What are the Challenges?

• Difficult to connect to the corporateintranet, and maintain security, requiring a mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP, provides cross-platform compatibility).
• Screen is smaller (9”) than a normal laptop or desktop (15” – 21”)
• Digital keyboard is smaller than standard size keyboard and no more mouse. Consider external keyboard.
• The browser does not support Adobe Flash which most eLearning and websites currently use to provide interactivity.
• HTML5 is only supported by IE8 and above. As a result if you have courses that need to be used by people on a desktop or laptop at headquarters, you need to make sure that you internet explorer version is IE8 or higher.
• You may have some off-the-shelf content from companies like ElementK that is no longer compatible with the iPad.
• Compliance, legal, regulatory will always be a challenge!

What are the Opportunities?

• Provide quick access to media libraries (document, videos, and audio files). This has been referred to as “Finger-Tip Learning”. Some examples of this type of application, check out TED, WebMD, and HSW(how stuff works).
• We have an opportunity to redesign our learning applications using the iPad navigational tools. The iPad allows for kinesthetic learning because it allows for touch with the environment. (e.g. slide, pinch)
• Augment reality as either a performance augment or an learning augment. (assessing performance through simulations, gaming .. etc.). A good example of this is Yelp and Star Walk. Yelp allows you to hold up your iPad and point you to local restaurant. It can then tell you about the restaurant. Consider how this type of application can be used to support a sales force looking for potential customers. Star Walk allows you to point you iPad towards the sky and using the GPS and database of stars and planets, the application will provide a window to the heavens.
• Leverage the built in input devices that include: camera, GPS, compass, and gyroscope/accelerometer.
• Develop a spaced practice model to compliment formal elearning or live classroom events. Spacing practice improves retention and recall.
• Bar codes or other readers for tracking or providing information on demand (airport check-in) Social collaboration (MSLync, Yammer)

Let’s first consider a definition of learning. We can simplify it by categorizing learning into two types, (1) knowledge or cognitive based learning, and (2) behavioral learning. A person can be very knowledgeable on a topic but not have the ability to put that knowledge into action. For example, a person can be well versed in business theory but fail miserably at managing an organization or a business. As a result, learning that results in increased knowledge is one type of learning, and mastering a set of behaviors or skills is another type of learning. So let’s compare individual learning to organizational learning.

Organizations are comprised of functional groups. If an organization has a goal to market, develop and sell products, then the organization will need those functions or capabilities. The organization will need to have a research and development(R&D) group, a manufacturing group, and a sales and marketing(S&M) group. This is a very simple organization but it will serve us for this example of how organizations learn.

These three functional groups, R&D, manufacturing and S&M need to work together in a process or a system. Each functional group has to feed information back and forth. They interact with one another. They need to work on the overall goal of the organization together as a single larger group.

As they work together a few things will happen.

(1) These groups will begin to define processes and procedures for working together.

(2) These groups will solve problems together and begin to develop and sell products.

If the processes are working well, these three groups will continue to develop new products to meet their customers needs. They will reinvest in new research and development and the cycle should continue indefinitely, as long as there are no errors along the way. If marketing misinterprets their data and poorly projects customer needs, then research and development might be working on the wrong project. The sales team will try and sell a product that few customers want or need. How will the organization react to this error?

Organizations need the ability to identify an error, evaluate the magnitude of the error against it’s the organizations goals, and correct for the error in such a way to bring the organization back into it’s stable rhythm.l. If the organization reacts too slowly and does not recognize the error in time, it could spell disaster for the company. If the organization sees the error, and is able to make just the right changes, at the right time, then it should be able to get back on track. This ability to correct for errors is organizational learning. (Argyris, 1999)

In order for organizations to both SEE errors and RESPOND correctly to them, depends on its ability to view the whole organization. This is referred to as systems thinking, the ability to see the interactions between the parts. In a future article we will discuss the concept of systems thinking and dynamic systems modeling. This principles are critical for managing change and learning within any organization.

For additional reading:

Argote, L. (2011). Organizational Learning Research: Past, Present and future. Management Learning, 42(4), 439-446. doi: 10.1177/1350507611408217

Argyris, C. (1999), On Organizational Learning Second Edition, Blackwell Publishing.

The categories of functionality that you need to evaluate include:

1. Course management: how do you manage courses and catalogs?
2. Session management: how do you manage live training events?
3. User administration: how do you manage users in the system?
4. Registration management: how do users get registered for courses or sessions?
5. System navigation: how do users locate courses or sessions?
6. Data tracking and reporting: how are user activities tracked and reporting?
7. System integration: how do you integrate the LMS with other systems?
8. Collaboration: how do users collaborate with one another around the learning content and events?
9. Security: how is data secured, especially in a regulated industry?

There may be other categories, but these are the core categories of a learning management system.

Phase I: Select 5-7 vendors to evaluate
You are going to want to evaluate at least 5 systems. Consider evaluating a few of the big players such as Saba, SumTotal and Plateau. If you have an ERP system such as PeopleSoft or SAP, you should evaluate the learning management systems that come with those systems. However, do not jump to the ERP vendor’s solution based on their claim of “easy plug-n-play integration.” Don’t drink that kool-aid. Remember how difficult it was to implement your ERP system? It’s not going to be any easy to add a module to that system. Also consider reviewing one or two SAAS (Software as a Solution) vendors. SAAS refers to vendors that host their application at their company and you rent space. You can get these systems up and running faster then other solutions.

Phase II: Build Use Cases
This term may be new to some. Use cases are common to an IT business analyst. A use case is essentially a high level scenario. These are based on desired business work flow processes. Some vendors will suggest that their system represents, industry best practices and as a result you should adopt new business processes to support the system. I wouldn’t be too quick to drink this kool-aid either. In some cases it might be true. However, you are going to own the system. You have to manage it, unless you are planning to outsource the management. However, a complex work flow will cost you more either way, if there are too many steps to complete simple tasks. An example of use case would be:

Create a New Course in the System

1. Create a new course
2. Define the attributes of the course
3. Associate the course with content
4. Associate the course with users based on their profile

As you can see, a use case does not tell the vendor what buttons to push or what screen to navigate to. That will vary from one system to another. These are very high level process steps. Once you have your use cases written, take the time as a team to prioritize them. If all of the use cases are absolute “must haves”, simply order them by importance.

Phase III: Putting the System to the Test
This is the part the LMS vendor will hate. You are going to invite the vendor for a full day evaluation of their system. You are NOT going to send them the use cases ahead a time. This is very important. Just tell them that they should have a fully functioning demo version. Don’t worry that they might not be prepared. That’s the idea. You are going to learn, through experiential learning, how difficult it is to run your use cases with an out of the box system. Every time you hear the phrase, “we will have to customize the system to do that”, add a month to the project time line, which of course adds to the cost.

Conclusion
Selecting a learning management system is daunting for anyone. You don’t want to take the process lightly and you want to make decisions based on the right information. Taking the system on a real life test driving with “use cases” is the best way to experience the system and discover for yourself if the system is going to work in the end and how painful and costly the process is going to be to get there. I recently heard a CLO from a very large organization, explain how painful it was to install their LMS, however when it was over it was worth it. You are going to have to weight out the pros and cons of all aspects of your LMS project. For this particular CLO, accurate reporting of training costs was a very critical success factor for the project. As a result, they wanted a system that would integrate well with their enterprise systems. For other mid-size to smaller organization, you may have other priorities and not be willing or able to endure a long term painful project

• Knowledge of adult learning theory.

However, in my 17 years in the learning and development industry, I have rarely seen adult learning theory applied in corporate training programs. Let’s take a look at the assumptions of the andragogical or adult learning model and you can analyze your own learning programs.

1. Adults Need to Know Why: Before an adult will put any effort into a training program, he or she wants to know why it’s important. Any trainer will tell you stories when someone came into class and said, “I don’t know why I am here. My manager sent me but I don’t think this is relevant for my current job.” That trainer knows that unless that person makes a very quick connection to the objectives of the course, they are not going to participate and could be a distraction for the rest of the class. The same is true for an online self-paced course. If the busy adult learner does not perceive in about 30 seconds that the course content and activities will bring value, they will shut it down. So what do we do in the training industry to combat this problem? We make training mandatory which goes against the assumption of how adults learn. A better solution would be to design courses and curriculum in such a way that every learning event is relevant to the adult learner and will help them to solve a problem that very day or shortly after the training event occurs.
2. Adult Learners take Responsibility: adult learners arrive at a point in their life when they feel a sense of responsibility for setting goals and achieving them. As a result, adults who have arrived at this level of maturity would prefer to have some control over their learning. When we attended grade school as a child, we were told what to learn and when to learn it. In the U.S. a school board, far removed from the classroom, selected our curriculum. When we advanced through high school and onto college we began to take more responsibility for selecting learning that would have a direct impact on our careers and money making potential. Most corporate training curriculum are built to align with defined job functions or business objectives. A chemist or an engineer can not decide to take courses on accounting on company time. It does not fit into their defined curriculum. Much of corporate and government training curriculum is mandatory. Reminders are sent out to please complete a course. When companies effectively integrate talent management with business objectives, they move towards accepting adult learning principles. However when all of the focus is on the business performance objectives, corporate learning curriculum resemble the grade school model of our childhood.
3. Adults build on Experience: As we gain more experience in our careers, we build expertise. A person with foundational knowledge will view a new problem or task differently then someone who is seeing it for the first time. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. Experience and competency is an advantage because one can build upon that foundation. If a person has 20 years experience as a manager in a large corporation, he or she can take that experience to manage a small business. However, deep competency in one area can also be an obstacle to learning. If the problems presented in the training are perceived as trivial or not sufficiently challenging, the person may choose to simply use old methods, rather then consider new ways of solving and old problem. When we design training programs for adults we need to take these principles into consideration. The learning has to be sufficiently challenging and adaptive to different levels of experience and competency. This level of learning can be achieved in simulations that adapt to different levels of skill. If the learning is building off of many years of experience, the learning has to be highly experiential and not informational.
4. Adult developmental stage will impact readiness to learn: Not all adults are in the same stage of cognitive and emotional development. A new MBA graduate is an adult by definition but may not have passed through all of the stages of cognitive and emotional development. Some of the development will come through experiences inside work and other will come from life experiences outside of the workplace. Developers of adult learning programs need to take this principle into consideration. How might this principle impact a new employee orientation program for example?
5. Adults are task centric not content centric: This concept posits the assumption that adult learners prefer to learn by doing rather then soaking up information through a lecture. Learners at all levels need information. Information is now at our finger tips through the internet and literally at our finger tips through mobile devices. By designing learning to be experiential and task centric, the learner is discovering the relevance of the learning during the event. This ties back to some of the other assumptions. John Dewey argued that learning in childhood should also be experiential to ensure successful learning. Dr. David Merrill concluded after years of research in learning that “information is not instruction.”
6. Adults have different motivations to learn: Training developers need to understand that adults are not motivated to learn in order to advance their careers, but more importantly to be happy. As a manager I would frequently ask my staff members if they were happy with what they were doing. If they were not happy I would look for problems with motivation or gaps in skills. In many cases motivation was a result of a lack of challenge. When a person starts to play a game, if the game is not challenging and the person is not advancing at an acceptable pace, the game is perceived as boring. As a result the person quits. The game of life is the same way (the real game of life). If we are not continually challenged and advancing we get bored and what to stop playing the game. This assumption is connected to talent management and retention goals.

References

Knowles, Malcolm S., Elwood F. Holton, and Richard A. Swanson. The Adult Learner: the Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005. Print.

There are three categories of online learning strategies and unfortunately most fall into the first category which has the lowest impact on learning in terms of changing behaviors and improving performance.

Shovelware Strategy

(1) Online Interactive Documents: These engage learners by having them read text on the slide or in hidden pop-ups and listen to narrations. Then you normally see a quiz at the end to measure comprehension of the document. These have the lowest impact on learning and unfortunately are the most common. PowerPoint and Articulate work just fine for this type of elearning and as a result this is the most common. The development requires little to no design, other then some document organization concepts. If you can cut and past text onto a PowerPoint slide you are good to go so people love it. However the learning impact minimal.

Knowledge Management Strategy

(2) Online Knowledge Centric Presentations: Very few organizations even get to this level which applies good presentation design and avoids cognitive overload. For example, the audio narration should never mimic the text on the screen. “Slidology” from Nancy Duarte is a great book for designing effective presentations and Nancy Ruth Clark’s most recent book discusses the problems with cognitive overload. These types of courses are a bit more effective taking communications design into account but are still low on the learning effectiveness curve. Again, PowerPoint and Articulate can get you this far as long as you consider effective communications design. If you need to include a demonstration of a software application, I would throw in Adobe Captivate which is excellent for building software demos, originally designed for sales presentations but has since evolved to allow for tracking of actions. I also highly recommend Rapid Intake’s tools, ProForm and Unison which offer a template structure and do offer a tool to convert PPT slides to ePresentation slides.

Learning Management Strategy

(3) Task Centered Learning: This level requires a bit more design, a knowledge of instructional design, the learning sciences and computer sciences. However, this type of learning has the highest impact on the learner and the business. Low levels of task centric learning can be achieved with tools like Captivate but again to make it task centric requires design and an understanding of adult learning and instructional design. The tool will not create a good design, no more then a power saw will create a work of art book shelf, unless you know how to design correctly. The tool of choice for designing task centric learning is Adobe Flash.Consider working with an outside vendor to build a few templates that you can re-use to meet your Business Journalism learning goals. The upfront design consulting and development of templates will increase the quality of your training significantly.

Conclusion

You strategy and implementation of online learning should match your organizational goals. If your strategy is to shovel content onto the web then you have what others have called, “shovelware”. If you want to provide well designed information that is searchable and allows for communities to discuss and reflect on the content, you have a knowledge management strategy. However, if you want to provide learning experiences that will impact the way in which people behave and perform on the job, and you have a way to measure the changes in behavior and performance, you have a learning management strategy.

References

Allen M., (2007). Designing Successful E-Learning, Pfeiffer

Clark Ruth C., Nguyen F, and Sweller J. Efficiency in Learning: Evidence-Based Guidelines to Manage Cognitive Load. Pfieffer

Duarte, N., (2008). Slide:ology, The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, O’Reilly

Rosenberg, M. (2006). Beyond e-Learning, Pfiffer

The learning needs analysis process seeks to answer two critical questions: (1) what do you want your learners to gain from the instruction, and (2) what business objectives do you want to impact and how? In order to ensure that learners gain the desired learning outcomes, it is important that you define the process and tasks that the learning solution will support. A common mistake that many people make is to develop training courses which deliver information only.

Changing Behavior & Impacting Learning
Training by definition should provide demonstration, practice and feedback on the task that the learner needs to perform back on the job. For example, presenting the information regarding a policy is not sufficient to change behaviors and improve performance unless the person has an opportunity to apply the information in a relevant and challenging activity.

Impacting Business Performance
It is also important that you define the goals for the business. For example, are you trying to improve compliance, quality, or efficiency? Do you want to reduce cycle time? The learning solution should provide opportunities to practice and receive feedback on the desired behavioral outcomes. Let’s say that you want learners to use the information in a training course to reduce errors in decision making, to reduce the impact on project life cycles. When projects are delayed, companies lose money. If these were your business goals, the training needs to provide opportunities to solve problems and feedback that their decision making, over time, is positively impacting the business. Very few learning programs do this so you many not be familiar with the concept in training, but you are very familiar with the feedback loop in real life.

Problem Solving Feedback Loop

In business we are constantly presented with problems. The process of analyzing the problem can take a moment for an individual or it could take days, weeks or months. The process could involve a series of emails and meetings until a decision is made. The ability to quickly make decisions and move forward is a skill that everyone needs.

So how does this impact the design of online learning?

If you want your employees to solve problems more effectively, your training needs to provide relevant and sufficiently challenging problems, and the right feedback that closely mimics real world outcomes. Asking staff to read online page turning courses that define policies, procedures or concepts will not be sufficient to change performance in the business. Learning Mind can help you design learning solutions that will more effectively impact your business goals.