive world, employers and employees will need to respond ever more effectively to survive economically. Employers will be permitted fewer failures. They will be increasingly vigilant to root out non-productive functions, leading to more out-sourcing of non-mission-critical functions. Employees will find fewer career opportunities as organization structures flatten and fewer middle management jobs remain, and will increasingly change employers to advance. The slogan that “employees not actively contributing to increasing revenues or decreasing costs are expendable” will increasingly rule the workplace.

What has this to do with e-learning? A lot. E-learning offers opportunities for learning when and where it’s needed to learn and grow in the ever-changing workplace. E-learning enables employers to provide that learning at less cost than any other way known. This powerful new tool is arriving just in time for the new economy of increasing worldwide competition and greater mobility between jobs than ever before.

Advantages of e-learning

Why is e-learning better than other forms of instruction? The primary factors are:
• availability on demand, anywhere, anytime
• proven greater learning productivity than instructor-led training
     o one-third more learning per hour on new material
     o up to 13 times faster where prior learning may exist
• self-paced: go faster, slower, forward, backward, anywhere you want, or pause
• enrichment: choose more depth where you want or need it
• all the power and flexibility of the Internet, with graphics, video, audio, whichever is most appropriate, or all in combination

What is e-learning?

Have you ever learned anything from the Internet? That’s e-learning. The main difference is that most Internet websites are selling something, but e-learning uses all the same tools to enhance education. E-learning will help employees of the future from the day they join a new employer throughout their careers. They will receive their orientation kit on a personalized thumb drive with instructions and links to the on-line orientation program, which is updated every time something new happens or someone new arrives and is available on demand so any staff member, new or otherwise, can find specific information or learn more about the organization when needed. All it takes is for someone to organize that information and upload it in accessible format to the organization’s website. Once that’s done it’s available to everyone everywhere, from new recruit (or even potential job applicant) to interested retiree. The instructional designer gathers and organizes the information in easily accessible ways and the learner does the rest. E-learning enables learners to access the information they need when and where they need it, all at their own personal pace and convenience. Newspapers and magazines may be in trouble but the information they and other media produce is not, and all that information is and will be available from their archives at our fingertips on the Internet. Information needed by employees about their workplaces and their roles in those workplaces will be available on-line. In many organizations the responsibility for collecting and posting this information has not yet been allocated so it’s still available for the motivated Human Resources executive, but over time it will be split among Human Resources, Public Relations, Chief Learning Officer (CLO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO), whoever is most motivated and takes the initiative.

Does it work?

The validity of e-learning has attracted controversy before, and that continues. Proponents and naysayers claim all manner of benefits and problems, but research by the U.S. Institute for Defense Analysis reports that e-learning reduces learning time by one-third or conversely increases the amount of learning in a given time by one-third. That assumes no prior learning on the topic but when prior learning is considered e-learning can reduce the learning time by up to 13 times.

Good e-learning needs carefully organized instructional design so learners can study the instructional material at their own pace and following their own individual path. Teachers at primary and secondary schools can reasonably assume their students have approximately the same level of prior knowledge on new topics. Not all school students learn at the same rate, but children, unlike adult learners, attend school for social and physical development as well as intellectual. Prior knowledge and learning rate differences among school children are less disruptive and distracting than for adults at work, who have much wider disparities of prior knowledge and learning rates. Their need to know is their personal responsibility and they don’t want to spend any more time than necessary to learn what they need. For adults, time is money.

Since both the pace and path of e-learning are controlled by the learner, e-learning is able to serve the wide range of adult needs when it is well designed. Just as this article enables each reader to decide personally whether to open the links to hyperlinked topics, well designed e-learning incorporates enrichment via hyperlink or elective supplementary content that can be accessed by learners according to their individual choices. Thus good e-learning enables learners with prior knowledge or less need for detail to advance more quickly through material while others may want or need more time and/or detail. E-learning frees each learner from the single pace set by the instructor in classroom training which may be too fast for some and too slow for others. Even in this article if you followed the link above to New York Times columnist David Brooks and were interested to learn more about him you could enter “David Brooks, NY Times” into your Google Desktop search box and Google would give you a list of links, the first of which would be this link to his New York Times opinion page. If you don’t know what Google Desktop is, you can enter it into Google’s search box and the third entry will be a Wikipedia page describing it, or you can learn about it on Google’s Home page.

The point of these links is to demonstrate the enormous power of e-learning to make information available to you from your personal computer whenever you are connected to the Internet.

Now back to e-learning. In summary it frees learners from the constraints of group instruction in a classroom, just as books do, but much more than books it enables instant access to the entire resources of the Internet, all in real time where updates made seconds earlier are instantly available when the next visitor accesses those pages.

Training for the future

Advocates and providers of workforce training will need to become thoroughly conversant with this powerful learning tool because it offers exceptional opportunities for delivering just-in-time learning whenever and wherever needed by the workforce of the future where there will be pressure for everyone to have access to skills upgrading training on an on-going basis.

Workplace training has too often made invalid assumptions that employees exposed to training are then “trained” and therefore competent. This assumption may have some validity for compliance training where there is no proficiency test to measure how much has been learned. But this is much less the case with skill training. In compliance training where public law mandates that employees be “trained” on legal and behavioral topics such as sexual harassment and employment law, the employer may be entitled to the assumption that the provision of the training is all it can do and then adult employees are responsible for obeying the law, just as drivers are responsible for obeying traffic laws. This is the affirmative defense concept where an employer may be relieved of responsibility for misconduct of an employee if the employee has been trained, such as through sexual harassment training, even if the employee has not changed behavior.

Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. In California, however, employers have been mandated to provide two hours of sexual harassment training. However, the only criterion by which the training is measured is elapsed time and there is no requirement for proficiency testing to prove subject matter knowledge. Employees who have received training are assumed to know the law, and employers are considered to have complied with the law whether or not employees were tested.
   
Who is responsible for learning 

Learning is accomplished only by learners and not by teachers. While teachers may fairly be considered responsible to some degree for the learning of their students in academic education, that assumption is far less valid among adults for workplace training. E-learning, however, enables the employer to fairly delegate responsibility for learning to the employee, and well designed e-learning can enable learners of all levels to acquire the learning and to prove it by passing a proficiency test. While proficiency testing is unpopular among classroom trainers and trainees alike, it is an integral part of almost all well designed e-learning, with the rare exception of topics like Diversity where there may be no real “correct” answers. Some law firms and e-learning vendors oppose testing on the basis a score of less than 100% may jeopardize an employer in litigation, but all educators know the important value of testing as a teaching tool.

In summary, learning is the exclusive responsibility of the adult learner and e-learning enables adult learners to study the material wherever, whenever and at whatever pace and depth needed to accomplish the appropriate level of learning.

New technology

As a new technology, e-learning has sometimes suffered over-promotion like other new technologies, but it is very much not going away and employers that offer it will develop and attract more productive and progressive employees. But there’s still no free lunch. Just offering it doesn’t get it learned, any more than buying a piece of exercise equipment gets the buyer into shape. The obvious advantages of e-learning include availability on demand, self-pacing and real-time updatability, but its enrichment potential is what offers the greatest promise. E-learning’s enrichment capabilities greatly exceed those of printed materials and enable the same e-learning instruction to serve audiences with very broad ranges of prior knowledge and learning ability. Enrichment can be as simple as links to a dictionary or glossary, or as sophisticated as links to references available only at the world’s greatest libraries. Wikipedia’s extensive use of hyperlinks demonstrates this power and every link is optional under individual user control.

Workplace training has ranged from the very best to useless. Technical and sales training at IBM and Xerox have been world famous for many years but run-of-the-mill compliance training is often disliked and disrespected for being ineffective and serving up conflicting or even incorrect advice and overdone political-correctness.

Is all e-learning effective?

Unfortunately the answer is “No.”  E-learning suffered a setback with California’s law mandating two hours of sexual harassment training for supervisory employees.  Knowledge is not measured in hours but by proficiency testing, but the political landscape created a sense of urgency in the California legislature and millions of California workers have been disenfranchised from receiving the best of e-learning.  Why would that be?

To be most effective e-learning must be self-paced, but self-pacing and two hours are mutually exclusive. Establishing a fixed or minimum time for any task removes control of the pace from the user. The reason e-learning is self-paced is that its effectiveness depends directly on capturing and retaining the attention of the learner through intellectual interactivity with a computer, in a Learning Dialog℠. Imagine being told you had to spend a minimum time on each page of an Internet search. Do you expect that would interfere with your effectiveness in doing your search? Of course it would, and you would hesitate to click on a link if it meant you had to spend a full minute on that screen. That is what happened to e-learning when California mandated a minimum of two hours for its sexual harassment training. Some programs actually speak aloud the text of each page and prohibit the learner from advancing the program until the voice stops talking, in order to control the time and reach the required minimum. Obviously that disrupts and fragments the user’s attention, but it is the result of a focus on compliance over competence.

Learning effectiveness is not measured in units of elapsed time and e-learning enables proficiency testing of each individual learner which is the universal standard of learning measurement. In the period following enactment of the California law, the e-learning provider community appropriately objected but the commercial threat to the instructor-led training community brought out a barrage of objection from classroom trainers who understood the risks to their services if e-learning was able to demonstrate its advantages and “get away with” less than two hours for faster learners and those with prior learning. Despite objection to the two hours from the e-learning community, regulations were finally approved without revision, although the process took almost three years.

The future

This one setback should not discourage Human Resource professionals from exploring the powerful benefits of e-learning that is truly self-paced and enables motivated learners to acquire knowledge when they need it in significantly less time than by instructor-led classroom training.

All serious educators know e-learning has enormous potential and are learning more about it every day, but like many concepts it can be trivialized and misused as demonstrated under California’s AB1825.

That should not discourage employers from recognizing the power and opportunity of e-learning to educate their workforces towards survival in the coming years of increasing competition in the Post American World.