Often elearning is seen as something people have to do, something to get out of the way. A boring, box-ticking exercise.

Why? Courses are usually designed in very general terms. They discuss the abstract. Buzzwords and jargon creep in.

You’ll get:

In your role as a Contractor you need to create a new job number for each new job as defined in part 3. Submit an XYZ form using the mobile form processing software to get the required job number ..

Snore. “How does this help me?” asks the Learner.

What about something more practical:

Karen or Geoff are the people to contact about XYZ forms. They’ll help you get your first forms sorted out. Here’s a video explaining the basics of how the software works. Any questions ask Geoff, he’s the expert. Here are his contact details.

“Better!” says the Learner. “That’s actually useful.”

Capture Real Communications

It may seem inefficient to be so specific – after all, if Geoff leaves the organisation then you have to change the course. And if you’re in the enterprise, it’s not generic enough to apply to all the people doing the course. (You may have 20 people in Geoff’s role in 4 different locations, for instance.) It may also seem too casual. Not “official” enough.

But this is the sort of casual, applied communication that goes on in organisations everyday.

The secret is to capture this communication in elearning courses. Work out what people are telling each other. How things are actually done.

This is the stuff people actually need to know.

Put it in a course.

Knowledge Retention is Vital

If courses end up being vague, general introductions to buzzwords and abstract procedures, then people tend to forget the course content.

And then the abstract parts they really need to know – legal requirements for example – also get forgotten. It gets lost in all the other generalities.

So: courses need to be visceral and applied and capture the real communication that goes on in the organisation.

Of course, this is the ideal. The cost of personalising courses completely would be prohibitive. Particularly once an organisation is beyond a certain size.

But there is a good compromise between the generic and the personalised …

Team Generated Elearning

But keep in mind people care about things they help create. Get them to help you. In providing the examples. In helping you design the course. In explaining what people really need to know. Get staff involved in creating personalised elearning modules.

For instance, ask Geoff and Karen the top five errors that staff make submitting XYZ forms. Make a video of them explaining the errors.

Make your courses much more interesting by interspersing them with more personal, practical content. Essentially: help staff help each other using elearning technology. Done well, this approach can scale quite well and will increase knowledge retention.

Let’s say your employees need to be recertified every two years, or when requirements change significantly. At the moment that means learners have to retake an updated version of the course every so often – on average every 15 months.

But the learners may already know large parts of the course. It turns into a tedious box-ticking exercise. Hours of work-time are lost. It is unproductive and demoralising.

So you decide to introduce automated “skills gap analysis” via the learning management system. A learner is tested for knowledge of the material. And then taken through the material she didn’t know that well. And the parts of the courses that are new.

Great! That will save time and not be as boring!

At this point some people would leap into the new project. Let’s go!

Not so fast.

Will It Work? How Will You Know?

We have way to see if the new approach actually works. It should. But does it, really? How do you know? How do you prove it to yourself? Can you prove it to sceptics? Can you convince learners?

So: how do we actually measure the effect of the skills gap analysis?

• Do we have one group that does the training the old way and a new group that does the training via automated skills gap analysis?
• Do we measure hours spent training the old way and hours spent using skills gap analysis?
• Do we measure learner satisfaction?
• Do we measure knowledge retention?

You get the idea.

If we don’t decide on some way of measuring the effect of the skills gap analysis, the great new idea will be training and technology for its own sake.

Before you spend money on elearning, it’s working out how you will measure its effect. For example:

• how does it mitigate risk?
• how does it effect the bottom line?

Or, more specifically, does it …

• reduce hours lost to recertification training?
• reduce accidents?
• increase productivity (sales, items processed, etc)?
• increase learner satisfaction?

And so on.

Avoiding Making Training an End in Itself

Without some measurable ends like these in mind, ends beyond the training, the training can become an end in itself. Some symptoms of training being an end in itself:

• Employees do the training because they have to, not for a set of good reasons that make sense to them.
• Course materials have no direction. So they seem fluffy, vague and impractical. Theory for theory’s sake. Mostly irrelevant to the work at hand.
• Technology gets used because it’s there. Wow, this skills gap analysis feature sounds great! Is it really?
• And, in any business, the question arises: why are we spending X dollars on training? Is there a good answer? Can we talk dollars and cents? If not, training is seen as a net cost, with no financial upside, and slips down the list of priorities.

So it’s important to decide how you will measure the effect of the elearning project. It’s important to do this in concrete terms.

Before you start the project.

So that a sense of purpose is built into the training materials, the learning management system, the administrative procedures, and so on. And it needs to be toward a reasonable end beyond the training itself.

When someone asks you how the training is going, you can respond with stats, anecdotes and comparative studies; all demonstrating the expenditure is worth it. If it’s not worth it, stop doing it!

Be Careful!

Of course, you don’t want to be a slave to these measurements.

A big question that follows all this:

• What other effects is the training having that aren’t captured in those measurements you decided upon? What actually ends up happening?

It’s worth noting as many of those as you can before you start the project. During the project. And as you go. If these start to become really important, that will change things.

A good way to escape the possibly myopic effects of focusing on particular measurements is to also capture anecdotal evidence from learners. This is all about getting feedback.