I was looking for a summary of the top 10 mistakes people make in designing e-learning solutions. I couldn't find one (no doubt there is one, somewhere) but thought I would list my own. I am sure there are more - maybe you can help me make it a top 20!
- Overlooking the implementation: there’s an important distinction between completion rates and learning. Be that as it may, completion rates are still likely to feature in an evaluation of the success of your programme – especially when it comes to compliance training. Completion rates are almost entirely determined by how you have implemented your course; more specifically the degree to which you used a combination of elements such as: marketing, reporting, administration, hard prerequisites, senior sponsors and the appraisal process. It is perfectly possible to create a mediocre course and achieve 100% completion, or a fantastic course and achieve 5% completion rates. It’s all in the implementation.
- Building courses: it’s usually an illusion to think that providing information or changing attitudes will result in behavioural changes. Generally the only thing that changes behaviour is changing behaviour. As a result we often find ourselves trying to mitigate a problem instead of tackling the process that gives rise to it, and for that reason it would be better if we were more squarely engaged in performance consulting than learning consultancy. But within the area of learning there’s also a healthy shift away from the course format sweeping our profession - and which I would like to reflect here. It’s great that the conventional model of bolting a 30 minute ppt-style course onto the front of a face-to-face experience is giving way to something more sophisticated. Instead of courses we are building resources: interviews, conceptual animations, scenarios, drama, best-practice case-studies – in short a kit of parts that can be recombined as required. They may be used in advance of an event, as part of a comms or awareness-raising exercise, in classroom sessions, or by the line managers in discussion with their teams. The advantage of this format is not just flexibility (including mobile) but the ‘tone of voice’ – courses which use presenters or voice-overs or scripting to say ‘I am the teacher and this is what I want you to learn’. In this model you can still build an assessment (better still a challenge) – but as an independent asset, to be used in combination with a range of resources.
- Dumping information: there’s this curious script for what happens with learning: someone important says ‘people need to know this stuff – go talk to Bob’, Bob pushes a document across the table, we employ the dark arts of Instructional Design in producing something whose effectiveness is never measured. My response to this tendency has been ‘Story-Scenario-Simulation’: our job is not merely to summarise information, but to construct experiences which make it clear why anyone should care enough to invest their precious time in learning. Forget learning styles – anyone who thinks people can’t learn from a pdf if they are of a mind to do so is living in cloud-cuckoo land. It’s the why of learning that people are struggling with, not the how.
- Ignoring the audience: I still do this sometimes – time pressure and the insistence of subject-matter expert can lead us to overlook the central importance of our ultimate customers in the equation, and instead produce something that merely satisfies the expectations of our proximal stakeholders. Often this ends up being ‘on message’ but ineffective – a course which says all the right things but fails to tackle the real problems. I don’t think is simply a call for more Training Needs Analysis – there is something about understanding a particular organisational sub-culture; what calls them to learn, what challenges they face, what they like and who they respect that isn’t captured by TNA alone.
- Not making use of informal learning: so by now we all realise that around 80% of the learning is happening around us, in the informal/natural learning space. Whilst this doesn’t necessarily mean there is no role for formal learning (Andrew Joly points out this may make the formal stuff even more important), it is possible to build learning programmes that blend formal and informal elements to greater effect: in the BBC’s production safety programme members of the ERastenders production team are interviewed in situ then embedded into a 3D panorama – the BBC Colleges of Journalism and Production are also good examples of learning that is more about sharing expertise amongst peers, or engagement with a community of practice. It is still easy to create isolated and isolating learning interventions which neither incorporate informal elements nor link to established informal activities. And it is not enough merely to try to create and control an informal learning space: most attempts at social media for learning fail through insufficient consideration of content-generation-strategies. Here, again learning professionals used to more formal roles have an invaluable part to play in creating an informal experience.
- Failure to challenge: sometime I simply repeat the Cognitive Arts matra: ‘GOAL-FAIL-FIX’. Find out how people fail (i.e. the reason why people are doing the training), build these into a scenario/simulation (Cathy Moore has probably done the best job of expanding on this) and allow people to fail. You might even say our job is to ‘engineer failure’. Learning happens as a result of failing at these challenges, and not because we say ‘FAIL!’ but because we demonstrate the consequences of decisions that the learner takes and provide additional feedback. The Learning Design Toolkit research we undertook confirmed that learners want us to provide them with situations in which it is safe to fail, whether these be role-plays or online scenarios. One last point on this: it is the challenge element that is the distinction between ‘just-in-case’ and ‘just-in-time’ learning – we don’t always have to engineer a challenge ourselves, ideally learning is supplied to enable people to tackle a real and pressing challenge that is not one we’ve cooked up ourselves.
- Not considering the emotional landscape: what is an ‘emotional landscape’? It’s what you’re describing when someone asks you ‘How was the movie?’ and you say ‘It took a long time to get started’ or ‘it dragged a bit in the middle’. In my experience 90% of courses open with something moderately entertaining (e.g. a video) then flatline for the remaining 30 minutes. There are any number of ways of avoiding this so I won’t spell them out here – but rather just say: if you had to draw a line representing the emotional landscape of your course, what would this look like? Why does this matter? I have tried to set this out in the ‘affective context’ stuff elsewhere in this blog, but broadly speaking it matters because learning is almost entirely governed by subtle emotional cues. No cues, no learning.
- Outsourcing it: bit of a contentious one, this. I do believe that a well-formed online strategy is a three-tiered triangle. At the top are online resources best built by highly capable elearning suppliers. At the bottom are resources generated by learning staff and employees and shared between peers. But the middle tier should be a healthy chunk of learning content created by the organisation itself, using rapid development tools and techniques. For smaller audiences, tighter budgets or quicker turnarounds outsourcing activity is costly and inefficient and runs the risk of distancing key stakeholders from the creative process. True, quality is an issue – but relevance, timeliness, cost and client involvement are important too. I see plenty of poorly-worded emails, but am left in no doubt that we are more productive in a world without typing pools. The future of learning professionals should be a sound grasp of the techniques and tools that can be used in creating learning content – such as video skills, for example.
- Shoddy visual design: users will get a sense of the quality of an online course in much the same way as they get a sense of the quality of a face-to-face course from the venue. True, this can be grossly misleading, but if you underestimate the impact of good typography, layout and design in your screens then you do so at your peril. It’s not enough to know a bit of flash, powerpoint and a smattering of instructional design principles: I often find myself wondering whether or not to use a supplier based on the standard of their graphical design expertise – because the rest can be taken care of.
- Poor content management techniques: this is more of a technical shortcoming. Put simply ‘Don’t build some inscrutable tangle of flash files that we have no way of editing when the text changes or updating when our branding moves on’. There’s also a point around accessibility here, where good content-management (such as the use of XML for content) can really make a difference to users of assistive technology.
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