I've had a number of discussions recently with large corporate clients about the e-learning skills that they need to maintain in-house. Let's assume that by e-learning here, we're referring to asynchronous (self-paced) materials of some sort, much of which must be produced formally to meet the needs of large audiences, with high production values and with correspondingly generous schedules and budgets; but to complicate the matter, let's also assume there's a requirement for 'good enough' materials produced rapidly to meet the needs of smaller audiences.

It seems to me that organisations have three main options:

1. Put all the work out. In this case, the organisation needs to ensure it is adequately skilled at defining the requirements, working with external developers to get the job done, and then ensuring successful implementation (none of which are trivial). On the plus side, the organisation stays lean and can concentrate on core business. On the minus side, the learning and development staff are only involved at the periphery of the process and don't get to develop the e-skills that they'll need for the future - they may even feel alienated from the whole idea of e-learning; without any internal technical and creative capability, you're at risk of being a naive purchaser who pays over the odds; and unless you've really got your act together and found a developer who specialises in rapid work, you're not going to find it easy to be responsive to urgent business needs.

2. Keep it all in-house. In this situation, the organisation needs to build sufficient capacity and skills to meet all requirements from within: that means training up generalist trainers and subject experts to look after the rapid development of the lower tier materials; it also means staffing up with full-time e-learning professionals to build the higher-end content, and that means covering all the bases - project management, instructional design, all the creative specialisms, as well as a fair level of technical expertise. With this arrangement you should be able to evolve a development process that's finely tuned to your organisation's line of business, training requirements and culture; you won't be bogged down in contracting and communicating with external developers, and you'll have found a way to get the whole learning and development community involved with e-learning. The problem is that your full-time e-learning team will be a monopoly supplier - and we know that doesn't always lead to the best customer service - and that, when it comes to the cuts (as it always does), that team is never going to be regarded as core to the business. Couple all this with the problems of balancing capacity, so you've always got enough people but never too many, and you can see that this solution is hard to sustain.

3. Maintain the skills, but with limited capacity. The compromise solution that I'm beginning to favour goes like this: you maintain a small team of full-time e-learning professionals with an emphasis on project management and instructional design skills, but with some graphics and technical expertise as well. You use this team to (1) establish and maintain standards; (2) train up and support those doing rapid development; (3) help out by doing some rapid development themselves; and for more formal e-learning projects, they (4) define the requirements and carry out the top-level design; (5) contract out the more specialised and time-consuming elements of development, such as storyboarding, graphic design and authoring; and then (6) ensure effective implementation.

So, am I on the right track or have I missed something?

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  1. Anonymous7:53 PM

    Clive, I think you're on the right track. I'll add a paraphrase of something I heard the training manager of a large U.S. hospital complex say once:

    He much preferred to have work done in-house, building the skill and reputation of his staff.

    In going outside, he'd have reasons like the ones you cite: not enough time, specialized skill, things not likely to be ongoing opportunities.

    Then he said, "I'll also go outside when there's a major organization disagreement about how we should proceed. In such cases, it's my duty to the organization to find a qualified third party who shares my bias."

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  2. Your option (3) is attractive. We have something like that but it's complicated. There's a small in-house team with a brief to maintain a corporate university site, most of which is static information, and create elearning. Our brief includes strategy and standards. However business units have the option to commission outside companies to do elearning projects without using the in-house team. With larger projects, too big for our team, that's fine, but sometimes they get an outside company who charge a small fortune for something we could have done for next to nothing - simple page-turners being a case in point. Also, we've had to take on the role of 'shadowing' these projects because they tend to create what they're used to creating, which then doesn't meet our intranet technical standards and we're not allowed to put it up. Until recently this meant they coded pages over 50k or used Flash, neither of which were allowed (thankfully that's changed). The task of the internal team now is to raise awareness of what we can do, which isn't easy as we lack the 'clout' of an expensive, semi-famous consultancy! But we're getting more assertive as some of the work we get for five or six figure sums is frankly amateurish. I still think the combination of an in-house team and some trusted outside suppliers is the best for large companies.

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  3. Clive, I think this works if you view elearning as 'courses'. However, how does it scale to handle portals/performance support, mobile, eCommunity, etc?

    I think those should be treated as a whole performance ecosystem in conjunction with courses, and that one group should be overall responsible for it so it's integrated and coherent. How would this play out in your model?

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  4. My thoughts on what the decision might depend on:
    - Volume of content to be produced, say in a year?
    - How frequently the content needs to be updated?
    - What’s typical time to market for the content to be produced?
    - Has the organization outsourced before? Have they outsourced training, or parts of, before?
    - How easy it is to get subject matter expertise through vendors?
    - How accessible are in house SMEs?
    - What skills (technical, media etc.) already exist in house, or is hiring required?
    - Are all tools available in house or will investment be required in tools?
    - How is the organization structured and what control does training department have (extending Norman Lamont’s comments)?

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  5. To respond to Clark's question, I believe that my option 3 does make it possible for the small internal team to work on integrating all e-learning efforts.

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  1. In October 2005, I wrote my first post for the Clive on Learning. It was called Bringing e-learning into the twentieth Century. We're now 20 years into that new century and I'd like to think that, thanks a great deal to coronavirus and repeated lockdowns, we now have a pretty good idea of what advantages we can gain by learning online. Paradoxically, we've also realised just how important it is for us psychologically to be face-to-face.

    Anyway, this is my 900th and last post addressing issues around learning in the workplace, so I thought I would celebrate that fact with a blast of the trumpet. I am shifting to a new phase of my life in which I will be exploring other interests of mine, including music composition and writing, with an emphasis less on how others learn and more on how I learn and develop. At the end of March, I will share my First Post to reveal what I have been up to in this year of forced seclusion.

    For now, I would like to thank the 4 million or so readers of this blog over the past 15 years and wish you well as you continue your careers in learning and development. As we rebuild our lives and economies post-pandemic, you will have a pivotal role to play.
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  2. If you have an hour to spare (and, let's face it, in the current circumstances, that might just be the case),  you might enjoy this podcast hosted by the wonderful Jane Daly. I really enjoyed talking to Jane and reflecting on my career in learning and development.

    And I thoroughly recommend Jane's site People Who Know as a rich resource for learning professionals.



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  3. Last year I worked on a major project to develop online courses for HR professionals. Most of the content was aimed at influencing behavioural change so, as the principal writer, I decided to major on storytelling as strategy for learning. Over a six-month period, I reckon I must have written hundreds of stories, some no more than simple prompts for reflection and discussion, while some formed the primary means for uncovering ideas and generating insights.

    Reflecting on how central storytelling had become so central to my approach to learning design, I thought back to the point at which I really became hooked on this technique. Back in 2003, I devoted a great deal of energy to the design of a new CD-ROM course entitled Ten Ways to Avoid Death by PowerPoint. In blatant disregard of all the usual constraints of time and budget, I set out to design a programme that was both highly interactive and media-rich, engaging as many of the senses as possible.

    As the course was nearing completion, I came up with the idea of introducing the programme with a short story, adapted from a classic fairytale. Because the moral of the tale seemed to echo the main message of the course, I added this in, even though I was concerned about starting a course in such a passive, linear manner.

    Some time later, I met with a colleague who had been reviewing the course. She had shown it to several managers in her company and got some feedback. I asked if anything stood out that they found particularly enjoyable or memorable - perhaps the games, the multimedia, the illustrations? No, you guessed it, it was the story. It made the point, it stirred the imagination, it stuck in the mind.

    You may not be surprised, but I was. Can stories really be more powerful than interactivity in bringing about learning? I investigated further and found a site called storyatwork.com (it's long since disappeared). They said: "We are story-making machines. Cognitively speaking, every experience, every relationship, every object is stored in the mind as a story." OK, but any website that calls itself 'story at work' is going to be biased. What about the science?

    Well, Jerome Bruner, the father of cognitive psychology, believes storytelling is hardwired into our brains. The primary reason infants are motivated to learn to speak is because they have stories inside them that they want to share with others. Simple stories like "I fell over" or "I had a bad dream and I'm scared", but stories nonetheless.

    In his book Tell me a Story, psychologist and artificial intelligence expert Roger Schank argues that "knowledge is stories" and that intelligence may be more or less equated with the ability to tell the right story at the right time. Even the old-timers agree. According to the old Hopi proverb, "He who tells the stories rules the world". Hollywood already knows that.

    When you attend a really good workshop, the one thing you can guarantee is that the facilitator will have some good stories. Perhaps a few are just good jokes, but many will be extremely relevant to the subject in hand. They illustrate a point, they stimulate discussion. That's why it's so much more difficult to run a workshop for the first time - it can take quite a while to come up with all those anecdotes and examples that bring the event to life. It also explains why your average facilitator's guide is never quite enough of a foundation on which to run a workshop - however thoroughly it lists all the steps involved in preparing and running the event, it's inadequate if it doesn't also provide you with a repertoire of interesting and illuminating anecdotes.

    There's a clue here as to why so much self-directed learning is dry and boring. The typical designer will work with a subject expert to define the learning objectives and list the important learning points. They will structure this information and support it with visual aids and practical exercises. If they're not careful, what they will end up with is the online equivalent of the facilitator's guide, when what they should have done is spend hours in conversation with the subject expert, wheedling out their favourite stories on the topic - the successes, the horror stories, the amusing incidents.

    Even if you don't fancy yourself as a budding chat show host, you are unlikely to encounter much opposition. Subject matter experts will find it much easier to tell stories than to articulate what they know in terms of neat and tidy abstractions. Funnily enough, learners won't be any different. Try as you may to come up with clever mnemonics to help them remember the five stages in this, or the seven elements in that, they're much more likely to recall the tales you have told or the experiences shared by other participants. They'll also waste no time in passing these stories on to their colleagues. After all, they're only human, and if the scientists are to be believed, simply story-telling machines.


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  4. Back in 2009, I posted a simple analysis of learning technologies based on Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework. This became the second most popular posting ever on this blog, so I thought I'd give it a further look.

    I was particularly taken by Diana’s five media forms (the descriptions are mine):
    1. Narrative media: explain, demonstrate, describe
    2. Interactive media: facilitate reflection, check understanding, encourage exploration, provide feedback
    3. Communicative media: allow exchanges between learners and between learners and tutors / subject experts
    4. Adaptive media: facilitate experimentation and practice
    5. Productive media: allow learners to articulate, express, demonstrate understanding
    I was interested to see what light these categorisations would shed on my understanding of the wide range of learning technologies currently at our disposal. The following table is my updated 2020 attempt at allocating technologies to each of the five categories. I have added a column to explain whether digital content would be an input to the learning processes involved or an output.

    Media formExample learning technologiesThe role of content
    Narrative mediaOnline videos, online articles and papers, podcasts, software demos, infographicsContent is an input to the learning process
    Interactive mediaScenarios, quizzes, simple games, click-through e-learningContent is an input to the learning process
    Communicative mediaSocial networks, forums, virtual classrooms, online meetings and discussions, webinars, email / messagingContent is an output from the learning process
    Adaptive mediaSimulations, AR/VR, intelligent tutorials, strategic games, intelligently curated content, adaptive learning pathwaysContent is an input to the learning process
    Productive mediaWikis, blogs, spreadsheets, apps for editing text, video, audio and slideshowsContent is an output from the learning process

    On re-visiting this analysis, I’m still not sure yet whether these categories move things along. Are some media forms more valuable than others? Are they situational? Should they be used in sequence or in combination? There's plenty of room to take this thinking further.

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  5. In my last post, I argued that, although face-to-face learning has been the default since the dawn of time, online learning has changed everything. As we have discovered over the past few weeks, online learning is scalable, flexible, accessible to all but a small minority, economical, environmentally advantageous and, of course, socially distant. What’s not to like?

    So OK, there are situations when we simply can’t achieve what we want online, which is fine because, in time, we’ll be able to go back to doing some learning face-to-face. Used judiciously and typically as part of a blend, face-to-face learning is capable of adding tremendous value. But not for everyday learning, for special occasions.

    Let’s imagine you’re currently in a position in which you simply have to deliver your programmes online because your classrooms are all closed up.  You still have a big decision to make …

    1. Should I develop online materials to cover the content of my programmes?
    2. Or should I run live online sessions that approximate what I currently do in the classroom?

    If you spend most of your time in a classroom, you’ll be drawn to option 2, because the experience will be similar and you will have less work to do in developing materials. But, in doing so, you only take advantage of some of the benefits of online learning - the social distancing, the reduced carbon footprint, the cost reduction. What you don’t get is the scalability and the flexibility. You can’t address as large an audience as quickly as you can with digital content and you can’t offer your learners the opportunity to learning when they want, at the pace they want and in the way they want. So there has to be a good reason for delivering your sessions live. In short …

    Live online learning is also for special occasions

    So, what are those special occasions? Why do you want to fix your learners to a particular date and time? Here are some arguments:

    1
    Live events allow for a free-flowing dialogue, something that is simply not going to happen by email, in a forum or on Twitter. Many learning activities, including role-plays, simply have to be live.

    2
    In a live event, you have the potential to get quick answers to your questions and immediate feedback on your performance. This level of responsiveness can be important in some situations, such as learning to operate a process or to handle customer queries. Generally speaking, a real-time approach gets the job done quickly, whereas it can take ages to resolve an issue while you wait for people to respond when it suits them.

    3
    Live events can also have more emotional energy (sometimes negative as well as positive) than their self-paced equivalents. Most of us would prefer to watch a big sporting event as it happens rather than see the recording sometime later, even if we do not know the outcome. There is something about experiencing an event as it happens in the company of our peers, whether that’s face to face or online. And this upsurge of emotion is going to make a big difference in terms of what we remember.

    4
    In the context of a blended solution, live events also act as a milestone to encourage learners to get the self-paced work done. In a course which has no timetable, it is inevitable that individual study will be put off to a later date – after all, learning is rarely the most urgent task on our to-do lists. Even if deadlines are established for self-paced learning, there is always the feeling that these could easily be pushed back if required. However, when a programme is punctuated with live events, there is a massive incentive to get on with your ‘homework’ – no-one wants to be the one who hasn’t got their assignments done.

    Choices, choices, choices. To keep it simple, let’s reduce all this to three steps:

    1. By default, deliver your learning programme as online content
    2. When online content won’t do the job (you want free-flowing discussion, you need to provide instant feedback, you want emotional energy, you want to introduce milestones into a longer programme, and so on) then consider delivering some elements live and online
    3. When live and online still isn’t enough (people need to be hands-on, you need full attention, you need maximum sensitivity to body language, etc.) then consider delivering some elements face-to-face

    Except, of course, that option 3 is not available at the moment. So, make option 2 work.

    Easy

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  6. Having spent the past 25 years advocating the greater use of online tools and resources for education and training (not to mention many other aspects of our lives), I've met my fair share of opposition and have to admit that I've been frustrated at how slowly we have responded to the opportunity.

    I needn't have worried! All we needed was a pandemic. All of a sudden, it seems quite absurd to question the concept of online learning. For me, this is the silver lining on a very dark cloud.

    Of course, the crisis will come to an end and, when it does, we have a chance to re-think before automatically assuming our previous positions. So, should we simply go back to doing as much learning as possible face-to-face? Or perhaps dispense with the idea of face-to-face learning altogether? To answer the question, I return to my post of 9th December 2011. For me, face-to-face is for special occasions.

    ***

    Ask yourself. What proportion of the music that you consume is at a live performance? Chances are it's something between 0 and 10%. What proportion of the drama that you watch is at the theatre, rather than at the cinema or on TV? I'd be surprised if it's more than a few percent. And what proportion of the sport you watch is in a stadium rather than on TV? You get the idea.

    And yet, there's a good possibility that those live events that you have attended - music, drama, sports or whatever - are among the most memorable occasions of your life. Perhaps even peak experiences.

    If you wanted to up the percentage of time you spent watching live music, drama or sport, it would come at a considerable price in terms of admission fees, travel, time and sheer adrenaline. Chances are that, unless you're rich and with considerable discretionary time, it would be completely impractical. In fact, with all the rush of modern working life, you're probably finding it increasingly impractical to watch TV or listen to radio at the times at which the programmes are broadcast. A great deal of your media consumption is almost definitely asynchronous - under your time control - using downloads, streaming media and the like.

    Is it too fanciful to apply the same logic to learning? The default position is now asynchronous and online, giving you complete control over time and place. If you want to share an experience with other learners in real time, you go synchronous, using some sort of virtual meeting platform. If you need a rich sensory experience that you'll remember for years, then spend the money, put aside the time and meet up face-to-face at a conference or workshop.

    There was a time when the only way you could listen to music, watch a play or a sporting event, or attend a class was live and face-to-face, because there were no ways to transmit or record these events electronically. Quite clearly those days are gone and we are the richer for it.

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  7. This week on The Good Practice Podcast, I join Ross Garner and Owen Ferguson to discuss the promise of e-learning.
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  8. An orchestral re-imagining of Robin Williamson's epic song for The Incredible String Band, conceived for the musical 'U' some 50 years ago.

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  9. Six months of highly concentrated effort by the Skills Journey team has paid off with the launch, on January 23, of a major new online learning resource for 150,000 members of the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD).

    We worked closely with the CIPD learning team to help produce eight courses aligned to the core behaviours in the CIPD’s New Profession Map:

    Ethical practice
    Professional courage and influence
    Valuing people
    Working inclusively
    Commercial drive
    Passion for learning
    Insights focus
    Situational decision-making

    This was a real team effort with design and development shared across CIPD and ourselves. To get this resource out in such a short time, including the production of 73 new videos and animations, we employed a highly agile and collaborative approach and this certainly seems to have paid off with a fantastic early response from CIPD members.

    A big challenge was that we were not focusing on knowledge-based material; we wanted to challenge and shape the behaviours of those working in HR, L&D and OD, not just in the UK but across a wide range of cultures. This led us to adopt an innovative design, centring on storytelling, authentic challenges, personal exploration, reflection and social interaction.

    We were determined not to bombard learners with abstract information. We wanted to stimulate insights that would transform practice and enhance the professional standing of those working in the profession. I reckon we have every chance of achieving that.

    The courses are free to CIPD members. If that doesn’t include you, you can get an overview of what the resource contains on the CIPD website.


    Clive is now Instrumentality
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  10. .

    Something about Quelque Chose
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