News article 25.01.2002

Report on the January 25th eLearning Network Conference
by Bob Little

Managing learning

The following is an excerpt from the full meeting report:

In his opening remarks, the eLearning Network (ELN) chairman, Vaughan Waller, said: "It's vitally important that any learning programme, from an organisation-wide e-learning implementation to an individual learning object, is carefully designed using established learning design models. You can have the best content, use the best standards and so on but the whole thing is useless unless it is well managed.

After lunch, Jonathan Kettleborough, director of e-learning consultancy Corollis, discussed how to keep 'learning interventions' fresh, current and relevant. He began by offering a quotation from the writings of Bill Bryson: ' In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did when the other three weren't available.'
Kettleborough commented: "Not much that is new has emerged in the training world for the last ten years. The three most notable breakthroughs have come from Peter Senge ('The Fifth Discipline'), Hamel and Prahalad ('Computing for the Future') and Kaplan and Norton ('The Balanced Scorecard').
"Why do we have training programmes at all?" he asked, evoking such responses as 'to meet legal requirements', 'to publicise a new product or process', 'to help new staff', 'to familiarise people with new equipment' and so on. Having discussed some of the media and 'interventions' which trainers might use to deliver this training, Kettleborough considered various 'development considerations', such as the target audience, why the training was being done and how you would know if the training had been effective.
Kettleborough then showed a programme lifecycle for a typical training programme. Usage rises sharply once the programme is launched. There is an even sharper rise in usage as the course achieves 'rapid take-up'. There is a 'steady state' phase, where usage rises gently and then begins to tail off gradually. After that, the programme goes into decline.

"There is the four stage, cyclical process of 'try', 'test', 'change', 'embed', 'try' again, and so on," Kettleborough explained. "Where a piece of learning is concerned, you need to carry out this process continually. Change is easy; embedding the change is hard."

Using the analogy of getting cattle from one field to another (instigating change), Kettleborough pointed out that the way to embed this change is to shut the gate between the fields - thus preventing the cattle from going back to their old field. Kettleborough commented: "People forget to remove the old way of doing things after they have trained others in a new way of doing things. Consequently, it is easy for the trainees to revert to their old way of doing things and the training is wasted. If you make changes to a learning programme, you must ensure that you embed that change so that people can't take a step back after undergoing the training!

"As far as the product lifecycle is concerned, you need to carry out a continual review at each of the four stages of the lifecycle."

Turning to the question of 'how we know we are doing the right things at the right time' where a learning programme is concerned, Kettleborough proposed the acronym 'PRIDE':

"This approach can't overcome the 'politics' that exists in organisations but, all other things considered, it can help to arrest the decline phase of the programme lifecycle," Kettleborough asserted.
"Pieces of learning have a natural lifespan," he continued. "For example, you know when a job aid has worked - because the people throw it away. However, to keep learning going you need flexibility - or change - within the delivery media.
"All media are flexible although some are more flexible than others. Generally speaking, the more inflexible the media is, the higher the cost involved in changing it. Costs associated with changing delivery media include changing the content, testing the programme and deploying the programme - all of which have their own issues.
"Often, when we produce a learning programme, we think of what's expensive to do in the first place. We don't think of what's expensive to change," he pointed out.
Kettleborough illustrated his argument with an example of a video clip that had been re-purposed to accommodate bandwidth restrictions.
"It was a standard 28Mb video clip," he said. "This has been changed to a 180k clip, which is easily able to be delivered online. Videos don't have to remain videos. Moreover, disparate elements - pieces of learning maintained in different parts of the organisation - can be brought together to make new learning materials, and 'static media' can be uplifted."
Kettleborough explained that, by 'uplifted', he meant that fonts, styles, layouts, colours, activities and even tutors and suppliers can all be changed to re-vitalise a learning programme. He concluded by saying: "There is a real need to keep every piece of learning 'fresh'.
"Remember the 'PRIDE' acronym; use transition media where appropriate; draw together disparate elements of information within the organisation to make new learning materials - and keep focused on results."