Reports of E-Learning’s Death…
“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” - Mark Twain
People have been declaring e-learning dead for a long time. This article by Rob Chapman in the UK even compares elearning to the Atkins diet – a discredited fad that is disappearing. (He apparently didn’t read the Oprah magazine article this month about a meta review of weight loss studies showing low carb diets most likely to be effective. But I digress…)
Chapman’s arguments fall into two categories. First, he says that e-learning isn’t as effective as face to face instruction, because of all the things you lose, like undivided attention, nonverbal cues. Second, he says that e-learning is more expensive than it’s often credited to be. Interestingly, his argument here completely ignores the cost of developing e-learning, and instead focuses on the cost of employees not having the information they would learn in the training because people are more likely to put off an e-learning class than an in-person class.
It’s the second point that particularly intrigues me. He’s saying that training is so important that it will costs companies more to have people with out-of-date skills than it costs to get them to in person training. Now, I should mention a couple of things here. Chapman’s company trains IT people on things like how to protect company data from the always-changing world of viruses, hackers and other threats. And he does so using in-person classes, so there may be some bias in perception there.
Still, he is not the only one making these sorts of arguments. In CLO magazine this month, Jay Cross even argues that training as a business function is dead. In its place, he suggests those who used to be called training immediately shift their focus to performance support, building the business through facilitating learning. He just doesn’t think the old ways of facilitating learning are fast enough. He argues for informal, peer-to-peer types of interventions instead of large-group learning interventions.
The funny thing about these arguments is that they both acknowledge that learning is a key competitive advantage for business. Chapman argues that new skill building is too important to share attention with lunch and e-mailing. Cross argues that business results are the key to surviving the economic shift that is on everyone’s mind. So perhaps the problem is not that training is or should be dead, perhaps it is a perception that training and learning and increased productivity aren’t closely associated in the minds of business leaders.
This isn’t particularly news in our industry. Leaders like Ruth Clark and Will Thalheimer have been arguing for quite a while that we need to professionalize the learning field with research on what works most effectively. The arguments of those who are predicting the death of the field altogether seem to agree. Some folks are even getting pretty cranky about the myths that pass for data in our field. Given the threats we face as a profession in this scary and shifting economy, I can’t say that I blame them.