Does your online training need an upgrade?
It’s fast, convenient, and cost-effective, but that doesn’t mean making e-learning work in the long term is easy. It can be just as difficult to make online learning ‘stick’ as it can for any other kind.
There’s a reason everyone’s talking about online learning and that’s because almost everyone is doing it. In the USA, a recent study by Chief Learning Officer magazine revealed that 75% of responding organisations used elearning. And according to the Bersin & Associates Corporate Learning Factbook, elearning has increased 2% over the last 5 years accounting for 20% of all learning delivery.
However dispersed your people are geographically, online learning can deliver training across your entire organisation. You know the programme will be consistent, and you know it will be convenient for those who can’t easily be called away from frontline duty. It can reduce time away from the office and decrease the cost of training by eliminating the need for travel. And of course there are those folk who prefer to learn at the computer screen in a virtual environment. A reduction in costs, instruction time, travel time and away-from-your-desk time, what’s not to like?
Unfortunately, even if online learning initiatives are launched with much pomp and enthusiasm, many businesses find out that engagement, participation and completion rates are not matching up to expectations.
In our many years creating online learning, we’ve learnt there are three crucial factors to creating successful online learning programmes; you need to make them short, practical, and social.
Shorter is definitely better and less is much more when it comes to online learning. The tendency is to ask people to do too much, when in fact the key to success is keeping each lesson contained. Often there is a tendency to design learning that throws the whole kitchen sink into the mix; a temptation to include absolutely everything into each segment. In fact you can make learning even better by eliminating every last irrelevancy from the design. By using the less-is-more approach, the whole learning experience can be made much cleaner and simpler. Remove unnecessary distractions by asking: if this was a house on fire and you only had time to rescue the crucial stuff, would this be something we would save?
On to practicality: when professional development goals are connected to the success of their teams and their organisations, participants get far more out of their learning.
Like a switchboard, the brain decides which path information takes depending on whether or not information is important. The essential stuff heads down the path of long-term retention, stored for immediate future use as necessary. The non-essential heads down a different path, eventually getting filtered out, at best stored along with hundreds of less important bits of information, at worst forgotten completely as the brain erases temporary records.
If you can link training to individual and organisational goals, the chance of skills being learnt and applied back on the job increases four-fold, from 20 percent to 80 percent. Conquer that challenge and you’re on to a winner.
Creating an impact map can be useful when it comes to identifying learning and performance requirements; clarifying expectations for learning results, and guiding measurement and evaluation. This is how to get started in creating such a map:
- Focus on performance outcomes: hold 20-minute phone interviews with senior leaders in each functional area to identify two to four strategic goals that are to be achieved over the next 12 – 18 months.
- Identify critical competencies: gather data on the key results and critical actions that each manager must produce if the functional area goals are to be achieved.
- Connect training to desired outcome: draft an impact map based on the individual’s performance and learning objectives. Refer back to the map often during the training sessions and when following up on the training.
Finally, make training social. Yes that is possible even online. Take the way adult education works in online universities: nearly all these classes use a cohort model, with one group of people going through content together. Having a group of people go through programmes together creates a camaraderie, a ‘stickiness’ and even some peer pressure which enhances and embeds learning, thanks to the benefit of having a shared experience. This creates a far greater impact than going it alone without connecting to others.
So, how are your online training programmes looking now? Can you make them shorter, more practical and more social? Try! I guarantee you’ll find it easier to achieve the online learning results you are looking for.
