8

Lies About E-Learning

Michael W. Allen

Perhaps no segment of the learning field has more misconstrued principles that lead to ineffective practices than e-learning. To be fair, designing and developing effective e-learning can be difficult, so success is far from a sure thing. But there are plenty of popular lies that attempt to excuse unimpressive results and justify poor e-learning programs. There are more that suggest that lame attempts truly are enough. There are even more that try to assure the wary that new technologies make improving performance fast and easy.

Misunderstandings are so pervasive that some lies have corresponding counter-lies—lies at each extreme—from “it’s too hard” to “nothing to it,” from horrendously expensive to miraculously cheap, from scourge of the earth to savior of humanity. As with most things, we prefer the comfort of extreme judgment—black or white, good or bad. But the truth is often somewhere in the middle; it depends on specifics, not on generalizations.

One chapter is not enough to address all the lies about e-learning, so I’ll take up the misconceptions that I hear most often—pointing perhaps to the less comfortable middle ground where the truth nestles and where we have to be thoughtful in drawing conclusions and making decisions. But note that despite what the lies imply, there are few absolute rights and wrongs. Countering the extremes of lies with more extremes simply exacerbates the problem and adds to the confusion.

Lie #1: Technology Makes Instruction Less Expensive

I often hear how alluring e-learning can be. How you can deliver it more easily than face-to-face instruction. How once you’ve automated instruction, you can take on any number of students and confidently know they’ll all receive the same instruction. How after some careful preparation up front, you can sit back and let the computer do all the heavy lifting. How you can organize content for presentation, present it, and follow up with a final test, just as you can in the classroom. How once it’s done, it’s done.

But instructional design for automated delivery requires more, not less, work than instructor-led delivery. Why? Because no matter how smart the designer or how clever the design, the learning product lacks the instructor’s real-time adjustments that greatly influence the quality and effectiveness of each delivery. While we may someday have artificial intelligence that can perform spontaneous instructional tasks and make subtle adjustment to the learning experience, for now programming must attempt to proactively address every possibility and account for every individual need. Only the instructional functions that are anticipated, designed, and built will be carried out.

E-learning is a great way to save money and reliably improve performance—a win/win. But it’s important to save money at the right place, instead of in places where cutting costs guarantees little or no impact and wastes time and effort. E-learning dramatically reduces delivery costs, typically the largest instructional costs. With e-learning there are no travel expenses, no classroom requirements, no instructor costs, and no scheduling problems that may require an operational shutdown while people are being trained.

But don’t get greedy. Apply some of the expected savings to improving the design and development of the courseware. Failing to do so may result in learning products with little impact, wasted development costs, untrained learners, and lost opportunity costs. And then, of course, the need for effective training remains.

The message here is simple—developing effective e-learning programs will cost more up front than developing classroom instruction for the same content. But done right, e-learning can provide highly individualized learning experiences that take advantage of every minute learners are away from their jobs for training. And while it may cost more to develop, in the end it may save money when factoring in the costs and limitations of traditional classroom training.

Lie #2: Instructional Design for E-Learning Is Too Hard

I also hear complaints that instructional design for e-learning is too difficult, too slow, and too expensive. Let’s agree that good instructional design and development isn’t easy—especially when doing it the traditional way many of us were taught: the ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation) way. For decades, practitioners have extolled the virtues of what began as a phase-sequenced process—analysis before design, design before development, and so forth (Branson et al. 1975)—and have exhaustively detailed the tasks required within each phase, insisting on the importance of thoroughness, lest the following phases be affected by errors in preceding phases. ADDIE is very logical, but if followed religiously, it can be too hard, too slow, and too expensive to implement, especially for e-learning.

For quite some time, ADDIE users have been searching for more practical methods—methods that don’t make them feel guilty about breaking the rules. While it is true that all ADDIE’s tasks are important, is there a way to complete them more quickly? How can the risk of errors and the potential damage caused by missing or skipping steps be mitigated so that tedious, painful, and expensive thoroughness isn’t required?

One option is the Successive Approximation Model (SAM), which is a much better approach for many in our profession (Allen and Sites 2012). In what could be seen as the next step in ADDIE’s evolution, SAM incorporates rapid prototyping, agile software development, interleaving design, and development and iteration—all adapted for the needs of e-learning professionals as well as the needs of the production team and stakeholders.

SAM is a bit more of a “just do it” process. While ADDIE takes a long time to generate specification documents, which are often interpreted differently by their writers and the assortment of readers for whom they are intended, SAM requires only a quick survey of the situation, mostly to determine who knows what and who cares about what. Key players are then assembled to brainstorm what might be done. Under the leadership of a skilled instructional designer, the group is encouraged to imagine a solution and then address the question: Why shouldn’t we do this? (The “this” is usually prototyped quickly so that everyone has a clear understanding of what’s being proposed.) Addressing that question generates valuable, specific information quickly and expedites conducting analysis and designing creative solutions.

Overall, SAM is simpler, faster, more practical, more learner focused, and less content focused than other models. It recognizes the need for clients and subject matter experts to be informed and defines practical ways for them to participate in instructional development. It takes advantage of the contributions learners can make from the very start of the process. It works to identify key decision makers, who are often not clear until late in production, and provides ways for them to be comfortably and effectively involved. In the end, SAM is a more inclusive process that has been optimized for instructional software development, which, in the end, is precisely what e-learning is.

Lie #3: Principles of Good Instructional Design Are Intuitive and Obvious

For years, instructional design professionals, especially those who focus on e-learning, have had to deal with what I might refer to as a little cluster of lies about their profession—anyone can do it, it’s not even necessary, and other new technologies have become the primary mechanisms for learning and they don’t require any design at all. This section will explore each.

Instead of diligently and intelligently applying what we know from research about how humans learn, many instructional design teams take a carefree approach, thinking there’s too much puffery about something that’s really quite simple. Our next lie about e-learning is that the principles of good instructional design are intuitive and obvious.

Regardless of delivery mode, producing instructional designs that effectively and efficiently produce performance excellence is a lot harder than it looks. Making matters worse, e-learning differs from instructor-led learning in what it can do and what it does well. Designers thus need to know which principles to apply where. There are many paths to becoming a good instructional designer, and some outstanding designers have little, if any, formal education on the underlying principles. Despite this, they are able to assess what makes a great learning experience and creatively design very effective instruction.

Sub-Lie #3a: Instructional Design Is Dead Because It’s Unnecessary

Pundits, and others with an agenda, have been proclaiming the death of instructional design for years. Well, this may just be wishful thinking. They think (and sometimes say): “I don’t know much about instructional design. Thank goodness we don’t need it anyway.”

We repeatedly see a desire for quick, easy solutions when it comes to instructional design and e-learning. Typically, although not always, those who are the loudest critics of the instructional design discipline are those who stand to benefit most by its demise—producers of new technologies, such as rapid authoring, template-based design, informal learning, social learning, and, more recently, gamification. They stand to benefit if their potential customers believe that their technologies render instructional design unnecessary. But this has rarely been the case, and the results almost never live up to the hype.

Sub-Lie #3b: Most People Are Learning Informally and That Doesn’t Require Design

“Since we know that people in many organizations report that much of their training was informal, we just need to get out of the way.” I hear this often in discussions weighing formal and informal learning methods. The complaints are the same: Formal learning programs are expensive, time-consuming to produce, boring, and ineffective. We’re well advised to scrap formal learning and just sanction the informal learning that’s going to happen anyway. Motivated people will figure out how to do their jobs; the others should just move on.

People with a high degree of technical expertise are usually very busy doing what they do best. When confronted with a request for some informal learning support, imagine a top performer having this internal dialogue: “Let’s see. I’m really busy. What I can tell Jerry that will get him out of his situation now (and out of my hair)?” Top performers may not be good teachers and may not always be available when someone needs help. So while Jerry—stranded, stumped, and confused—is often drawn to the expert for direction, the expert may, in fact, be the least available and most expensive person to provide help. The expert may provide a temporary shortcut, put work on hold to mentor, or let a less-knowledgeable person figure out how to help. None of these are good outcomes.

Poor methods and improper or ineffective shortcuts easily propagate when skill building is left to informal methods. Efficiency and productivity drops, competitive abilities are not nourished, and training costs rise. Informal learning certainly has a role to play. But while a good substitute for poor formal learning, it’s far from a good substitute for well-executed formal learning (Eraut 2004). It certainly isn’t the panacea that some industry experts would have us believe.

Informal learning will not create itself. It needs design and direction to overcome its deficiencies. To succeed, it requires time management, training and certification of mentors, facilitated matchmaking of learners and mentors, aids to help learners know when they need guidance and where they should go to get it, and many other preparations. Such preparations can be implemented, of course, but informal learning doesn’t become effective when formal learning is simply abandoned.

In fact, recognition that informal learning has its shortcomings was what demanded the development of a more formal approach to learning. Both approaches are necessary, but neither is sufficient, and they both require carefully designed foundations to ensure success.

How can we overcome the lies being told about the worthiness of instructional design, particularly in relation to e-learning? We need to recognize that instructional design is a profession. Just as with dentistry or plumbing or brain surgery, one takes quite a risk entrusting the work to those who aren’t fully qualified and haven’t demonstrated their ability to perform.

The Serious eLearning Manifesto (Allen, Dirksen, Quinn, and Thalheimer 2014) was recently created by a group of concerned e-learning veterans to offer guidance to those new to the field and to provide criteria that buyers of e-learning products (off-the-shelf or custom) should apply when developing requirements for their courseware or evaluating quality. It describes the characteristics of good e-learning, indicators of poorly designed e-learning, and principles to guide designers as they create e-learning programs.

When solely relying on informal or social learning, make sure that those needing help know how to identify and contact the best resources and make sure those giving help know how to provide effective support. And don’t forget, good instructional designers can also help train experts in how to guide others.

Lie #4: E-Learning Is Impersonal and Inferior to Instructor-Led Learning

Some opponents of e-learning say that it doesn’t have the eyes, ears, and empathy of human instructors. That it can’t replicate the magic good instructors create in their classrooms. And that it’s best to stick with the tried and true.

But the truth is some e-learning fulfills the promise of technology-assisted, individualized learning and produces spectacular results—sometimes even better than what a great instructor can achieve in a classroom. It can engage and mesmerize. It can produce irrepressible glee and appreciation. It can give every learner its full attention—something no instructor, no matter how good, can do.

E-learning replays consistently and reliably. It does what we tell it to do and only what we tell it to do. Once the logic is in place, it never varies because of illness, a lapse of memory, or a misstatement. It can match the pace that’s best for each learner. It has infinite patience. It uses the same criteria to judge every learner’s answer. It’s available all day and every day. And it never forgets the learner’s performance history, which it can draw on instantly.

E-learning is superior to instructor-led delivery because we can change it, knowing that the change will be carried out for every subsequent learner. We can systematically improve e-learning much more readily than instructor-led delivery, through application, feedback, and modification. Regardless of the effectiveness of an e-learning program, we can keep improving it until it meets our needs and, more important, our learners’ needs. And once we have done that, we can count on it to achieve its goals consistently and fairly.

In the end, I think that e-learning is considered inferior because designers and implementers fail to plan and budget for revisions. They do not test out their first version, perhaps on a small group of learners, to determine its effectiveness and what can be improved. It’s pretty simple, yet, somewhat inexplicably, rarely done.

Unfortunately, great results are too rare. And the risks are high because just as e-learning can earn superlatives, it can also result in staunch criticism. If learners like it, they talk about it, but if they don’t like it, they talk about it even more. Effective uses tend to be very effective, while anything less tends to be painful and monotonous. Even when well-grounded principles of instruction and human learning are carefully applied, the resulting learning experience can be dreadful.

Some common mistakes to avoid in designing e-learning are:

   creating content-focused presentations (“text and next”), rather than well-considered, challenge-focused learning experiences

   omitting meaningful evaluation from the implementation plan

   not planning or budgeting for improvement iterations.

Even instructor-led delivery quickly becomes impersonal if the focus is simply on presenting information. With e-learning we can ensure that learners receive the appropriate instruction and practice by steering them clear of monotonously flipping through content pages and, instead, challenging them to perform tasks. If the learners perform well, they can skip ahead to content they find more interesting and helpful. If they need help, we can elaborate on the content that will be useful.

These are basic concepts that should characterize nearly all e-learning. But too often, e-learning misses the mark. The rapidly expanded use of e-learning has forced many people into becoming instructional designers, a role they have had very little professional preparation for. They have not had the opportunity to learn these concepts and thus focus on content presentations rather than learning experiences. To improve e-learning, companies must be willing to trust it to the people skilled in the art and science of instructional design.

Lie #5: Evaluating E-Learning Is Too Difficult and Expensive, So We Don’t Need to Do It

Far too often I hear: “It’s difficult and expensive to do impact or return-on-investment studies. We don’t know how and we don’t have the budget. And even if we did have the money, we’d be better off developing instruction on another topic than just checking to see if what we did works. And besides, if we got bad news, what would we do about it? It would just make our department look bad. No thanks!” But not all evaluation is difficult nor is it always expensive. And more important, evaluation is critical to successful e-learning.

Unlike more traditional forms of learning, meaningful evaluation methods can be incorporated directly into e-learning so it can adapt to learner needs, while also identifying where learning is and isn’t happening. When designed well, e-learning continuously evaluates learner performance and progress to determine whether a learner needs more practice or if a learner is ready to advance to more challenging skills. Indeed, e-learning practitioners can’t use learners’ time efficiently and provide them with a beneficial experience if they aren’t collecting data along the way. Although courseware can’t directly measure post-training performance or the impact of on-the-job performance, it can ensure that learners are capable of the desired performance in the learning context.

How can you do this? By making sure that your e-learning has performance-sensitive branching capabilities that determine what each learner should do next. It shouldn’t simply cruise through topics, assuming that exposure to the same content in the same way will be effective for all learners. It should accurately detect whether learners need alternative explanations or additional practice, have those resources available, and be able to use them according to individual needs. And it should not force capable people to study previously mastered content.

This approach delivers a substantial amount of information that can be a useful proxy for the information gathered from evaluation studies that measure on-the-job performance. So while calculating ROI is difficult under any circumstance, e-learning can provide concrete information about development costs and job performance, and help recover lost opportunity costs from the dramatic reduction in time spent learning. And that is without any of the additional work that is required for achieving the same goals with classroom learning.

Lie #6: E-Learning Must Be Offered in Small Morsels

Apparently, some believe that e-learning is so hard to digest that learners need it cut up in small pieces, lest they bite off more than they can chew. This lie is often reinforced by lengthy explanations that today’s digital learners have little patience and very short attention spans. That the only way to connect to today’s learners is to get in and get out quickly. In fact, some wonder whether we should even expect them to actually learn anything. And some suggest we just give learners checklists or online instructions to follow, because they’re not going to be interested in putting in the time to learn anyway.

This willingness to throw in the towel—to blame learners for not being stimulated by boring e-learning and to not even try to build meaningful, memorable, and motivational learning experiences—continues to gain steam. It reinforces the lie that instructional design isn’t necessary, particularly for e-learning.

Sure, the interest-sustaining novelty of e-learning wore off many years ago. But short segments are not necessarily the solution. Of course, if the e-learning is going to be painfully boring, most people would prefer it to be short. But we know from the long hours many people spend playing video games that people do have sufficient attention spans if sufficiently engaged. And we also know that to build complex skills, brief contact with learners is simply not enough.

When we individualize e-learning—adapt it to a learner’s abilities by, for example, alternately raising and lowering the difficulty so that it demands concentration (as video games do)—learners will tune in for surprisingly long periods of time. And, not only will they enthusiastically endorse the learning method, but they will also recommend it to their friends.

Conclusion

We’re always looking for the easy solution, especially, it seems, to avoid the hard work of instructional design or even education and training as a whole. But being competitive and succeeding in the learning marketplace requires the right competencies, and this includes understanding e-learning. Time and again, e-learning has proved that it can be an extraordinary and economical means of achieving success.

But you must be wary of the many tempting pitfalls and misconceptions about e-learning. Here are the ones covered in this chapter:

   While technology may reduce the costs of instruction, you should apply some of the expected savings to improving the design and development of the courseware, or you may be saddled with ineffective learning products.

   Design methodologies have advanced—take SAM, for example—so instructional design is not nearly as hard or expensive as with ADDIE and other legacy models.

   Instructional design, especially for e-learning, requires developed expertise; rapid authoring and templates speed up development but don’t supplant good design. Informal learning has a role to play, but formal learning may be necessary when experts are not available to help mentor learners.

   E-learning has its limitations, but it can provide levels of individual adaptability that are unmanageable in classroom settings.

   Evaluation within e-learning is necessary to deliver individualized experiences, so claiming that it is too difficult or expensive is not an excuse. At the same time, e-learning can provide a great deal of information about development costs, reductions in delivery costs, and projections about on-the-job performance that are simply not available with other forms of learning.

   When e-learning is engaging and valuable, learners prefer longer sessions that go deeper in substance, not just brief interactions with the content.

I hope this chapter has prepared you to counter all those worrisome lies and you’re ready to reap the incredible advantages of e-learning.

References

Allen, M.W., and R. Sites. 2012. Leaving ADDIE for SAM: An Agile Model for Developing the Best Learning Experiences. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Allen, M.W., J. Dirksen, C. Quinn, W. Thalheimer. 2014. “The Manifesto.” Serious eLearning Manifesto. http://elearningmanifesto.org.

Branson, R.K., G.T. Rayner, J.L. Cox, J.P. Furman, and F.J. King. 1975. Interservice Procedures for Instructional Systems Development (Task V Final Report). Tallahassee: Florida State University, Center for Educational Technology.

Eraut, M. 2004. “Informal Learning in the Workplace.” Studies in Continuing Education 26(2): 247–273.

Recommended Reading

Cross, J. 2011. Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.