The early days of e-learning were product-driven, and the dialogue about e-learning took place primarily among vendors who were heavily funded by investment capital. Competing vendors touted the benefits of their infrastructure technology, but little attention was paid to the issues surrounding implementation or to the usage of e-learning by the end users. Often it was only after the introduction of e-learning within an organization that a company came to grips with the fact that e-learning is really a change management process. Included in a change management strategy must be a detailed analysis and action plan to obtain buy-in, ensure the implementation, secure alignment with a real and pressing business need, determine measurement and marketing issues, and put into place a tracking system to update management. A successful e-learning launch requires close consideration of all these processes that support an effective organizational transition.
Now the main challenges that are addressed in The e-Learning Fieldbook include answers to the following questions:
If we build it, will they come?
If they come, will they learn?
If they learn, will it matter to the business?
These questions are interlinked in the chapters and case studies that follow. The book presents a commonality of experience and shared perceptions about how to successfully launch an e-learning program. Several themes taken from the book can be summarized as follows:
e-Learning should be regarded as a change initiative that has the potential to impact business results.
While many of the case studies point to the need to use e-learning to train a distributed audience at a reduced cost, the successful initiatives identify the need to reduce the time-to competency in launching new products and services. At STMicroelectronics, this meant launching an e-learning version of its Fundamentals of Semiconductor Technology to increase the speed with which its workforce improved their skills and competencies. The goal was not simply to obtain a return on investment from reduced travel costs, but to significantly change the speed-to competency and thereby impact the business.
e-Learning is a developmental journey that results in a new way of learning.
Successful blended learning programs redefine learning as work-based activities engaging people in communities of practice. For example, the Unilever Leaders into Action Program, a five month leadership development journey, was delivered as a blended model, balancing online work with face-to-face classroom sessions and coaching. Learning took place when Unilever managers worked on authentic problems that were relevant to their business. Importantly, the journey was both individual and team-based and supported by a robust virtual learning community of online coaches. Learning was more than what happened online, or even onsite. It was about learning from others in the workplace and understanding how to contribute as an active member of an online learning community.
Successful e-learning initiatives devote time and resources to developing robust learning support services.
If content was king in the 1990s, the new mantra is learning support services are deal breakers. The greatest impact on e-learning retention is the creation of appropriate learning support services, which start with a 24-hour Help Desk but go beyond that to include:
A library of e-learning courses
Online coaching and mentoring
Online advisors
An e-bookstore
Discussion forums
Online assessments
Online pre- and post-tests
Access to local and national career planning information and credentialing
As Sir John Daniel former Chancellor of Open University, the UK’s largest university, said, “The one thing I have learned over the years in watching the growth of Open University is the importance of online student services. Students use the Internet more to engage in administrative transactions, make course selections, read digitized books, and communicate with faculty and peers than to study course material online.” Although support is frequently seen as crucial to the learning experience, the degree and effectiveness of what is offered has been haphazard in how these services are provided in most organizations.
Successful e-learning programs come with a new language, a set of different expectations, and a new group of vendors.
The case studies detailed in this Fieldbook illustrate that successful e-learning entails a host of teaching and learning practices that are convenient for the learner but are far more labor intensive for the faculty and training staff. Creating courses, maintaining chat rooms, developing a Web-based community, administering online assessments and responding to e-mails from e-learners around the clock require far more time and energy than the development and maintenance of traditional training programs. What has become clear is the need to develop an array of outsource partners, who can assist an organization in supporting an online learning community.
The target audience for e-learning is moving to customers and even to end users.
Numerous e-learning programs that have met with success have targeted customers, sales channel partners, and end users. This has been far more frequent with companies involved in product launches where training a distributed sales force or sales partners can significantly improve productivity and business results. But perhaps the real opportunity is to use e-learning for end user training by extending product knowledge directly to consumers. Training is not yet viewed by marketing and sales executives as integral to their success, but in the hands of a creative Chief Learning Officer (CLO), end-user training can reap bottom-line results.
Measurement and marketing plans are crucial for proving results to top management.
In all the case studies represented in this Fieldbook, there were processes and plans in place to track the results of an investment in e-learning. Importantly, this was with results specific to achieving strategic business goals, rather than large ROI percentage increases.
New skills are needed for a digital age.
As you read through the book and accompanying case studies, it is important to note just how significantly the job of a Chief Learning Officer has evolved to create and sustain an e-learning initiative. This small group of first generation Chief Learning Officers has shown the type of new skills required in the digital age. These skills can be thought of as:
Entrepreneur— Being a visionary and champion for the creation of a new learning culture within the organization. This means that CLOs must see themselves as builders of a new competency—e-learning strategy, design, and implementation. They must be excited by the opportunity to grow a business and build a new network of vendors. These new vendors extend beyond the traditional training vendors to include traditional universities that have a demonstrated competency in distance learning, for-profit universities, publishers, technology infrastructure firms, online community building firms, learner support service firms, and online assessment firms. This spirit of newness, adventure, and risk taking is key to starting a new e-learning function within an organization.
Change Manager— Aligning diverse groups around a common learning vision and preparing the organization for change. To a large degree, a Chief Learning Officer must see the big picture of what the CEO is trying to accomplish by investing in learning and then be able to translate this big picture with a razor focus into a set of action steps and deliverable results. Of course, these results must correspond to the projects and processes that will give an organization its competitive edge. For example, the driving impetus to establish an e-learning program at Liberty Group, a South African insurance firm, was the necessity to have all sales people accredited in line with the insurance industry’s new legal requirements. What’s more, this accreditation had to be delivered within a six month time period to a geographically dispersed audience. The results exceeded the goal, and the accreditations continue on a monthly basis.
Business Manager— Providing fiscal management to a function that has been traditionally a back-office cost center. According to Michael Bleyhl, Director of e-Learning at Invensys, a technology and manufacturing firm, “At Invensys, we decided to bundle elearning into our customer’s service agreement so we had a competitive edge in the marketplace.” The result was the creation of a value-added enhancement to a service agreement. This type of business-driven thinking is critical to transitioning a training function from a cost center to a profit and loss center.
Learning Technologist— Understanding how to integrate the mix of technologies needed for successful blended learning programs. Most of the media and tools illustrated in the book are a combination of several types of self-paced e-learning and live e-learning, so a Chief Learning Officer must understand when and how to integrate these into an elearning platform. This means that the Chief Learning Officer has to be sufficiently informed about technologies to evaluate what works, to judge when to adapt a technology to local needs, and to address demanding integration and implementation issues.
Advocate for the e-Learner— Finally, the Chief Learning Officer must decide to be an advocate for the individual e-learner. This means building a support system to assist the e-learner in communicating with faculty and peers, having access to online advisory services, online tutoring, e-libraries, e-bookstores, customized digitized books, and workbooks. E-learners should not have to feel they are learning alone at their computer. Rather, to retain their motivation and interest in learning online, they must feel part of a community that understands and serves their learning goals.
The experiences and the insights of all the organizations included here will provide you with the tools and networking community you need to further your e-learning implementation plans.
I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have. I look forward to connecting with the readers around the globe.
Jeanne Meister, Author and Consultant
Jeannemeister212@aol.com
New York City