Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
Issue link: http://elmezine.epubxp.com/i/48330
Lastword Why Does E-learning Reach So Few People? WE STILL HAVE MUCH TO LEARN ON HOW TO BEST TRANSFER KNOWLEDGE EFFECTIVELY IN A COST-CONSCIOUS MARKETPLACE. BY DOUGLAS BODILY H aving studied and participated in e-learning, I find that the developers, course designers and the businesses seeking e-learning as a cost-reducing product are often not looking at the needs of the learner. Businesses need targeted learning that will benefit the worker today, will improve product quality today, and will improve productivity today. Learners want content that is easy to follow. Often the content is hard to follow because it is boring; it reads as if it is very much scripted; and learners have few if any resources to ensure that they are performing properly. From what I have seen, CLOs and CKOs sometimes seek to reduce costs by using electronic libraries of training and data collection. The material is often well thought-out. The failure comes in the way it is presented, and often it is not useful to the worker. For ethics training and other informational seminars, many workers will have enough common sense to be able to skim through the content and take the final exam as required by HR. This is not necessarily a success — but the content is provided, an exam verifies that the needed information is understood by the worker, and the organization has a record of the completed course. Afterwards, however, the huddled masses of workers often describe the e-learning as being less than helpful. From my perspective after dealing with e-learning in various forms for the last 30 years, we still have much to learn on how to best transfer knowledge effectively in a marketplace that seeks to continu- ously reduce costs and improve quality. Online courses are much harder than brick-and-mortar classes. E-learning still is unable to provide the tacit-to-tacit knowledge transfer that most are comfortable with. Many have not been placed in a situation where learning is something they want to do in their leisure time. Until curriculum designers and e-learning consortiums are able to fine-tune e-learning to the envi- ronment in which it is being utilized, acceptance will continually be low. Education cannot equate to a Henry Ford production line: "You can have any color you want, as long as it is black." Education needs to be tailored to the learners. When new knowledge fails to reach the learner, it is of little value. —Douglas Bodily is director of I.T. at Queen of Peace Center, a non-profit affiliated with the Archdiocese of St. Louis. He is also an adjunct professor at ITT Technical Institute, St. Louis. 50 May /June 2011