MLTTG Meeting The Current State of eLearning in Law Firms October 27, 2009
Presenter Jeffrey Roach | President EncoreTech, Inc. jroach@encoretech.com
Session Description From simple quick reference cards to sophisticated software simulations, most of us are augmenting our training and support programs with eLearning and performance support materials. In this session, we'll take a look at what seems to be working, what might work in the future, and what has never worked at all. We'll also take some time to explore the nuances between eLearning and performance support, and the different roles each might serve in our overall program. Are there tools and delivery mediums that are inherently better suited to one over the other? Good question--and that's just the beginning. What's a reasonable amount of time to invest in an online lesson? What role does rapid development play in designing a successful program? How do we overcome user's apathy to eLearning learning? We'll tackle all of these (and more!) in our never-ending quest to evolve our training programs and take our eLearning to the next level. MLTTG OCT 09/Roach
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Understanding Your Reviewer’s Tilt Quick, what’s your immediate reaction to this statement? Do you nod your head and agree wholeheartedly, or is your first impulse to roll your eyes and mutter something under your breath? Your gut reaction goes a long way to revealing your reviewer’s tilt. Simply put, your reviewer’s tilt is your built-in, subjective, sometimes irrational response to the matter at hand. It’s like when you ask a friend about a new comedy and they begin with, “well, I really don’t like comedies.” You’re likely going to automatically filter their opinion through this new information. Your reviewer’s tilt is a summary of all of your previous experiences with the subject matter and your resulting bias. So what does this have to do with you and eLearning? Understanding your visceral reaction to eLearning helps you to temper your public reaction. In other words, if you love eLearning you tend to believe it can solve every problem, whereas if you don’t like it at all, you tend to dismiss it’s potential as part of any training strategy. Once you take a moment to recognize and acknowledge your reviewer’s tilt, you can examine the problem more objectively and figure out what role eLearning may play in your solution.
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My Reviewer’s Tilt I’m cautiously optimistic about including elements of eLearning in a training program. Part of this comes from my previous experience in the Learning Management System world, where I was exposed to the sorry state of standards that allow interoperability between eLearning modules and the LMS. Still, I think eLearning can be a very effective tool in certain situations. In other situations, it’s not appropriate at all. eLearning is rarely the right choice when you need to persuade an audience to your viewpoint. That almost always requires the human touch. I hate to even use the phrase blended learning, because it’s been used to death, but most training problems will need to be tackled with both classroom learning and eLearning. In fact, perhaps it would be a lot healthier to stop spending so much time separating the two and just think about them both as learning. Each has unique strengths and weaknesses, and our job is to understand those and make smart choices for our projects.
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Relax, We are All Using Some Kind of eLearning Some of us feel as if we are woefully far behind the curve when it comes to eLearning. Take a closer look at what your doing, and you will likely discover that you are delivering all sorts of learning and performance support opportunities electronically--and that’s the broadest definition of eLearning. The trick is to gradually expand your toolset to include a wide variety of delivery vehicles. The more ways you have to reach your potential learners, the better off you’re going to be in the long run. Think about it as combination therapy--for your training program.
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Business Goals are the Only Goals that Matter While you may be passionate about helping people get better at working with the tools they need to perform their job efficiently, the people who sign off on your budget probably are not. They are interested in how this improved efficiency will help them to reduce headcount, or increase the amount of work the current staff is able to put out--in less time. Translating our hopes and dreams to business goals is a crucial step in securing funding for any training initiative. Luckily there are only three business goals for us to choose from. Increase Revenue. How will this initiative help us to make more money? Reduce Costs. How will this initiative help us to reduce our overall costs, and save money? Compliance. How will this initiative help us to reduce our risk? Spend a moment thinking about some of your past (or future) projects. Can you identify the underlying business goal? Here’s a hint: If we work exclusively in the software training world, most of our project are about reducing costs.
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Building a Vocabulary Now that we see eLearning is neither panacea nor pariah, and the importance of aligning our efforts with an identifiable business goal, let’s dig a little deeper. The next few slides are going to help us to create a common vocabulary for our community of users-namely, MLTTG members. It’s not crucially important that our definitions match the exact definition we might find in a textbook. What matters is that we agree on the definitions as a group, so that when we talk about what we are doing at our firms, we are all speaking the same language. Performance Support tools are designed to help learners perform their job. For our purposes we can think about Quick Reference Cards as an excellent example of Performance Support. We don’t really expect a QRC to serve as a true learning tool, but we hope it can get someone from A to B, once they’ve returned to their desk.
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Training For years I’ve struggled with Technology Trainers who are embarrassed to have the word trainer attached to their title. “I’m not a trainer,” I’ve heard them say, “I’m an educator.” Actually, you are a trainer--and there’s nothing wrong with that! Training is all about teaching skills and knowledge that are meant to be used immediately. There’s no homework, and typically the lessons are finite by design. They have a beginning, middle and end, and don’t depend upon an existing body of knowledge. In other words, if we had an hour together, I could teach you everything you ever wanted to know about headers and footers in Microsoft Word. Granted without some other basic document knowledge, you might not be able to do much with it, but you could make some amazing headers and footers! Almost all of the software skills training courses and classes that we develop revolve around training. If you take a moment to connect the tactical skills to some analytical skills, then you are flavoring your training with a bit of education.
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Education Soft skill training is an excellent example of education. Teaching someone how to provide good customer service, for example, is not something we can accomplish in an hour. Good customer service requires a broad range of skills that we develop throughout our career. Anything I might teach you is intended to add to this body of knowledge. So if education is about building durable skills and knowledge, what role can in it play in IT Training? In my estimation, our IT Training programs have focused exclusively on training, to the detriment of education. A lot of our learners know which button to push, but have no idea why they are pushing it. Taking the time to build up some durable knowledge around document production is going to be very time consuming, but in the end it will allow your learners to make better choices when things don’t go as planned. Think about your own learning program. How is the mix between training and education? Which delivery vehicle is best suited for each? Does education require classroom time? Can we effectively impart true knowledge through eLearning?
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Formal Learning Just as its name suggest formal learning is always intentional, with stated objectives and predetermined results. The learner is expected to complete the entire module, and completion is typically tracked. In addition, the module may include an assessment or quiz that measures how well the learner is able to apply what they have learned. If the goal of your eLearning is compliance, the learner will typically be asked to digitally certify (in some manner or another) that they have successfully completed the class and will comply with the policy or procedures outlined therein. Most of our instructor-led learning is formal. The students file into the room, fire up their computers and are taken through a very specific set of tasks. For this reason, it’s sometimes helpful to balance this out with some informal eLearning opportunities.
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Informal Learning In informal learning the focus shifts from the instructor/content to the learner. Any time the learner is allowed to set their own objectives, the learning is considered informal. Keep in mind that in informal learning success is dictated by the individual experience. One learner may be able to breeze through your module and skip all of the exercises, while another takes the time to practice was he or she has learned. In both cases, the learning has accomplished what you set out to do, which is to support the learner in their efforts, at their pace, and on their terms. If you are currently running any workshops as part of your ILT program, they are good examples of informal learning. In terms of eLearning your QRCs and other digital job aids also qualify. If you’ve developed non-linear simulations with a TOC that’s easily navigated by the user, that’s another great example of informal learning. Keep in mind that usage of informal learning is typically not tracked. The goal is not to finish the course, the goal is to get what you need an then move forward.
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Scenarios Based on what you’ve learned about formal and informal learning, training and education, instructorled and eLearning, what kind of program would you design for each of the scenarios above? Why? Being able to get a quick read on which strategy to pursue on any given learning project is a crucial skill that each of us needs to develop. When you begin to run everything through this filter, patterns begin to emerge that makes it easy for you to quickly surmise that the best approach for a particular situation is eLearning simulations or classroom workshops.
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Industry Accepted Ratios The numbers on the left in the above chart indicate the amount of time you need to invest in developing eLearning to yield the finished product on the right. In other words, 34 hours of development time would yield a 1 hour course. At EncoreTech we’ve discovered it typically takes about 4 hours to develop a 5 minute simulation using Captivate. This would end up as a ratio of 48:1 if we were developing a full hour of content. Of course all of our modules include full voice narration, which significantly increases the amount of time they take to produce. The numbers above don’t account for this kind of hybrid, but it would fall somewhere between the 33:1 for simple PowerPoint driven eLearning and 220:1 for standard eLearning. It’s important that you create a benchmark for how long it takes you to create different kinds of eLearning materials. When someone approaches you about developing eLearning in support of an upcoming project, you can be very clear about the amount of time/effort involved. In order to do this you’ll need templates, standards and a rock-solid methodology that works.
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Instructional System Design Process ISD is a formal process for creating eLearning that includes four phases: Definition. Conduct a needs analysis and set goals. Design. Choose the vehicle and design and develop the learning strategy. Development. Draft the program and collect feedback. Implementation. Package, deploy and promote the learning. If you are interested in learning more about the ISD process, do yourself a favor and pick up Saul Carliner’s Designing E-Learning. It’s an outstanding resource for designing and developing eLearning. I’m not going to spend much time on the ISD process, because most of us in IT Training simply don’t need it. Instead, I would suggest we adopt a Rapid eLearning Development strategy.
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Rapid eLearning Development So what is rapid eLearning development? I’m glad you asked: Courseware which can be developed in less than three weeks Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) act as the primary resource for development A well-known tool (e.g. PowerPoint) or user-friendly templates form the starting point for courseware Simple assessment, feedback and tracking are usually provided Media elements which enhance learning but do not create technology barriers may be included (e.g. voice) Learning modules can be taken in one hour or less, often in less than 15 minutes Synchronous (scheduled or live) and asynchronous (self-paced) models may be utilized
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A Simple Definition for Rapid eLearning Keep in mind that when it comes to skills training, rapid eLearning development and traditional ISD are both fundamentally trying to answer the same three questions: Who is the audience What are the identifiable tasks What are the conditions under which the audience must perform the task The biggest difference is that rapid development dramatically reduces the time but focusing in on a subset of tools (namely Captivate, PowerPoint and Articulate).
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The Three Ds Rapid eLearning Development takes a few shortcuts: Design PowerPoint Style Learning, Templates, Screen Layouts Development Captivate, Articulate Studio, Adobe Presenter Distribution LMS, Firm Intranet Portal, SharePoint By focusing on a very narrow set of tools and possibilities, we can create a quality product in the fraction of the time it might typically require. Without a doubt, rapid eLearning development is the experiencing enormous popularity and growth. Inexpensive, easy to use tools like Captivate have enabled people with no formal education in eLearning development or instructional design to take a leading role in developing modules for their organization. This would not be possible in products like Flash or Dreamweaver.
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Before We Forget Whatever method you choose to follow, your chances for success will increase dramatically if you build everything with what your learners want in mind. So what do your legal learners want? Let’s look at a typical profile for your learners: Pressed for time Goal oriented Bring previous experience or knowledge Feel information overload Are motivated uniquely Do you recognize your learners in some of theses characteristics? For the sake of simplicity, it helps to collect your learners into larger groups, such as secretaries, attorneys and administrative staff. Which characteristics describe all of your learners, and which are more applicable to a particular group? If you haven’t already, take the time to identify and profile your various groups of learners. Print (or write) these profiles out and tape them up somewhere that you can easily see them. As you are working on an eLearning project, glance up at your list. Are you still on track?
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The Bigger Picture eLearning can be a real beast; there’s no doubt about it. In this session we focused almost exclusively on decisions around creating content. In the real world, great content doesn’t matter if you can’t get it into the hands of your users and then report on what they did with it. At the end of our session, I tried draw a simple, easy to follow diagram that explored the bigger picture. I’ve reproduced the finished product above. As you can see Create, Deliver and Report make up the three spokes of activity. There are also arteries that run between them. Between create and deliver we have to deal with packaging. How do you take an hour of video and deliver it in a way that learners can reasonably deal with it? Is it acceptable to expect them to watch it in one sitting? [Look at your profile!!] If they do step away, does it resume where they left off, or do they have to start over? Between deliver and report we have standards that are supposed to allow interoperability between a wide variety of products and services that support eLearning. The most popular standards are SCORM and AICC. How much do you know about these standards? How well do your tools support them? Will you be able to successfully report on how learners interacted with your modules? In a perfect world reporting feeds right back into your content creation process through careful analysis of what happened. How many people finished module A when compared to module B? Did support calls reflect the difference in completion rates for the two different subjects? Was one too long? Was it the yellow on white text that turned people off? [Giggle.] As you can see, when you step back and take a look at the bigger picture, successfully implementing eLearning is a lot harder than just pushing record and walking the users through a few clicks. It takes skill, practice, a methodology that you trust, and a little bit of luck.
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Thanks Thank you for inviting me to speak at your meeting. I really enjoyed hearing (and seeing!) what you have accomplished with eLearning at your firms. I’ve included my contact information above, don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s something I can do to help you with your program. For those of you with LinkedIn profiles, feel free to add me to your contacts.. My public profile is at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyroach Another place to look for presentations, articles and materials is our website. Jump directly to http:// www.encoretech.com/content.html to see our latest offerings. Again, thanks for listening, and best of luck in your eLearning efforts!
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