During the recent Unconference, an interesting point was made at the plenary session by Bob Spence – e-learning quality does not mean e-learning effectiveness. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear Bob’s full explanation about what he meant by this, and so I thought I’d take up Bob’s point as I see it.

When an organisation is relatively new to e-learning, there is a lot to do:

• Governance in place to manage implementation
• Skill development in instructional and visual design
• Learning to maximise the authoring tool
• Managing stakeholder expectations
• Communicating implementation
• Monitoring and measuring learning effectiveness

In the past I have blogged about e-learning quality. It is an obvious requirement. Despite the ‘consumers as producers’ trend that social media avails, as end-users of corporate e-learning, it is distracting to the learning process if the e-learning course is not a quality product. At this time, we cannot expect corporate learners to look beyond poorly designed and produced e-learning to get the learning message – I think it simply sends the wrong message – an “I didn’t care enough” message. Not to mention the threat to learning outcomes…

Quality is probably a subset of elements that make e-learning effective.

What makes e-learning effective?

We first need to start with the end in mind. Bob Spence suggested we need to ask the subject matter expert who want the e-learning course to be built “When will you know the learning was successful?” In other words, ensure to include success criteria when you are scoping an e-learning course.

Ensure the success criteria is measureable. Measurement will help you determine whether the e-learning course was effective. Some measurements will only be determined by uncovering what has changed behaviourly in the workplace.

Bob and another Unconference speaker talked about the dangers of assuming mastery at the end of an e-learning course. Until the learning outcomes have been applied and assessed in the workplace, we cannot confidently deem learners have mastered the e-learning content. Passing an assessment at the end of an e-learning course does not generally equate to mastery. To this end, Bob makes the point that staff need multiple content exposure back at the workplace, and an environment that supports learning and the development of mastery. This is where managers play an important (but not exclusive) role.

So, the bottom line, when we are developing an e-learning course:

1. At the start of an e-learning project, ensure to articulate measureable success criteria
2. Partner with corporate comms, management and leadership, and interweave the content into related policies, courseware and workplace information to help embed the learning outcomes into the workplace
3. Put mechanisms in place to measure the effectiveness of the e-learning project
4. Learn from the outcomes and use this to improve the success of the next e-learning project

“What’s love got to do with it?”

- apologies and admiration to Tina Turner

Last week I used the word “Love” to describe the attention to detail required to build a quality e-learn. I later wondered whether the term was a bit “over the top” for readers. Was I portraying my passion for all things ‘e’ with a little too much exuberance? Would anyone know what ’love’ meant in relation to e-learning quality?

I don’t think I have ever met a person working with e-learning who has not been passionate about the medium and the opportunities that learning technologies can and will avail our staff, our learners. But we need to have a little more than passion. We need to understand what quality looks like, how quality is experienced, so that we know how to pay attention to detail during development.

Sometimes it is the people around us that don’t understand the time and effort required to develop an e-learn – the trial and error required to learn the authoring tool – the stretch often required to see beyond the content to find ways to create meaningful activities and scaffold the learning.  Like any multimedia production, e-learning requires good scripting and good visuals to enable a learner to learn through the e-learn. As learning professionals we need time to give e-learning the love and attention it needs to become ‘quality’.

However you can, ensure to work with your reporting manager to get the support you need to create quality e-learns.

And, be an e-learning advocate and ensure poor quality e-learning doesn’t creep onto your Learning Management System (LMS).

Question from a client:

I  am working with Subject Matter Experts to manage the development of an e-learning course. What can I do to help the SMEs understand what is required for a quality e-learning outcome?

There are a couple of overarching things we need to achieve when working with SMEs:

• Help SMEs become discerning of what quality is. We can do this by exposing them to quality e-learning examples and critiquing these as a group (see checklist below).
• Help SMEs realise that their content as they know it (copious pages of text) cannot all be included into an e-learn. E-learning requires instructional design that will help enable learners to understand and digest the content in a meaningful and time efficient way. Typically, content from the SME needs to be culled and then carefully chunked and sequenced for includion into the e-learn. Learners can be educated on how to access and use the ‘detail’ (such as a policy, guidelines etc) as and when they need it.

To help critique the quality of an e-learning course, here is a small checklist:

Checklist of e-learning quality

1. Content needs to be succinct and concise, so that it is easy to digest and interesting. To get a concept of what I mean here, have a look at Cathy Moore’s excellent Slideshare Dump The Drone 

2. Lots of meaningful activity. There should be learning activities throughout the course to help learners build confidence in their understanding of the important concepts. Cathy Moore talks about leading with activity, and then introduce the content that reinforces the activity outcomes.

3. The visual design needs to appear organised. There must be consistent use of font, space, colour, graphics and multimedia. This puts the learner at ease and minimises cognitive overload.

4. Navigation must be consistent throughout the course and options kept to a minimum so as to not confuse the learner on what they need to do.
Tip: For Articulate users who add Engage templates amongst screens created in Presenter, please remove the Engage navigation at the top. Keep to one navigation at the bottom of the screen.

5. Graphics and multimedia are thoughtfully used to create real-life context about the topic at hand. Use graphics to reduce text burden, such as flowcharts.
TIP: Be prepared to spend 50% of your development time on sourcing and creating congruent, meaningful graphics.

6. Attention to detail. Make the learner feel as though the e-learn has been created with love by ensuring there are no typos, that text is properly aligned & consistently spaced, there is a consistent editorial style throughout etc.
TIP: Use plenty of testers to proof your e-learning course before going live.

There is, of course, a lot more to achieving quality e-learning. However, if you are able to at least have SMEs agree to ensure they achieve these six factors, then this will go a long way towards a quality outcome.

If you don’t have quality e-learning on-hand to critique with your SMEs, have a look at some e-learning provider websites for examples.

• Change management theory espouses ‘quick wins’ as a useful way to get staff onside to your new initiative.
• Organisational culture and change reminds us time and again that staff respond better to incremental change, and to having ownership or at least feedback opportunity to that which is happening to them.
• Design theorists talk about design as process of iteration and refinement.
• Entrepreneurs of the web talk about getting prototypes up and running early, to test user response before spending too much time and effort on an idea that represents only the developer’s perspective.

Each of these perspectives help to inform us that it is almost always useful to stage your e-learning, social media or Learning Management System (LMS) implementation.

Let’s take a few examples:

Example 1: Internal e-learning courseware development

If you are new to designing & authoring e-learning, it’s useful to build a course as best you can, and then have it critiqued by colleagues or an e-learning industry expert. Get feedback, make refinements and then launch.

If you happen to have launched your first attempts – that’s okay. Ensure you have a feedback loop that provides you with ongoing evaluation of your live course, and make changes when you acknowledge the feedback is useful and fair.

Example 2: External e-learning courseware development

When you are looking for an e-learning provider to develop your courses, it is useful to engage the vendor for one course, and see how the experience goes for you from both course quality and project management perspectives. Let the vendor know that, if the experience is positive for you, then there is likely to be more work.

Example 3: Learning Management System (LMS) implementation

If your organisation is disparate or your data, records and other learning administration is in different forms and places, then implementing a LMS can be a big job. Consider incremental implementation. Perhaps start with populating classroom events & working out the email workflows for this. Then tackle the e-learning courses (or vise versa).

Example 4: Participative virtual classroom (webinar) events

Training-orientated webinar platforms have functionality that can help you to facilitate generative learning through participation. Introduce your learners to one new webinar function or activity each event, to help them gain confidence in knowing how to use and express themselves in the platform e.g. begin with a poll and a whiteboard activity. Introduce text writing, highlighting, web safaris, breakout rooms etc over a series of events.

Example 5: Online forums

It take time for people to build confidence to leave their thoughts on an asynchronous forum to be viewed & critiqued by others. Start early forum discussions with simple questions and answers, and reward positive behaviour. Deep reflective posts will come with confidence, trust and with good questions and online support.

The bottom line:

There is NO constant in the practice of learning and development. Organisational IT infrastructure changes, software and hardware improve, visual design gets tired looking, content becomes redundant and, most importantly, our understanding of learning design and pedagogy evolves as we deepen our understanding of learning and technology. So, take the plunge as early as you can and be prepare to iterate and refine your learning design. And, be prepared to sustain and evolve your e-learning, LMS & social media strategies.

Oh, and when is a staged approach to implementation NOT a good idea?

I don’t know – I just don’t like using absolutes. Please feel free to comment.