E-LEARNING ISN'T EVERYTHING:

ADAPTING INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN TO A WEB 2.0 WORLD

Frank Nguyen

THE GAME HAS CHANGED

Much has changed in the world since those dark, early days of e-learning. The number of people plugged into the Internet worldwide has quintupled from 360 million in 2000 to almost two billion just ten years later (Internet World Stats, 2010). While screeching dial-up modems were common at the start of the decade, more than 300 million households worldwide now have broadband access (Internet World Stats, 2010).

More importantly, whereas previous web technologies (now dubbed Web 1.0) limited content contribution to those with the tools, skills, and infrastructure to publish content, the advent of Web 2.0 technologies has opened content creation and contribution to the masses. Anyone can share his or her stream of conscious thoughts on a blog, catch up with old friends on Facebook, document everything he or she knows about the Byzantine empire on Wikipedia, or publish a video of a baby named Charlie biting his brother's finger on YouTube. This paradigm change has pushed the growth of the web exponentially. In 1998, there were just shy of three million web pages worldwide, compared to estimates of around fifteen billion in 2010 (Internet World Stats, 2010).

None of this is really surprising. There has been much discussion over the past several years about the advent of informal learning, mobile learning, microlearning, m-learning, learning ecosystems, performance ecosystems, Learning 2.0, eLearning 2.0, e-learning 2.0, workflow learning, immersive learning, and insert new trendy catch phrase here learning. Which of these are legitimate trends, passing fads, or harsh realities is a matter of personal opinion, conjecture, and time.

What is clear, however, is that the environment has irrevocably changed. Training is no longer the only shop in town for trusted information (let's face it; we haven't been for a long time). Learning can and will take place beyond the classroom or office cube. Learners no longer see learning as a one-way street. They can and will share what they know with others. e-Learning and how we approach the design of learning in general must adapt as well. e-Learning wasn't everything when we started and it still isn't today.

ADAPTING INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN 1: BUILD LEARNING EXPERIENCES AND NOT JUST EVENTS

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States military realized that it had to find a better way to consistently and rapidly train vast numbers of new soldiers who had to quickly learn how to navigate ships, fire artillery, drive tanks, and fly planes. It also had to find a way to mobilize a civilian workforce that was asked to build the ship hulls, mortar shells, tank chasses, and airplane fuselages used by soldiers during the war.

In 1949, the U.S. Air Force recruited a young professor from Connecticut College, Robert Gagne, to run its Perceptual and Motor Skills Laboratory—with the goal of finding better methods of developing future generations of pilots. That young professor spent the next ten years developing an approach that formed the foundations of instructional systems design. In 1965, he published a book, Conditions of Learning, that outlined a specific sequence of events that must occur to support optimal learning. You will probably know this framework as Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction, shown in Figure 1.

The instructional design constructs that Robert Gagne gave us worked back then, and they still do today. But the post-WWII world that Gagne faced was obviously very different. The cutting-edge multimedia of the day were filmstrips. The first electronic computer, the ENIAC, was finished just three years prior to Gagne starting his work for the Department of Defense. The closest thing to instant messaging at the time was the teletypewriter. As a result, the nine events that Gagne referred to occur squarely within a briefing room full of young and brash fighter pilots, a group of welders assembled on the docks of a shipyard, and the four walls of a class of elementary school students. Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction focus on learning events that occur in a certain place, at a certain time.

Figure 1. Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction (Gagne, 1985)

Over the past decade, e-learning has made significant progress in breaking down the time and geographic constraints of such learning events. Learners no longer have to sign up for a class, schedule time away from their jobs, and travel to another site just to attend training. They can log on to a learning management system twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to take a web-based training course. They can sign up for a scheduled virtual classroom session or even watch a recording afterward from the comfort of their offices.

But from an instructional design standpoint, we still focus much of our instructional design energies on isolated learning events. We expect learning to occur within a certain period of time, even though we may be more flexible about when that time is and where it takes place. We make sure that each web-based training course gains the learners' attention with a whiz-bang Flash animation or motivational video from the CEO. We give them a summary of what the objectives are. The learners still have to read walls of words or listen to audio narration. We give them practice activities to elicit performance. We give them feedback and test to make sure they have mastered the instructional objectives.

Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction were focused on the design of singular learning events in a world of filmstrips, the ENIAC, and teletypewriters. In a world of YouTube, iPhones, and IM, we are still designing singular learning events.

As an e-learning industry, we have to expand the scope of what we design from simple learning events to more comprehensive learning experiences. As shown in Figure 2, what Gagne gave us is still relevant and useful, but we must take advantage of the fact that learning does not only occur in a certain place, at a certain time. It will occur before formal training and well afterward. If we let learning outside of the event happen informally or in a haphazard way, it will probably still happen. However, it will be inefficient, painful, and costly for our respective organizations.

Gagne's original mission more than sixty years ago was to find ways to make learning more efficient for soldiers and civilians. Although technology may have changed since then, our objective as learning professionals has not. We must find ways to design learning experiences that leverage the powerful set of tools we have today to make learning more efficient and effective.

Figure 2. Gagne's Instructional Events Spread Across a Learning Experience

ADAPTING INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN 2: EXPAND THE TOOLBOX

I once worked in an organization populated by e-learning addicts. The manager reminded me a bit of Gus from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. While Greek Gus used Windex to solve every ailment, e-learning Gus thought every business problem could be solved with an e-learning course. Customers are having problems purchasing on the website? No problem, here's a WBT. We need to roll out a new performance review process to managers? Sure, let's build a WBT and some virtual classroom webinars. Users have no way to access the new equipment manual? You guessed it: e-learning. Over the course of one particular year, we created just shy of two thousand new online courses. In fact, we even had several e-learning courses devoted to train others on how to make more e-learning. We proceeded under the assumption that e-learning could solve any problem, address any need.

As e-learning professionals, we have to be less one-dimensional than Gus and his miracle bottle of e-learning. We have to acknowledge the fact that some business problems—in fact, most business problems—may be best addressed using e-learning combined with some other performance interventions. In certain situations, e-learning or training in general may not even be necessary. Figure 3 outlines a number of different performance interventions that can be combined with traditional e-learning offerings to address specific business needs.

This notion of developing solutions that include more than just learning is not at all new. Those who subscribe to the principles of performance improvement have long professed this approach. A performance technologist would argue that careful, deliberate analysis followed by the thoughtful selection of training, support, and just about any other intervention under the sun will better address business problems than training alone.

Figure 3. Performance Interventions That Can Be Combined with e-Learning to Create Learning Experiences

However, one of the pitfalls of this approach is that we risk becoming mediocre tinkerers at everything and expert at nothing. Even though the list of performance interventions in Figure 3 is not at all exhaustive, it would be unrealistic and costly for any organization to develop core competencies in each intervention and to identify supporting products. It is simply not possible to become an expert at e-learning and job aids and coaching guides and knowledge management and….

Fortunately, you don't have to become one. By and large, most learning organizations serve a specific audience and specific business domain. These boundary limitations can be used to select a pre-defined set of performance interventions that your organization should consider adopting, become very good at, and use in combination with e-learning.

Using the worksheet in Figure 4, you should start by identifying the type of content your organization is typically responsible for training. For example, a sales organization may typically deal with factual content for its ever-changing product portfolio. A learning organization based in the information technology department may commonly deal with software procedures and business processes. A group supporting a factory likely must support manufacturing processes, equipment troubleshooting principles, and repair procedures. A human resources department may be asked to provide learning for management principles, performance review procedures, or legal and compliance facts.

Once you've identified the type of content your organization generally supports, you should identify performance interventions that would best support the performance of learners as they master this content. In addition, it is useful to identify one or more products to support each intervention that your organization could realistically implement.

For instance, a sales organization may choose to deliver its volatile product information through podcasts that can be produced rapidly and inexpensively. An IT training organization may elect to adopt a wiki with common and uncommon software procedures to provide learners with performance support after they attend the learning event. A manufacturing group could use a blog to allow technicians to quickly capture new repair procedures. They could set up team practice activities whereby technicians gather together to solve case studies that closely mirror recently identified equipment issues. The human resources team could create coaching guides that help managers deal with low-performing employees.

Figure 4. Content-Performance Intervention Mapping Worksheet

Ideally, you should identify a range of performance interventions that can provide support to learners before, during, and after the learning event. Depending on the content and audience you serve, you may need only a few different performance interventions. In other situations, you may need a dozen or more. Some factors to consider are complexity of the work, content volatility, and size and distribution of your employee base. For example, if your employees work in a fairly rigid, process-driven manufacturing environment where things change on an infrequent basis, it's likely that your organization could rely on fairly conventional interventions like direct communications, job aids, and on-the-job training. On the other hand, if you primarily serve field sales representatives who work with clients on-site to sell the company's latest and ever-changing products, then you may need to consider a broader toolkit that includes video podcasts updated on a daily basis, performance support systems that can deliver learning at the moment of need, and other mobile learning interventions. The key is to select the requisite interventions to meet your needs and become very good at designing and developing those interventions. Again, don't adopt so many interventions that you are mediocre at all of them but expert at none.

With a toolbox brimming with new performance interventions, you should benchmark other organizations that may have strong expertise in these new interventions, identify any best practices and incorporate them into standards and product templates for others in the organization to follow, and establish internal experts to champion each performance intervention and support their peers as they adopt these new tools.

Finally, focus on how to best combine these products with traditional e-learning to create rich learning experiences. To guide instructional designers and e-learning developers through the selection of the best performance interventions for a given situation, you may want to develop a decision-making process or guidelines. One approach is to create a matrix specific to your organization that outlines criteria for each performance intervention such as the example shown in Figure 5. Such factors may include the type of content, audience size, cost, and other factors.

Figure 5. Example of a Performance Intervention Matrix

ADAPT INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN 3: EMBRACE THE MASSES

Just as some instructors feared that e-learning would signal the death of the classroom, some today fear that Web 2.0 technologies and the learning paradigms they enable may signal the death of e-learning. Why do learners need us if they can share what they know with each other and learn on their own? Why take an e-learning class when they can search for information in a wiki? Why sign up for a class next month when they can read an expert's blog today?

Just as classroom training did not die with the advent of e-learning, it is unlikely that e-learning or training will die with the advent of user-generated content. However, unless we adapt how we design learning and move away from providing stand-alone, isolated, and untimely learning events, we certainly risk being undervalued. More than likely, we will be perceived as slow, out of touch, and eventually irrelevant.

Because of Web 2.0, the world has irrevocably changed. Rather than perceiving this paradigm shift as a threat, we should instead see it as an opportunity. It is a mechanism that allows us to mine the knowledge of the masses. It is an opportunity to mobilize a larger body of resources—learners, their peers, their managers—and deliver more timely and scalable learning experiences with lower cost and fewer resources.

For example, instructional designers have historically relied on subject-matter experts (SMEs) as their primary source of content and information. We have been at the mercy of SMEs' projects, schedules, and competing commitments. We struggle to arrange meetings to obtain the information we need. We send reminder after reminder to obtain the screenshots or process documents promised weeks ago. We wait impatiently to have them review and provide feedback on learning materials. When the input finally does come, it sometimes arrives in the eleventh hour or even after the e-learning course has been published to the masses.

In a Web 2.0 world, our elusive subject-matter experts will continue to be a trusted source of information. However, we also have access to a broader source of knowledge: learners. We can review blog sites of well-respected employees to identify best practices. We can reference content posted by employees in the organizational wiki. We can reuse podcasts as part of a structured learning experience, perhaps as a foundational performance intervention before a web-based training or virtual classroom course.

We can also leverage Web 2.0 technologies to support learners before, during, and after learning events. For instance, prior to a course designed to help managers deal with difficult employees, we may require the participants to write an anonymous case study about a difficult employee using a course blog. During the learning event, small groups of managers can collaboratively problem solve and identify strategies on how to deal with the difficult employees described in the case study. They could even then produce low-fidelity videos, post them to a video-sharing site, and watch video case studies from other managers. They could then extract the strategies identified during the course and document those to a wiki for on-the-job reference.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE HERE … TODAY

Every once in a while, I look at that first e-learning course I built years ago. The experience is akin to digging up an Atari 2400 game console from the closet and loading up Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or Pong. While you can't help but feel a little nostalgic, you have to wonder how you ever thought it was cutting-edge.

The e-learning industry has matured since the early days of HTML, crashing corporate networks, and cases of Mountain Dew. Just as we had to learn and adapt back then, e-learning is at an inflection point today where we must do the same.

In order to continue make learning efficient, we cannot simply focus our design energies exclusively on learning events. We must also design and structure learning experiences that intelligently provide learning and support before, during, and long after training is over. In order to do this, we must expand our toolbox beyond e-learning and adopt interventions that we may not be comfortable with, including Web 2.0 technologies. In a Web 2.0 world, we must no longer think of our learners as learners, but as our subject-matter experts, instructors, and partners in the instructional design process.

REFERENCES

Gagne, R. (1985). The conditions of learning and the theory of instruction (4th ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Internet World Stats. (2010). World internet usage statistics. Retrieved September 27, 2010, from www.internetworldstats.com.