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Features

Published January 2008

E-Learning Is Dead. Long Live E-Learning!

  

  Sushant Buttan

E-learning has meant many things to many people over the past 15 years. There have been many versions, translations and interpretations, but has it really made an impact on learning effectiveness? From the “shovelware” days of the 1990s, when content was simply shoveled onto the Web and passed off as e-learning, to the current day, when there is an overdose of technology-laden course content, the e-learning industry has left many promises unfulfilled.

Today, corporate executives, training managers and HR professionals are resting on the success of e-learning. Some have even gone out and declared, “Innovation within e-learning is dead!” Paradoxically, there is a significant interest in what the future holds for e-learning with the advent of Web 2.0, a brand-new generation of the workforce and partial acknowledgment that something went wrong with the e-learning of the past.

One of the biggest challenges for most of this e-learning has been the lack of educational courseware that was designed on the basis of sound instructional-design principles. Massive numbers of e-learning courses were produced with technology-based “templates” for the Internet. “Efficiency” became the mantra. E-learning salespeople spoke of how to efficiently produce and distribute e-learning and train hundreds of thousands of employees.

Someone once explained a concept called “Fordism” to me — that is, the mass production of large numbers of inexpensive automobiles using an assembly line that can build a car in 98 minutes. To take classroom-based courses and simply reapply them to a technology-based delivery platform under the guise of efficiency was taking “Fordism” to a whole new level. While the courses may have been cheap and fast from a development standpoint, they wound up costing the company much more due to their poor adoption by employees and millions of dollars in opportunity costs lost for the company.

As the industry struggled with learner retention, new terms like “course stickiness” and “butts in seats” became popular. Questions such as “If you build it, will they come?” and “If they come, will they stay?” became common. The e-learning industry found solutions to knowledge retention by openly discussing topics like better interactivity and user interface. Meanwhile, companies relied on flashy graphics, and seminars and conferences were filled with breakout sessions on what needed to be done to improve e-learning effectiveness.

Sadly, most companies missed the point. Instead of focusing on the real problem — the need for a new model of learning design effectiveness — the industry spent most of its time on how much more Las Vegas-like the courses could become, with neon lights and razzle-dazzle to suck in the unsuspecting learner.

Let’s shift the focus momentarily from e-learning vendors to the buyers of e-learning design in corporations. Training managers invested millions in e-learning content and infrastructure because they saw everyone else doing the same thing. It was a gold rush of learning, and the Web was the promised land.