Let’s say you are seeing a lot of training downtime. More than you would want. Some staff are really struggling. Others are getting bored. Others are procrastinating about the recertification process. It is all costing money and sapping morale.

But budgets are tight. The business case for changing things up is hard to make.

And there’s a problem. There are lots of problems there. Surely you can’t solve them all! Is it worth the cost?

Yes, it probably is.

Because behind many of those problems – boredom, struggle, stress, etc – there is often just one problem.

Modes of Learning

Some people respond to stats. Others prefer diagrams. Others prefer social learning. Some are happy reading slabs of text. Some hate slabs of text. Some people need personal contact. Some hate it.

There are many different ways of learning.

Some say preferences vary along based on auditory, tactile, visual, and so on, preferences. Other senses are combined in different ways in different people; some people (dancers) learning through movement, for instance. Others argue that people learn different things different ways. So a particular person might learn more abstract things visually, but learn practical skills through movement.

It quickly gets complex and controversial!

One model is the “VARK” system proposed by Neil D. Fleming, an academic from New Zealand.

VARK is a questionnaire that provides users with a profile of their learning preferences. These preferences are about the ways that they want to take-in and give-out information. read more here

The questionnaire is used to work out which category of these categories a learner fits into:

• Visual (V)
• Aural (A)
• Read/write (R)
• Kinaesthetic (K)

And, finally:

• Multimodal (various combinations of V, A, R, K)

That means for each skill or concept you need to impart, you need to prepare materials that teach it in a number of different ways.

The Cost Question

This isn’t necessarily going to cost 4 or 5 times the cost of doing it just one way. But it would be getting there.

So a middle way is found to save up front costs.

One that caters to the average learner.

Of course, there is no such thing as the “average” learner. That person is a myth, a convenient notion that allows you to produce learning materials that don’t really suit anyone.

A mishmash of Vs, As, Rs and Ks randomly assembled to a budget!

But the mishmash has one big advantage. It costs less than the more sophisticated approaches.

The problem is the cost of the average materials is hidden. In longer term costs. So it doesn’t figure highly in the business analysis.

But the up front costs are there for easy comparison.

But those hidden costs are there. Added downtime as people try to learn in a way doesn’t suit them. The cost on moral of training materials designed for the lowest common denominator. Inefficient ways of handling blending learning through manual admin. Stress. Boredom. Confusion. And so on.

Fortunately, elearning can be used to analyse learners and adapt to them. Methods such as the VARK questionnaire can be applied online. This feeds useful information to the learning platform. The system can then automatically adjust to the modality that suits the learner best.

And the system can also adapt on the fly algorithmically. A learner is not passing some tests, for instance? It may be that the materials don’t suit them. Switch to a different modality and see what happens. Without manual intervention.

Great trainers do this sort of thing all the time. But the notion is really only starting to take root in elearning now. But here’s a great example: Knewton.

Of course, no approach is going to be perfect. The model for analysing peoples’ preferences will be limited. But it is better than not doing it at all. Better than not acknowledging the problem – and letting those long term costs weigh down your elearning program over time.

Making the Business Case

But how do you make the business case for a better approach? How do you convince the organisation to adopt something such as VARK?

If you can relate, say, that extra downtime to a section of the course that is hard to understand, that’s a start. What if only certain types of people find it hard to understand? Wouldn’t it make sense to balance the cost of the downtime against the cost of developing new materials for those learners? And then proving it is more efficient later on. To be able to talk in dollars and cents terms?

But gathering this sort of data can be hard work.

The next phase for enterprise elearning is linking dollars and cents to everything from training time to learner feedback, to wider business measurements, the multi modality teaching to adaptive training. And making it easy to do t without spending time and money on special reporting systems, extra admin, etc.

That is: a simple way to keep track of return on investment on things such as VARK.

And simple way to make the business case for other improvements over time.

That is what Enterprise Elearning Analytics is all about.

A contractor was struggling with his induction. He was accidentally restarting his computer in the training room — and saying it had restarted itself! Another trainee couldn’t hear the audio. She had the volume set at zero at the operating system level. But it looked fine to her. The volume dial on the headphones was set to “max”.

The level of support required changed from group to group. Sometimes everybody just sailed through. At other times there were problems like the audio volume and the restarts.

In essence, the problem was simple. Some groups had better computer skills than others. So we were seeing wild fluctuations in support required.

In the rush to get the course finished a basic tenet of elearning had been forgotten.

Every elearning course is a test of computer skill.

Can you work with a browser, a mouse, an operating system, a navigation system, and so on? Basic computer skills are a prerequisite for elearning.

But computer skills are not always necessary to master the content itself.

(The content of a course on truck maintenance, for example, has absolutely nothing to do with computer skills.)

So how do you avoid the problem?

Solving the Problem

As a general rule:

• the lower the computers skills, the more personal support interaction will be required.

That may mean phone calls. It may mean have IT staff in the same room with the learners. It may mean quick access to screen sharing.

And more personal interaction means higher costs. And that needs to be added to the cost of maintaining the course. It may even make elearning prohibitively expensive.

So, before you create a course, ask two questions.

• “What computer skills / literacy skills / etc are inherent to the content?”
• “What additional computer skills are needed just to use the course?”

If the answer is: “there are additional skills needed just to use the course”, then you need a plan to deal with that.

Identify People Lacking in Computer Skills Early

First, you need to have a way of identifying learners who don’t have the computer skills, the required level of literacy, and so on.

Sensitive topics. How do you deal with them?

We all have tech support buttons, but how do you provide support in such a way to triage lack of skill? Some ideas here.

Support Triage

Implement a basic support triage system.

At first:

• try and solve the problem by email

Think about who will do this, what sort of responses you will give, what sort of process to take on. Build support into the course itself – help buttons, phone numbers, etc. Test the process.

• talk to the learner by phone

Sometimes simple human interaction can make a big difference. Empathy and knowledge of the course is needed. So make sure support staff know the course well.

This often leads to:

• use screen sharing to help the learner

That means you need to make sure corporate firewalls, PCs, etc, allow screen sharing.

Instrumenting Courses

It is also worth “instrumenting” your courses with support in mind. So add analytics, click tracking and so on. Then you can review how learners move through courses.

More here

The Face to Face Option

Finally, if the learner is still frustrated:

• send out a workbook or provide a face to face session.

(You can still minimise paperwork and cost by having the trainer conduct this as a blended learning session with a group.)

Finally …

This may all seem like common sense!

But the question is: do you really have a plan to do all this? Can you send out workbooks if necessary? Will support staff really understand the course? Is the course structured so people can ask for help while they are doing it?

Document the process you adopt at each stage.

If you can, test the whole process with a sample cohort of testers. Ideally, test with the type of learners you expect will use the course once it’s live.

And remember: Elearning doesn’t always work for everybody. If it would just be cheaper to train people in person, do that. You can always minimise trainer paperwork using computer-based assessment tools that interact with your LMS.