The Impact of the Current Economic Crisis on E-Learning: February ‘09 LCBBQ

This month’s Learning Circuits Blog Big Question asks

What is the impact of the economy on you and your organization? What are you doing as a result?

In response, I returned to a post I wrote about a year ago. While reflecting on the LCBBQ I formed the view that the argument I outlined then bears repeating now. Where appropriate I have updated the article to reflect recent developments as the Recession turned into Depression.

The dialectic I am presenting here can be summarized in the following manner: will the positive economic, organizational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses an economic crisis? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

So what's changed in the e-learning industry since the last recession in 2001? I've outlined some discussion points below:

1. First of all: Traditional business practice
2. Developments in Infrastructure & Hardware
3. The E-learning Hype curve
4. Refinements in Content Development Methodologies
5. The Rise if the Read/Write Web
6. The PlayStation Generation - Digital Natives in the workplace

Scroll down to find out more about each of these points.
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Traditional business practice
Historically, when a slowdown or company rationalization occurs, the first against the wall are the folks in the PR, marketing, and training departments. Typically, individuals and organizations revert to previously-learned behaviors in tough times; this usually means going through the process of carrying out tried-and-tested, though not necessarily logical responses to the problems put in front of them. The rationale is as follows:

• Profits are down
• Revenue projections aren't great for the next 12/18 months
• We need to cut our costs
• We need to keep the guys that make the widgets (we need to have product to sell)
• We need to keep the managers of these people (or productivity will go down)
• We need to keep Human Resources in place to manage everyone obviously (it's just a coincidence that I - that is the decision-maker - work in HR!)

• What about those training people? High travel costs for the ILT guys, they pull people out of work for 3 days to go on courses. Large budgets spent on implementing and maintaining an LMS/LCMS, third-party e-learning libraries, custom courseware etc, but they do seem to add value to the organization. And let's face it, they don't really improve the quality of our product, because they never convince us with their ROI metrics...
• Outcome: tea and sympathetic chat, and the Training team get their pink slips / P45s.

Sadly, I reckon that this will be strategy undertaken by a significant number of organizations over the next year or so. However....

...and it's a big however.

Let's look at the evidence for factors that have changed in the e-learning industry since 2001 and the recession following the Dot-Com Crash.

Infrastructure & Hardware
More-or-less general availability of high-speed internet access just wasn't there in 2001. To take the example of the company I worked for at the time, our high-quality courseware was developed in Authorware and Director and delivered to customers on CD-ROM for distribution via their intranet or accessed directly from the disk. Our on-line courseware was a 'lite' version of the CD material - not out of choice, but because of the limited functionality that could be provided to a user via a 56k connection.

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio - hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn't find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colors, 800x600 pixel displays. And so on.

In short, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

The e-learning hype curve
This brings me neatly to the e-learning hype curve (see Figure 1). Kevin Kruse described 2001 as the year that

...brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of "blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

I would suggest through familiarization and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery). Given this environment, organizations are now more willing to invest in e-learning as part of their overall training strategy. But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

A year ago I wrote that:

I can't answer that question right now. I suspect that I will be able to answer it 12 months from now, because there will be evidence as to whether decision makers consider e-learning to be a core requirement that effectively meets organizations' training needs.

In light of recent research by Bersin & Associates among others, it seems that The Powers That Be in organizations have judged online training to be found wanting, and are responding by cutting budgets and reassessing learning & development strategies, apparently by beginning to disintermediate training by using non-formal and informal knowledge transfer methods in place of ‘e-training,’ LMSs, and VLEs.

Content development methodologies
I would assert that there is a real opportunity for e-learning here (if L&D professionals are in a to position stand their ground). Without going into the history of this too much, the development of (relatively) easy-to-use authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate (and a whole raft of others), Rapid E-Learning development methodology and the disintermediation principle means that e-learning has fewer up-front costs associated with it than at the turn of the century.

Similarly, if it's done correctly it can be argued that ongoing maintenance and support costs are lower than they ever have been. By developing content with smaller, more flexible teams, the value proposition of e-learning has been enhanced, and the total cost of ownership has been significantly reduced. Outside of e-learning, the take-up of podcasting and streamed media on sites like Blogger and YouTube demonstrates that this ease-of-use of tools and technologies has extended into the community at large.

The Read/Write Web
Who would have thought in 2000 that blogging, social networking, wikis and podcasts would be as big a part of life as they are now? At the start of the century, the Web (and e-learning) could at best be described as a half-duplex medium; it was pretty much all one-way traffic. The development of information platforms has facilitated knowledge-sharing, folksonomies, social interaction, and, key to all this, reciprocity.

We now live in a multiplex world of many voices and ideas, mediated by the internet. At the forefront in using these web technologies is the e-learning industry. By using these tools to develop content I feel we can demonstrate quite effectively that e-learning has a value now that it did not have a decade ago. I would assert that this is particularly true if you take a social-constructivist approach to learning. By the way, I'm happy to entertain debates about the role of formal as opposed to non-formal and informal learning in this environment.

The PlayStation Generation
Concomitant with the read/write web is the PlayStation generation that have grown up over the last number of years. In his seminal essay Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Marc Prensky declares:

...students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Extending from this, there is a generation of workers who are comfortable with and practiced in the concepts and use of e-learning - take a look at the resources available on www.skoool.ie, an initiative for second-level students in Ireland. I was involved in the development of the first iteration of this site, and it's changed a lot (for the better) since we took those first steps creating it 8 years ago. Similarly in third-level education, there have been significant developments in on-line learning, and I think that it's fair to say that it has become quite embedded in the pedagogy employed by universities: tools like Moodle enable students to upload coursework, take tests, build their own knowledgebases and wikis, and have on-line discussions through a single point of access.

This generation is in the workplace right now. It will expect to learn new skills as their careers develop using the tools that they have always learned on in the past: that is, by using e-learning.

Conclusion
This is a blog entry, not an essay. But consider other factors including transport costs and training in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment ("e-learning" becomes "eco-learning" anyone or even ‘economical-learning’?). I think that if they are in a position to do so, learning professionals are repositioning themselves to re-use the skills they’ve acquired in different contexts – perhaps undertaking their activities from a different platform, or through working in a different domain of expertise.

Ultimately, I would say that all anyone can do at the moment is keep their powder dry and hope for the best in the short term, while preparing for what may be a completely different business environment when the green shoots of recovery finally emerge.

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Rapid E-learning: using the 80/20 rule to prioritize learning needs

Today's post concludes my short review of Kineo's 80/20 approach to rapid learning content prioritization and development.
Previously, I considered how the 80/20 Rule could be applied to e-learning, and suggested that Juran's Axiom of "the vital few and the trivial many" meant that we could say 80 percent of learning results originate from 20 percent of inputs for any activity or process. For example, 80 percent of an organization sales come from 20 percent of customers, or 80 percent of performance in an organisation is attributable to 20 percent of workers.

In the learning domain, this rule can be applied to the process of training prioritization. In organizations the purpose of learning and development is to improve worker performance. There are many ways and opportunities for employees to improve their performance:

• reducing procedural mistakes
• identifying new customers
• influencing the behavior of others
• reducing error in products

Effective training should focus on providing what’s necessary to enable people to improve performance. However, the 80/20 rule suggests that not all performance improvement opportunities merit the same focus. Rather it suggests that 20% of opportunities, if addressed 80% of the total potential value of a training solution (assuming the ‘perfect’ solution will address 100% of opportunities completely. Focusing training efforts on that top 20% is a far more efficient model than attempting to cover the remaining 80%. For rapid e-learning with a relatively short duration, having this focus is critical.

In this context, Kineo recommend a value-driven model for identifying and prioritising opportunities for rapid e-learning to influence performance that will contribute the most to organizational performance.

According to Stephen Walsh from Kineo, this process has a number of key activities:

• Ensure that you have identified prioritized needs that rapid e-learning is best placed to address
• Use the 80/20 rule to guide your analysis of the prioritization of training
• Use the three-step approach (see Figure 1) to conduct rapid training needs analysis

1. Identify the full range of performance improvement opportunities
2. Establish criteria and rank accordingly with experts – concentrating your efforts on top 20%
3. Translate to objectives and seek approval

• Use rapid tools (check-lists) and rapid methods (phone, workshops, virtual classroom, surveys) to gather your data.

Figure 1. Value-driven model for rapid training needs prioritisation (courtesy Kineo)

For a more detailed look at this approach, go to Kineo's website, or download the Rapid Guide on How to Rapidly Identify Training Needs.

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Rapid E-Learning and the 80/20 Rule

You'll know if you're a regular reader of The E-Learning Curve Blog that I have discussed the usage of the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 Rule) in previous blog posts. Elsewhere in the e-learning blogosphere, Tony Karrer at the eLearning Technology blog has also discussed what he calls the "Corporate Learning Long Tail" in some depth.

Over the weekend, I encountered a very useful paper describing a practical application of the 80/20 rule (though not, as we'll see, the Pareto Principle).

Now read on...

My experience of the e-learning industry is that the best and most effective practitioners are always looking for even more efficient content development methodologies, media production technologies, and approaches to content distribution to enable them to design, develop and deliver content to learners. In this regard, British e-learning development house Kineo always seem to have something interesting to say about the potential uses - and value - of Rapid E-learning, and one particular piece published in this month's Newsletter struck me as being particularly useful. In the article How to Rapidly Identify Training Needs Stephen Walsh discusses a strategy to pinpoint and prioritize training needs - "rapidly of course."

The value of any learning intervention is the change it achieves. If you know where the business challenge is, and you can pinpoint how learning can change behaviour, correct costly errors, and improve performance at the right time, you're setting yourself up for laser-accurate learning.

In his seminal article Rapid E-learning: Disintermediate or die! Ted Cocheu asserts that:

Learning is rapidly changing from today’s hierarchically-driven, curriculum-based training process where instructional designers and trainers intervene to transform subject matter knowledge into courseware, into a “flattened” world where experts transfer their knowledge more directly to those who need it. In this brave new flattened learning world, training professionals will focus more time on capturing and transferring expert knowledge than developing formal courses.

To support these changes in the design, development, and delivery of content, a number of factors need to be considered:

• Speed is king.
• Knowledge is exploding.
• Budgets are shrinking
• Classrooms are not scalable.
• Workplace learning is informal.
• People forget.
• Key knowledge is proprietary.

Rapid E-learning "changes the development model, leverages new tools, and dramatically changes the economics of content development" (p.2). By focusing on specific learning needs, e-learning developers can generate a much higher return on investment in training when compared to content designed using a more traditional ISD-based approach.

The methodology suggested by Kineo is designed to assist learning professionals identify and prioritize learning needs that are appropriate for rapid e-learning in organizations using a "value-based analysis."

This will get you to the outcome that a more detailed training needs would, but in a fraction of the time, by focusing specifically on the greatest points of pain and potential to add value. Identifying those key points means taking an 80/20 approach to needs analysis.

The Kineo interpretation of the Pareto Principle is based upon Dr. Joseph M. Juran's pioneering work in Quality Management in the 1930s and '40s. He "reduced to writing" his generally applicable observation (which I suggest that we should really call Juran's Axiom) of the relative importance of the "vital few and trivial many." Juran observed that in any activity or set of tasks, a few (20 percent) of the functions are vital, and many (80 percent) are trivial. However, as he stated in his 1975 article The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa he "...mistakenly applied the wrong name to the principle." In Pareto's case it meant one-fifth of the people owned four-fifth's of the wealth. In Juran's research for the US Government, he identified 20% of defects in a production process causing 80% of the quality issues. Project Managers know that 20 percent of the work (the first 10 percent and the last 10 percent) consume 80 percent of time and resources. Extending from this, Juran asserted that the 80/20 Rule could be generalized, from the science of management to the physical world, and indeed to learning and development processes.

In this context, 20 percent of learning interventions, if properly identified, should address 80 percent of the learning needs of an organization, and 80 percent total potential value of a training solution (assuming the ‘perfect’ solution will address 100% of learning.

Focusing training efforts on that top 20% is a far more efficient model than attempting to cover the remaining 80%. For rapid e-learning with a relatively short duration, having this focus is critical.

(How to Rapidly Identify Training Needs p.2)

As such, implementing a value-driven model based on the 80/20 Rule for identifying and prioritizing learning interventions can be a highly effective means to enhance worker performance in an organization.

More..

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References:

Cocheau, T. (2005) Rapid eLearning: Disintermediate or Die! [Internet] Available from: http://ww.elearningforum.com/downloads/rapid_elearning.doc [Accessed 15th May 2006]

Juran, J.M. (1975) The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa [Internet] Available from: http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/docs/the-non-pareto-principle.pdf [Accessed 30 August 2008]

Walsh, S. (2008) How to Rapidly Identify Training Needs [Internet] Available from: http://www.kineo.com/documents/Kineo_Rapid_Guide_Identify_Needs.pdf [Accessed 30 August 2008]

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Definition of E-learning: Content Authoring

Today I will be treating of the final phrase of Don Morrison's definition of e-learning,

The continuous assimilation of knowledge and skills by adults stimulated by synchronous and asynchronous learning events – and sometimes Knowledge management outputs – which are authored, delivered engaged with, supported and administered using internet technologies.

(2004, p.4)

I would suggest that the process of authoring, delivering, engaging with, supporting and administering content to be time-critical components of the e-learning delivery chain. E-learning can be authored in a time-frame that is appropriate for the audience – with some of the newer methodologies like Rapid e-Learning, easier-to-use content creation tools means that subject matter experts (SMEs) are now in a position to author content in a way that was not possible a decade ago: disintermediation of the traditional instructional design process enables experts to deliver content to where it is needed as soon as it’s possible to do so (Cocheau, 2005). In the same fashion, Jay Cross describes “eLearning is learning on Internet Time, the convergence of learning and networks” (2004, p.104); organisations working on internet time are in a position to develop using e-learning in ways that are not possible to achieve via any other learning or training approach. Having elaborated upon the justification for the chosen definition of the term ‘e-learning’, I'm going to dedicate a number of posts to non-formal learning and why you're using it (even if you don't know you're using it).

References:

Cocheau, T. (2005) Rapid eLearning: Disintermediate or Die! [Internet] Available from: http://ww.elearningforum.com/downloads/rapid_elearning.doc [Accessed 15th May 2006]

Cross, J. (2004) An informal history of eLearning. On the Horizon [Internet] 12(3). pp.103-110. Available from: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewPDF.jsp?Filename=html/
Output/Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Pdf/2740120301.pdf [Accessed 20th February, 2007]

Morrison, D. (2004) E-Learning Strategies: how to get implementation and delivery right first time, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Rapid Elearning: Strategies to get SMEs up to speed on e-learning authoring tools

I had a fantastic time discussing the benefits (and otherise) of Rapid E-Learning with the National College of Ireland's Higher Diploma in Computing & Education students last week. I'll get back to the lecture proper in another post; today I want to talk about the Lab we carried out in the second part of the lecture.
One of the key aspects of developing content using a rapid e-learning apporach is for learning professionals to manage the disintermediation of the producer role to the SME.

What is disintermediation? Ted Cocheau defines it in his seminal article Rapid E-Learning: Disintemdiate or Die:

Wikipedia has the following definition: “In economics, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: cutting out the middle man” (schitt aus dem Zwischenhandler). Shopping on the Internet is a great example—rather than driving to a store (the middleman) and paying the additional profit to the merchant, you can now purchase goods online directly from the producer.

What does that mean for training and learning? In the learning process, the subject matter expert (SME) is the source of the knowledge—the producer. Instructional designers are the middlemen who extract that knowledge from the SME, develop it into courseware, and finally make it available to the learner—the consumer. Disintermediation enables SMEs to make their valuable knowledge more directly available to learners by eliminating the intermediate designers and the courseware development process. It reduces the time and cost significantly, is much more scalable to deal with the tidal wave of new knowledge (by eliminating the courseware bottleneck), and is more authentic (coming directly from the source). This is the only answer in a world where speed is king, knowledge is exploding, and budgets are not keeping pace.

So the challenge for my lecture last week was: "How do I give rookie learning specialists a taste of the rapid e-learning approach?" I had to take into account such elements as their relative lack of experience in the e-learning industry, that they had only 9 weeks experience using multimedia apps like Flash and Dreamweaver, a similar introduction-level set of skills using LMSs, and were just beginning to come to grips with the core concepts of learning theory, starting as they were right at the beginning with behaviourism and cognitivism, and moving forward from there into constructivism, applied, active, holistic and more modern interpretations about how humans learn.

The first section of the lecture was a presentation; this component provided context for the students. To reinforce this, I set a practial exercise using the rapid e-learning approach - in essence, they would become the SMEs, using the authoring tool I chose (Adobe Captivate 3):

The Task

• Create a learning object using Captivate
• Objective: develop a demonstration to instruct a learner how to format and print a document in Microsoft Word
• Guidelines:
• Your demo must contain the following elements
• Onscreen text
• Animation
• Interactivity
• Transport controls and progress bar
• Format
• The published file must be a Shockwave Flash (SWF) file
• SWF must play back in a browser such as IE or Mozilla

Task Breakdown

• Capture your content
• Launch MS Word (your target application) and enter some text in a Word doc. Save the file.
• Launch Captivate
• Select Software Simulation >> Application >> OK
• Select your Word doc from the drop-down list
• Set record mode to demonstration
• Click on Record
• Record your demo
• Change the layout from Portrait to Landscape
• Change the paper size from A4 to US Letter
• Preview and “print” the document
• When you’re done, end and save your Captivate file

Edit Your Content

• In Captivate, open your recording
• Click on the Edit tab
• Your demo is displayed
• Select the first slide
• Select Insert >> Blank Slide
• A new slide will appear in position #2
• Drag and drop it above the first slide
• Select Insert >> Text Caption
• Enter some introduction text outlining the objectives of the lesson and position the text on the page
• Review your captured demo, editing out any extraneous slides
• Add a conclusion slide at the end of the demo
• Save your demonstration

Tip: You can preview your demo at any time by selecting File >> Preview >> [option] from the list

Publishing your content

• Select Project >> Resize Project
• In the Size panel chose Width: 1024 Height: 768
• In the If New Size is Smaller pane, select the Rescale radio button and check the checkbox
• Click on Finish and click on OK on the warning dialog
• Click on File >> Publish
• Select Flash (SWF) as the output option
• Give your project a name and save location
• Check Export HTML and Flash 8 as the output options
• Review the information in the Project Information pane
• Choose a look and feel for the demo
• Click on the Preferences button
• Choose options from the tabs
• When done, click on Publish

Some Things To Try Yourself

• Add some audio to your demo
• Try adding narration to your demo
• Try adding sound effects to give learners feedback
• Questions
• Add in a progress test half-way through the demo
• Add a lesson test at the end of the demo
• Interactivity
• Add in Back and Next buttons
• Create branching – what happens is a learner give a wrong answer to a test question?
• Publish Options
• Try generating a lesson plan
• Try creating a CD-based version of your demo

The purpose of this approach is to introduce new tools and ways of working to SMEs who may feel initially overwhelmed at the thought of transferring their skills and knowledge (in a format suitable for e-learning). By introducing a rapid e-learning approach through an application they are familiar with (in this case MS Word), as well as a task they are comfortable carrying out (i.e. printing a document), the SME is introduced to the e-learning authoring tool in a manageable fashion. You can begin to orient them to use the tool in a context that does not have the cognitive load of carrying out a more complex task, such as they will probably have to undertake when creating content "for real."