Posts Tagged eLearning
How should vendors sell to you?
Community halls are cold places at the best of times. The hard, hollow flooring, bordered by dull, white-washed walls. The strip lighting, harsh with the occasional flicker, bathing the room in a sickly yellow hue. These are cold places for cold people, those with problems. Those people with a confession to make.
The refreshment table was laden with extra bitter coffee, like it alone could cleanse the souls of those within its reach. The biscuit tray lay beaten, already pummelled into submission by the gaggle of desperate looking zombies who filed into the room slowly, sullenly. The chairs creaked and squeaked against the hard floor as people took their seats in the circle. It was time. I rose to my feet, hesitant, but expectant as to the relief that would follow my confession.
“My name is Ben” my voice trembled. “And I’m a Vendor”…
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It’s not easy to admit it, but give me a chance and I will sell you something. Whilst I am also an academic researcher, my job first and foremost is in the retail of E-learning products and services.
One of the toughest aspects of my job is working up decent sales leads. I myself loath cold callers. I hate advertising. Networking is painful. Events are boring. But come what may, it’s still got to happen somehow.
Today I’ve seen loads of tweets passing my eyes on the subject of social learning software and how to be weary of vendors selling you snake oil (see Harold Jarche, Jane Hart and Jay Cross). There’s a similar theme elsewhere too.
The bottom line is, vendors talk a lot of shit and generally screw up a good idea.
I can’t disagree, it’s true.
But vendors still need to appeal to consumers in ways that differentiate themselves from the competition. If I tell you that my social learning software is great, but it won’t create a culture of informal learning without a massive behavioural change effort and that, at best, you’ve got maybe a 25% chance of seeing a return, I’m not going to be in business long. So how can I get noticed without the hyperbole, without the empty promises?
We’re in the midst of developing a new piece of software which we are all quite excited about. It’s not going to “formalise informal learning” or anything like that. It certainly won’t transform your workforce into a legion of web 2.0 advocates, blogging their way into profits. But it will look to abandon the old “E-learning Course” structure, encourage users to connect concepts together and add new learning objects to create a unique learning environment. Engage, Connect, Contribute. That’s our tag line for it. Catchy eh!?
But we’re already following down the same path as those vendors which went before us. So how can we do it differently?
• Cold calling doesn’t work for this sort of thing; no one has a clue what you are talking about and the number of “shots on goal” you have to make before you score is absurd.
• Advertising is expensive and poorly targeted.
• Expensive networking events are generally snake oil in and of themselves.
• Exhibitor events are full of vendors shouting about their informal, formal, social wiki, learning enterprise platform.
So what’s left? Where do I submit my software for independent, transparent review which can be trusted? And how could I get the PR required to get my software reviewed without resorting to hyperbole?
The bottom line is this: Given that there is an outside chance that my products could significantly alter your organisation for the better, how should vendors, like me, sell to buyers (or potential buyers), like you?
Harnessing the Tipping Point to embed E-Learning in your organisation
Embedding E-learning into your organisation is not just a technical problem, far from it. At its heart it’s a process of change; specifically a behavioural change in the way employees train and learn. Changing the behaviour of workers in your organisation is a notoriously difficult task. But it is a challenge you must be willing to take on if you really wish to evolve your company into one which embraces an E-learning culture.
My MBA dissertation centred on the concept of the Tipping Point and behavioural change. Organisations with experience of behavioural change often report that it takes a long period of time to try and change people’s actions. The Tipping Point, as described by Malcolm Gladwell, offers a theory of enacting rapid change. Gladwell’s book is more about hindsight than method and as such we looked at identifying a usable method to try and create a “Tipping Point” in a process of organisational behavioural change. We identified a series of five levers which could be used to enact behavioural change:
• Walking the Talk
• Influencing the Influencers
• Sticking the Message
• Rewarding the Behaviour
• Embedding the Understanding
None of these are groundbreaking on their own, but what we did develop was a piece of academic research (derived from over 700 respondents to a questionnaire) that showed these levers to be direct influencers on exactly how much an employee adopts a new behaviour or practice. Allow me to elaborate…
Walking the Talk: An oldie but a goodie. If you want to embed E-learning in your organisation, leaders have to embrace it first. You need to be the first person through it and you need to make sure others know that. It is often said that employees will copy your worst trait as a leader. You cannot tell your employees how important E-learning is whilst you ignore it. They won’t change and perhaps more importantly, they’ll think you’re a bit of an idiot.
Influencing the Influencers: Leaders aren’t the only source of influence within an organisation, far from it. Others within your organisation will wield the power to influence others, regardless of the presence of any legitimate power. They might be the loudest person, the oldest person, the youngest person, the coolest person. Whatever, when they talk, people listen. You will know who these people are. These are the people you need to be your evangelists for change. In some organisations there exists a culture that acts like an opposite force to management direction; whatever you say, they do the opposite. It is these influential’s who hold the key. Identify them and put them in a pilot group, you need them on board.
Sticking the Message: Again, this is simple. Your change needs an identity and its sticky message will be it. Your change initiative will need a name and an elevator pitch. Think Martin Luther King Jr – “I Have a Dream“. That was one hell of a sticky message. Come up with the message and then make sure it is everywhere – notice boards, walls, emails, mugs, mouse pads, whatever. When you’re enacting behavioural change you need to make sure that no-one can blag that they “haven’t heard about it”. If you can’t see a poster with your changes name and tag line on from wherever you’re sitting the job isn’t done yet.
Rewarding the Behaviour: This can be a tricky issue, mostly because people think it involves money. It doesn’t. When an employee starts to show a new behaviour you need to be quick on the draw with the reward. If they go so far as to actually do what you want, they need praise heaped upon them from a great height. In these circumstances, emotional reward is more important than monetary reward. For all but the most menial of tasks, money is not a motivator. Remember that. Little touches will reward behaviour suitably. If you send an email out to your team requesting they complete a piece of learning, or use a new tool for capturing learning you need to follow it up. The first person who does as you wish needs to be identified and then praised publicly. Follow up your first email with a group email that says “Big thanks to John for being the first person to use our new tool, a great example for others to follow”. Equally important here is the issue of medals. Everyone likes a medal. Make sure that completion of any formal course of E-learning comes with a certificate – a printable one. And make sure that any record of informal or social type learning is captured and look to reward suitably, consider Whuffie for example. There could be financial rewards here and do reinforce these where they appear (think pay rises dependant on a good Personal Development Review), but money is not sustainable or effective as the cornerstone of your reward package.
Embedding the Understanding: Knowing the tag line of a change process is not enough. For it to really embed within the organisation over the long-term, workers must understand why the change is better than the current situation and what the change really means for them. Take John Lewis (a major UK retailer) for example. Their sticky message is “Never Knowingly Undersold”. Ok, so I know the tagline, but what behaviours does this drive? As an employee, what is my reaction when a customer comes to me with a lower price from a competitor? This is more often than not a case of formally training employees. Assuming that people will “figure it out” isn’t enough – so what if they can use the features of a tool, they need to know how and why this is better and why it improves their life. Understanding the need for change is the single most important driver of embedding a behavioural change. Don’t leave it at an intuitive interface; people need to know how it is going to improve their lives!
Using these levers it is possible to influence the rate of change within an organisation. You need to lean on them all, but in doing-so it could be possible to enact change more rapidly than otherwise thought possible. Perhaps the most important lesson here is to realise the significance of using E-learning within your company. It’s not a nice little initiative that’s going away. It’s going to be a major part of working practice for decades to come. So do the groundwork now and you might find your people are much more open to innovation and new technology in the years to come…
Working Towards a Shared View of Quality
One major issue that faces the E-Learning industry as we look to grow and consolidate is the issue of Quality. Ask two E-learning professionals for what amounts to “Quality” E-learning and you will probably get two very different responses.
Broadly speaking, there are two views on Quality. The first is pedagogical. If a piece of E-Learning is pedagogically sound then some would argue the presentation of this information, so long as it’s usable, is largely irrelevant to the measure of Quality.
This is a view largely taken by higher education institutions; I’ve spoken to rather a lot of them and all of the internal E-learning departments at universities appear to share this view. Of course they would, it is at the heart of any universities core competence to know pedagogy. This approach is not limited to a specific media (say PowerPoint, or HTML) and can be used in more social learning frameworks, but never-the-less, presentation is barely a part of the Quality measure. Here it is more of an order qualifier; is it usable? Yes, tick, done.
At the other end of the scale are those with little to no interest when it comes to pedagogy in E-Learning. Here it is all about style over content; making sure it wows the audience and captivates the imagination with little thought as to the learning framework itself. Sometimes this doesn’t matter; a bite-size piece of learning which is tightly focussed and lasts 10 minutes is quite likely to hit the nail on the head without any in-depth analysis as to the pedagogical nature of the learning. Sometimes it doesn’t. I saw a great looking E-learning demo the other day, nice dashboard layout, hand-drawn images to complement the content and lots of interactivity. The questions were awful, they had little consistency in the approach and the feedback was completely nonsensical. The E-learning looked great, but I would have soon resorted to just hitting the “next” button to get through things as reading it was largely pointless.
It’s worth pointing out at this stage that rapid authoring tools often miss both of these measures of Quality. As these two views stand you either look good, or read good (forgive the expression). So unless you are a designer flexing their muscles into the world of E-learning, or a teacher who knows their online teaching techniques, you aren’t likely to create a piece of Quality piece of E-learning. This assumes that you have the ability to manipulate these rapid and easy authoring tools at all. Whilst the tools are increasingly easy to use for someone like me (you know the type, the one that always fixes the TV/DVD/VCR for the extended family) they remain fairly complex for those whose software experience is largely limited to the Office family of products. But that’s another story.
It would be easy to think that these two views on Quality, whilst fundamentally different, are easily reconcilable. Let’s just make a piece of E-learning that has pedagogical foundations that would make Oxford proud and then get 2Advanced studios to knock it together. Your first issue here is that those ingredients alone aren’t enough to make a great piece of E-learning; both parties need to know something of the others world. But your bigger issue, expense aside, is that the proponents of these two views on Quality often believe they are not reconcilable at all.
The arguments are thus:
“Pretty pictures take away from the real purpose of the product and actually detract from the learning experience”.
“Pedagogical frameworks are out of date, hugely restrictive and make any piece of E-learning long-winded and largely dull”.
Solving this issue will take movement from both sides. Pedagogy will need to evolve (it is, see Connectivism) to take into account the ways in which people are now learning online. Its proponents will also have to step outside of their core competence and realise that creating a piece of E-learning with engaging looks and increasingly complex interactions will only add to the value of the end product, if done correctly.
Equally designers need to be much more than their job titles suggest. They need to develop an understanding of teaching online and to realise that style does not trump substance, it merely augments it.
Developing a shared view on Quality will help the E-learning industry to evolve its next-generation of content and learning. At the moment these two polar opposite views don’t sit well together and present a confusing front to end-users. You might not dare to question the authority of an austere institution telling you that their learning experts will ensure quality learning transfer, but how many words will it take to explain that to your boss, who thinks the end product looks awful?
The corporate E-learning world is a little different to the world of higher education. When you attend a university you are there to learn. When you go to work, sitting through a training course is not at the front of your mind. It’s a job to be done, probably a monotonous one. E-learning needs to reach out more to this audience, to appeal, to make the user want more. Or perhaps less ambitiously, just to avoid pissing people off.
Both sides have good arguments. We need to move to a situation where people realise they can and should have it both ways. Anything less is failing to make Quality E-learning content.
E-Learning Sucks by Red Magma
These guys really hit things on the head with this excellent little presentation. A company after my own heart – great presentation skills coupled with an opinion which matches my own. AND they referenced Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We thought we were the only ones…
Put the Hammer down: The bottom line on why you should leave E-learning to the experts.
It doesn’t seem to matter how many years tick by in this industry, by far and away the most common phone call I get is from companies looking to run E-learning pilots, or prototypes, or anything else in the “just getting started” framework.
It’s not a criticism of the clients, far from it; I’m delighted to be the person who helps to mould the minds of newcomers to the E-learning genre, call me anytime! But doesn’t it strike you as odd, in an industry that’s now 15 years old, that everyone else is still getting started?
I’m not alone in my sentiments, just this morning I retweeted a link from Clive Shepherd – “What every learning and development professional needs to know about e-learning”. Indeed, there are two burning questions that all clients (both new and old) want to know when I speak to them; how much is it going to cost and why shouldn’t I do it myself?
My contemporary, Karl Kapp, actually beat me to the punch on this one with his post “How much for that E-learning in the Window”, but I’ll let him off as he referenced me so nicely. He referenced a few other places but most telling was his link to Intellum, a state-side competitor to HT2. They have a great bit on their website which gives you a ballpark figure on what your E-learning will cost which I strongly suggest you check out as I feel its quite representative of the market place.
A recent study by Defelice & the aforementioned Mr Kapp, (brought to my attention care of Michael Hanley and Brandon Hall), showed a new set of figures for how long it currently takes to develop 1 hour of E-learning content. Keep this table of figures in your mind, as I’m going to use it over the rest of this post.
The metric of “1 hour of E-learning content” is important to us in the E-learning industry so you might want it in your arsenal of questions to ask an E-learning developer when you phone them. Most companies will give you a ball park figure on how much 1 hour of E-learning content development is. This figure will range widely but typically I’d be expecting to hear anything from £5,000 per hour up to £40,000 per hour plus.
This is quite a range. And unfortunately we hit the same sort of stumbling blocks as we did with LMS pricing – not all E-learning is born equal! However, if we dig into the figures a little, we start to get an idea of where these numbers come from.
An experienced and professional E-Learning development company, like HT2, who specialise in bespoke content development will probably use software like Articulate or straight Adobe Flash to create their content. So if we take the mean average time it takes to develop 1 hour of E-learning, with limited interactivity and no animations using this sort of software and we multiply that by a typical “daily rate” figure, we can estimate how much an 1 hour of this sort of content should cost.
So:
(94.5 [hrs mean development time] / 7.5 [working hours in a day]) x 400 [typical daily rate] = £5,400 for 1 hours basic E-learning content.
This about tally’s up with the bottom end of my earlier estimate.
Now let’s look at the option of not hiring a bespoke content development company and doing it yourself. You probably won’t be using the move advanced tools like Flash and Articulate, so we’ll look at the figures for easier tools, such as Captivate. I’m also going to estimate that the internal cost of a days development is half that of the external company, £200. I’m also not adding in the cost of training individuals, which will probably run to a few thousand.
(241.5 [hrs mean development time] / 7.5 [working hours in a day]) x 200 [typical daily rate] = £6,440 for 1 hours basic E-learning content.
What we’re saying here is that, even at the bottom end of the scale in terms of complexity, it’s worth your money to hire in the experts. Not only could it be cheaper; it will also take less time – half in this case.
It’s not so useful to measure up the scale of interactivity/animation in this manner as it becomes less likely your internal functions could produce the graphics, sounds and animations that accompany more complex E-learning. Here you really will need to call in the experts to get the job done.
I realise I still haven’t told you come how you will get quotes in the £20k plus range. Well let’s look at the other end of the scale, a fully interactive Simulation:
(525.5 [hrs mean development time] / 7.5 [working hours in a day]) x 400 [typical daily rate] = £28,024 for a 1 hour Simulation on “Softskills”.
Again this is a big estimate – as your learning becomes more complex, it requires more specialist development skills. And the more people are involved, the more difficult it is to project manage. The rise in cost of truly high-spec E-learning development is almost exponential.
There is a pitfall in my cost saving argument for using the experts to develop your E-learning and that is this:
Experts almost certainly won’t recommend an hours worth of E-learning with limited interactivity and no animations.
In our experience this sort of material will not hold the learners attention in a corporate environment. It might work in a Higher Education setting, where your whole motivation is based around learning, but where your learners have a day job that isn’t learning, you need to engage them on a whole new level.
In the end using experts might not be cheaper than doing it internally, but it is certainly comparable and you will get a lot more for your money. Not to mention the fact that your learners will potentially take a lot more away from the experience, which is kind of the point in the first place!
Modelling E-Learning 2.0
This week we’ve been hammering out some details on what our next version of the KnowledgePortal is going to do. I have to say I’m pretty excited by it. We’ve already got a tool that blends various social and learning media together and now we’re taking it a step further. I can’t say too much, but our playground is going to be our www.opsman.org website, amongst others, so you can expect to see changes there in the coming months.
I’ve been looking back at the books to reconcile exactly what it is that “E-learning 2.0” should be bringing to the party, above and beyond the web 2.0 tools we use already. To go back to basics, I would term traditional, formal learning approaches “E-Learning 1.0”. Here Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) write materials and convey them to students, who are expected to comprehend and put into order what is said.
My thinking is that this action alone is not enough. Nonaka & Takeuchi, in their seminal work “The Knowledge-Creating Company”, highlighted a more complex model of taking Tacit knowledge and making it Explicit. The model details four stages, Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination and Internalization. When the model was written in 1995 the authors could have had no knowledge of the “web 2.0” and its philosophies, but the model is surprisingly applicable to the field and more specifically, to what might be the missing piece in “E-learning 2.0”.
Stage one of the model, Socialization, is most closely related to our traditional methods of teaching. Here SME’s try to convey tacit knowledge to students through a variety of methods. There is little difference between being in the lecture hall or working your way through a piece of E-Learning in terms of this model. The material is presented to you in an order deemed logical and appropriate by the expert and you attempt to take in what you can.
However it is perhaps not until Externalization takes place that you start to comprehend what has been said. Here you take the teaching and reflect on it to generate your own ideas and thoughts. It is the act of writing, of conceptualising the learning that helps you to develop. We occasionally touch here during the course of E-learning programmes, by the use of “learning logs” or similar, perhaps a discussion board. But I would suggest this stage is often seen as optional, especially in the world of corporate training. Learning logs are still very much the domain of Higher Education in my experience and are not so widespread in the workplace. But it need not be a log that Externalisation takes its form from; any technology that allows learners to write and reflect can work here. Blog’s, Wiki’s and comments are probably the mainstays, but Podcasts or Videos would also work.
Combination is next in the model and this is perhaps the most significant point which we miss out on at the moment. Often the learning done earlier is prescribed as the only way the subject makes sense. There is very little opportunity for you, the learner, to take your refined thoughts and re-order them to make better sense of your situation. This is of particular importance in organisational learning, where your experiences are very much significant in how you frame new information and how you will subsequently apply it to your role. In addition to this, the web 2.0 technologies that we might use in the previous stage allow us to then share this knowledge with the rest of the class. So this sorting stage allows learners to take information given by experts, their own writings and their classmates writings and put it into an order which makes sense to them. Here learners could create “learning paths” which visually explain their understanding of a subject. These could be shared between the class and even act as guides to non-students who wish to share in the learning.
Finally, Internalization is all about taking your new learning and actually applying it to the workplace. This act grows and matures your learning and so it might well be seen as important to “re-sort” your knowledge at periodic points, as well as important to keep adding experiences and reflections to the mix.
Right now E-Learning often begins and ends at stage one – sitting down and being told a bunch of new stuff. That’s E-learning 1.0. We and others have tried to embrace some aspects of the web 2.0 into our learning programmes, but perhaps we haven’t seen this bigger picture. Pedagogy experts recognise the value of reflection and as the technology is fairly obvious here, this is the area where most “2.0” tools are currently employed in E-learning.
Stages three and four are where we hope to work with our next version of KnowledgePortal. We want to make linking explicit knowledge a focus for E-learning 2.0, something which builds on the tools that web 2.0 gives us and creates something more specialist for our genre. It is my hope that by adapting models such as Nonaka & Takeuchi’s, we can create a unifying reason for using Web 2.0 tools in our learning which stretches far beyond our currently level of “because we can”.
The Curse of the Next Button
A wise man once said “Nature abhors a Vacuum”. 
An even wiser man drew a cartoon of the saying. It is with this inspiration in mind I have coined a new phrase: Learning abhors a Next Button. I doubt anyone will pen a cartoon in my honour, but you never know.
This week I’m back on track with thinking about my doctorate. It, like the cartoon, is a bit foreboding, dark and sinister. Fortunately I’ve been given the greatest gift of all – time. My EngD allows 4 years to research a new approach, theorise it, make it and then defend my actions. However, there actually is the option to get the work done in 3 years and I’m keen on that as it means I gain my doctorate before I turn 30, a personal goal of mine. So less 12 months from my original 48. But of course, my registration actually started on the 1st Feb, 2009. Minus another 6 months. I’m told that most people do relatively little in their first 2 years, beside attend a couple of residential modules and read a lot of books. So take off another 24 months.
So basically I’ve got 6 months to redefine an industry.
Greatest gift my arse, I would have settled for a decent pair of socks.
Over the weekend, with the above equation in mind, I set myself the task of actually producing something. When I set out on the EngD path I had clear visions of what I wanted to achieve. I immediately released an Aladdin’s Cave of information as soon as began scratching below the surface. Who knew that so many people were interested in E-Learning? Who knew that so many would be engaged in academic research projects, exactly like mine? There’s even a bloody conference on E-Portfolio’s for God sake; I thought I was on my own there for sure.
A wise man once said “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know”. Then Donald Rumsfeld said it and totally fucked it up for the rest of us. I’ve reached the second stage on the confusion chart; Known unknowns. I know that I don’t know very much.
It’s a scary place to be, stage 2. I went through the same process when I wrote my MBA dissertation. I went in, full of confidence. Did a little research, launched a questionnaire. Then when I started analysing the results I realised I didn’t have the first clue about what I was doing. This freaked me out somewhat. I had 700 responses and I’m sure the data was telling me something, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what. And then I eventually returned to sanity. I wasn’t under pressure to make the data tell me something. The data not telling me anything was actually a fantastic outcome. It was eliminating the strand of enquiry I was making – a very useful addition to knowledge. It was a truly small addition to knowledge, one that will probably never be unearthed. But it served its purpose.
And so now I find myself back in stage 2 once more. Again I’m overwhelmed by how little I know. But, like the recovering alcoholic, I’m beginning to acknowledge my problem and as such, I can address it. My first point of call has been to chunk down my problem into areas of investigation. The EngD, unlike a PhD, typically consists of 3 case study papers, written at a rate of 1 per year, which then tie together in the final year with a bridging paper. This brings everything together much like a thesis, but on a broader canvas of work. And you actually need to Engineer something in the process of writing these papers. My first paper is likely to centre on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and web 2.0 tools. I don’t think I’ll stretch too far in the e-portfolio ark of this topic, but I’ve some nice contacts in the CPD arena and we’re currently working on a CPD project for a great cause in the developing world. My second paper is shaping up to be something completely different. Not necessarily a problem, it just means my bridging paper will have to be a work of art.
It was this second paper that became my focus over the weekend and gave rise to the title of this blog. Yes, the overly long prologue is now over, I am actually getting to the point. One of the issues I’ve been tussling with recently is the role of informal learning in the future of E-Learning. There are so many opportunities to learn from the web and from the information it holds. All we do at the moment is take these ideas and write it out neatly.
With so much material in existence, be that inside or outside of organisations, it seems to me that the only thing that is stopping this “informal” content being used is the lack of order it possesses. But linear learning is not necessarily the best teaching method; the “Next” button has become such a mainstay of the E-learning I see that it almost seems impossible to imagine courses without it. This is the curse of the Next button and it is something we need to break out of if we are to move into exciting new areas for learning online.
This is the area I’m going into next. I want to present a method of non-linear E-learning which embraces informal learning. For me, putting information in its place is how I learn. I like to piece it all together, to see what relates to what, to know the story and the relationships between knowledge. Clicking next doesn’t do this for me – I’m just learning the order someone said it should be in. I need to create my own journey, to be presented with the pieces of the jigsaw and put it back together again.
Then and only then can I see the bigger picture.
Everyone Likes a Medal
When you’re researching a doctorate about learning it seems likely that at some point you will actually have to get involved with some research on how the brain works. I’ve been avoiding this like the plague. I’m sure it’s very interesting, but frankly I’m much more about implementation (as is my EngD) and so getting bogged down in a 4 year argument about neurons isn’t really on the cards. Plus I’m not that smart and thus far I seem to be getting away with it. Tackling neuroscience is a sure-fire recipe to blow my cover.
But then I came across this article (courtesy of Twitter, of course) from MIT telling us that new research has shown that we learn more from success than failure. This is seemingly a direct contradiction to my understanding of the subject. A big influence on my knowledge has been the book “The Decisive Moment”, by Jonah Lehrer. Now its hardly an academic paper, but frankly when it comes to neuroscience I like my reading to be nice and simple. Lehrer lays it on thick for the most part, but the standout section of the book is when he starts talking about learning. Specifically, the concept that we do indeed learn from our mistakes and he backs it up with science. So you can imagine my surprise when MIT claim the exact opposite to be true.
Allow me to digress. Training my Labrador, Lyra, has been one big exercise in the two theories. Every trainer we ever went to has insisted that positive reinforcement is the only way to teach a dog. And this is the path we followed. To be honest, I never had any inclination to teach my dog by smacking it about; if I wanted to do that I’d have brought a cat. But now and again I do wonder.
She has done the occasional ‘awful’ thing (for example, chowing down on cow sh*t, or pulling the leg clean off my desk at work – see photo) and no amount of me shouting, swearing or grappling seems to dissuade her from the practice. But take for instance, biting. As a puppy she was keen on biting people – it’s my understanding that most puppies are. Obviously we couldn’t let that continue, but rewarding her for not biting people wasn’t exactly an option. So a bite was met with a loud “no”, us physically removing her from the room and placing her in isolation (OK, the dining room). This upset her a lot. But she learnt quickly.
Today she has a very impressive array of tricks embedded in her brain and is a fantastic dog to own. The only thing she can’t do is walk properly on the lead and no amount of positive reinforcement or training seems to change that. People keep suggesting the choke chain, but I keep refusing. I don’t want to hurt her, but maybe this is just one of those behaviours that positive reinforcement cannot reach, like the biting.
And so back to the theories – can they really co-exist?
I think so. Read beyond the headlines and you will realise that MIT conducted a study showing us that when failure has no consequence, nothing is learnt from failure. Lehrer illustrated that failure coupled with negative consequences has a profound impact on learning.
Questions do remain. Is a small reward for a positive action better at adjusting behaviour than a negative reaction from failure? Just how bad does a failure have to be in order to be useful?
The real questions lie in how we use this knowledge. I take two things away from the study, which broadly align with my previous thinking:
1. Success must be met with real rewards in order to meaningfully embed learning.
2. Failure must be met with real consequences in order to meaningfully embed learning.
I continue to think this is an area which E-Learning has been historically poor on. The rewards are often tiny for success and the consequences for failure are often non-existent. We developers tread a fine-line to ensure we don’t alienate or upset participants in E-Learning, as we need their positive feedback to keep programmes running and cash flowing. As such we may have an inherent conflict of interests.
In practice the answer is that we probably don’t want to inflict failures of the magnitude it takes to change behaviour and what’s more, we probably can’t. We’re left with positive rewards as our only means to embed learning. This is a change in stance for me. Although I do think learning from failures is important, I’m not convinced we can harness it well in practice.
As scientific evidence for positive reinforcement mounts, it is hard to deny it as a good alternative. After all, everyone likes a medal…
Is your learning costing the Earth?
We’ve launched a new version of our Learning Footprint calculator!
The calculator was first launched a few years ago and allows users to estimate the carbon emission savings their organisation could make by introducing E-Learning to their training programmes.
Travel is one of the single biggest causes of carbon emissions in the UK. By cutting out the need to travel to training venues, organisations can dramatically cut their emissions. The Learning Footprint Calculator is the only tool specifically designed for calculating the savings that could be made!
We’ve updated it to be a bit slicker, but also added in the functionality to produce a PDF report of your findings. This way you can save your work locally and use the report as a part of your business case for the switch to E-Learning.
The tool is free for everyone, no registration or anything required!
Visit www.learningfootprint.com and have a look see – its a pretty nifty little thing!
Is Swine Flu in your business case for E-Learning?
The Swine Flu outbreak in the UK is reaching exponential growth figures according the BBC and much is being made of contingency plans for schools to keep functioning if they must keep their doors closed in the Autumn.
Any solution is sure to involve putting more teaching online and doing things remotely. If this “worst case scenario” were to come true then we would probably see universities following suit.
But what of businesses?
Inside the companies that we’ve been visiting this week, Swine Flu is high on the agenda. One business we attended asked all employees and visitors to wash their hands before passing through the reception area. Another held a seminar for Senior Managers, advising that it was likely as much as 10% of their workforce could be on sick leave at any one time in the coming months.
And so questions must be raised as to business continuity plans if this flu outbreak were to escalate further and drag out over the winter months. One thing should be certain; bringing large groups of workers together in a single room for an extended period of time, as occurs with face-to-face training, is a big no-no.
They say necessity is the mother of invention. Could this be E-learning’s time to shine? The business case for utilising more remote technology is certainly strengthened by outbreaks like Swine Flu, maybe it’s time to start telling people their options…
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