Trends that are Shaping the Future of Corporate Learning

One of my criticisms of current evaluation methods is that they developed from a

corporate context and landscape that is fundamentally different from the one that applies in the majority of modern organisations. Whilst business strategy has adapted to suit the emerging corporate context, training evaluation methods have not kept pace in recognising the new drivers of value or the centrality of intellectual capital in producing sustainable competitive advantage. If we are to develop a new understanding of the role and practice of evaluation, it must be posited against this new context and it must be flexible and adaptable enough to remain relevant as our organisations develop further. With this in mind, it is perhaps worth a quick review of the major trends that are shaping the landscape of learning and development in our organisations.

The most obvious trend in corporate training over the last 40 years has been the on-off love affair with technology-based training implementations. These started with tape and film loops, experimented with programmed learning techniques, quickly moved into video and then on to standalone computer-based training. The state-of-the-art now tends to be web-deployed applications that showcase various aspects of technology as

a delivery mechanism. Although much excitement and hype has been generated and many chief executives rushed towards technology based training in the hope of slashing training budgets, the promise in many cases remains largely unrealised.

Many examples of e-Learning are associated with attempts to replicate the classroom experience on screen. This is what I call tell and test, the pedagogy employed is to provide information followed by examples, then simple testing to check comprehension and memory. Often these programmes include some form of summative test at the end. More advanced packages may have a pre-test which provides fast tracking through the material for those who can demonstrate mastery of some of the objectives. These sorts of packages are most closely related to the face-to-face classroom experience. They would certainly fit any definition of e-Learning and they can be very imaginative, highly visual and graphically pleasing. However, one must question the advisability of taking the pedagogy of the Victorian classroom and applying it unchanged to a computer presentation.

But what about other forms of e-Learning? There are many good examples, some share this same traditional pedagogy whilst others are based upon alternative models. Virtual classroom is certainly a form of e-Learning, here we use an asynchronous audio visual collaborative tool to provide real time discussion and application sharing. The key to the effective use of this particular tool lies in its enablement of collaboration – a key adult learning process. But what about some less obvious uses of technology - do they also merit the label e-Learning? I think specifically of test preparation environments,

simulations and video role-plays, video games, Internet books, e-labs, discussion boards and forums and, finally, free text search engines such as Google. All of them connect people with either other people, repositories of knowledge or opportunities to experiment with varying parameters. For me, these are all most definitely learning opportunities and they are e-enabled.

All of the above are increasingly being deployed in our organisations to deliver some of the most critical programmes, but what impact have they had on the corporate training landscape?

The e-Learning enthusiast would doubtless claim that the last 15 years have seen great advances in technology and multi-media design that enables us to produce material that engages students at previously unimaginable levels of fidelity. As a result we now have e-Learning courseware that employs:

♦ significant animation - includes sound, video, links to job aids and other documents, message boards, live mentors (24x7) and permits multiple modes of interaction.

♦ virtual classroom technology that allows live instructors to lead world-wide sessions across time-zones and share applications

♦ courseware that can be used anytime, anywhere. This allowing students to control the pace of their own learning, taking breaks at any time and returning to exactly the point where they temporarily adjourned ♦ reinforcement through constant testing. Performance is tracked and

recorded providing an audit trail for the benefit of the student and/or corporate training management

By contrast, one could look at the same evidence of e-Learning deployments and suggest that we have taken the pedagogy of the classroom and applied it unchanged to a new delivery mechanism.

If you take this view the last 20 years could be viewed as producing great advances in multi-media design whilst learning design has been largely ignored. The result being that we are left with very pretty courseware that provides little stimulus to learn. Current courseware is often criticised as lacking:

♦ Authenticity - little connection to the real world ♦ Reinforcement, no mentoring or post course support

♦ Usefulness after the first use, no indexing to aid finding things later ♦ Any support for information discovery, experimentation and what if type

exploration

♦ Any linkage to enduring corporate repositories of knowledge

In addition e-Learning is generally considered to be expensive to create and even more expensive to maintain.

Whichever camp one supports, the undeniable fact is that we now have a Corporate Legacy that is characterised by:

♦ A large installed base of generic e-Learning materials from a range of providers. Most of which follows a pedagogy of tell and test (Rosenberg 2001)

♦ E-learning modules that are not linked to personal development objectives and rarely integrated with the rest of the learning portfolio. In almost all cases there is no explicit linkage to any corporate programmes of instructor led training (ILT) (Rosenberg 2001)

♦ Exceptionally poor take up rates of e-learning and poor completion rates ♦ Return on Investment (ROI) calculations based on avoided cost by not doing

training some other way, rather than effectiveness of change in knowledge, attitude, skills or habits and subsequent linkage to operational effectiveness

Overall the advent of e-Learning can be seen to have produced some changes in the pattern of training deployment and attitudes to the training experience but, just as with other forms of training, there is remarkably little evidence of direct contribution to traditional metrics of business success. It could be argued that the main change we are seeing is an increased expectation that training materials should stimulate multiple senses, be more memorable, more accessible and be available in more condensed chunks that can be called up when needed. In turn, we are seeing classroom style sessions getting shorter, more skills and competency based and more closely linked with job requirements.

The deployment of technology-based training is undoubtedly the most obvious change in corporate education in the last half century. But despite the hype it has done virtually nothing to change the underpinning paradigm of corporate learning. The dominant paradigm remains, that the organisation decides what you learn, how you learn and largely when you learn. It also decides how to recognise what you have learned and prescribes how to deploy your learning on organisational tasks.

There are however some interesting trends in learning that do have the capacity to fundamentally change the paradigm of organisational learning and as they come about will potentially require whole new approaches to assessing delivered value and

organisational impact.