LCMS:

NOT JUST A TECHNOLOGY, IT'S A STRATEGY — A REBUTTAL

Carla Torgerson

In his article, Bryan Chapman makes some excellent points about how training can and should provide a strategic value to the business and connect “learning activities with bottom-line business objectives.” I agree wholly with his points about the importance of using training to push organizations to better efficiency, productivity, and profitability. However, that's where our agreement ends. While I agree with the goals Chapman identifies, I disagree with the methods he recommends.

Chapman suggests that training is best developed when we use shared learning objects on a learning content management system (LCMS). That is, training modules and content documents are repurposed and repackaged for different learner groups. Ultimately Chapman's vision is to create reusable, modular learning content. He suggests that this decreases development time, increases speed to competency, makes training available across departments, and enables the training department to capture expert knowledge.

AN OMELET BAR AND WHY MODULARIZED LEARNING TASTES BAD

Imagine that we are going out for breakfast. I'll take you to my favorite restaurant down the street where they have a fabulous omelet bar. There's a friendly chef who will cook my omelet to order. I can choose from a host of things to have in my omelet: mushrooms, spinach, ham, chicken, tomatoes … and of course the cheese!

On the surface this may sound like the learning that Chapman is proposing—a host of learning morsels for the learner to enjoy, all culminated in a single dish. However, what he's really proposing is that the chef make a plate of scrambled eggs and sprinkle the ham, tomatoes, and cheese on top. I'll be lucky if the cheese is even melted. There will be no blending of foods or tastes. No culinary contribution, really. Ultimately, I will have a plate piled with food, but not the omelet I was expecting. If I finish it, I certainly won't be back for seconds. I didn't want groceries; I wanted a carefully conceived, constructed, and integrated dish.

Instead (thankfully!), the chef will take all of the food items I've requested and stir them in with the eggs, integrating the ingredients into the tasty omelet I desire. Ultimately, the omelet tastes better because all the pieces were cooked together. They were combined thoughtfully, with the flavors of each ingredient impacting the others. Just as you cannot have a delicious omelet by piling ingredients on top of the eggs, you cannot have an effective learning experience by stringing learning objects together. There needs to be a unity in the learning experience—where things from later in the course reference things from earlier and the whole course works together to optimize my time and experience.

I am not saying that we should not reuse learning content. Absolutely we should, as it is more efficient. However, an instructional designer should be like your omelet chef, taking individual ingredients and shaping the content mixture to create a complete course for the learner, just as the chef takes your desired ingredients and delivers a delicious whole omelet just for you. Careful integration complete with helpful transitions allow the course to flow together in ways that are relevant to the learner. They allows the course to build on previous learning activities rather than just being a number of discrete learning objects placed together.

REVISITING CHAPMAN'S ADVANTAGES OF LEARNING OBJECTS

In the article, Chapman makes a strong business case for the use of learning objects. However, I'd like to look at some of his points and offer an alternate strategy.

The Overall Case. Time and again, Chapman insists that content is the key. Certainly, having the right content is important, but for people to learn the content, context is the real key. If Chapman were right and just having access to information was all that learners needed, then we wouldn't need training at all. We would simply provide employees with Google and access to a central repository of proprietary content.

Certainly, much learning could happen in such an environment. There is a lot of excitement and interest in informal learning—the learning employees do when quickly searching the Internet, talking to a colleague, or reading something on LinkedIn. (For more on this, create your own informal learning experience by doing a Google search for Jay Cross!) However, there is still a place for formal learning—learning that is directed by outcomes and perhaps even by a manager to whom the employee is held accountable.

Formal learning is most effective when there is a context. If you strip away the context, you make it much harder to keep the learner engaged and for the learner to transfer the learning to her work. For example, let's say I was going to design a course on sexual harassment. I could simply put the corporate policy on my LCMS and expect people to read and interpret it, as Chapman recommends. Instead, I recommend designing a course that has the learner apply the policy to common situations and learn about the nuances of the policy from the feedback in those activities. The feedback will be adapted to what the learner may already know and do. This would be more interesting and engaging and would also enable the learner to practice efficiently and to a point of mastery. If learners don't have the opportunity to practice the behaviors you want them to exhibit, they are unlikely to be able to perform those skills on the job. Chapman seems to confuse reading content with the learner's ability to apply it.

Even if the learning object is interactive and enables the learner to practice and apply learning, it must be applicable to her. If you teach me a number of things without relating them to my specific job role, I may not be able to apply them when I get back to my work. Creating learning objects before you even know who will use them will force you to create something so generic that it's really not helpful to any learner.

Similarly, learning must be customized for the knowledge expected of the learner and the tools and resources at his disposal. Let's say I need to learn how to change a flat tire on my car. I can watch a number of YouTube videos about how to change a flat tire, but I may still not find the information that I need. What if I told you the car is in my garage and I have a hoist? Would that change what I needed to learn? Of course. I need to learn how to change a tire for a car on a hoist, not a car on the side of the road. When the training department doesn't recognize the different environments that learners are in and the different tools they use, then the training is not likely to meet their needs. Just one learning object may not meet all learner needs, and it would be foolish to assume it could. Trying to make content elements generalized and reusable almost certainly guarantees lesser impact for all learners.

Does It Really Decrease Development Time? Reusing learning objects can decrease development time, but it may not allow you to bring in the unique contexts you need, or to customize them for each learner group. Chapman is right that it can be faster, but is it better? There are many cases for which we could do things faster, but we don't because quality is also important. For example, would you want to fly in a plane if I told you it was assembled in just two days? Would you want to drive across a bridge that had been constructed in just a week? Of course not. In both of these cases you would fear the corners that might have been cut to finish the product quickly. Even at the omelet bar, my omelet could be delivered more quickly, but then it would be undercooked. It wouldn't taste very good, and worse, it might be very unsafe for me to eat.

The same is true of learning. We need a certain level of quality to ensure the learner actually learns. A course that is thrown together too quickly will not provide adequate teaching, the learner won't learn from it, and the learner will hate the experience. If students don't learn, then we've wasted our time and our learners’ time. There is no efficiency in this. We should not be measuring courses by the amount of time it took to create them, but rather by the amount of learning that took place from them and the strategic value of that learning to the organization.

For example, at Allen Interactions, we developed a piece of e-learning that was very successful. The client's research found that the training decreased lab breakage by 12 percent and decreased error re-dos by 17 percent. This resulted in $7M in annual savings! If I told you I needed more than a week or two to design and create that training, would you allow me the time to make the right solution? Of course you would. The payoff of quality is simply too great for you not to.

Certainly Chapman is right that longer development times can create bottlenecks. We must always review potential courses and prioritize those that have the most strategic value for the organization. This allows us to create the most strategically significant training and use learners’ limited time most wisely.

Will Learning Objects Deliver Increased Speed to Competency? Chapman suggests that learning objects will increase speed to competency. In his examples, he's showing how learning objects can speed up development time. Truly, it is unfair to say that just because you have a course ready sooner, the learner will be able to become proficient sooner. It depends on the effectiveness of the courseware. Certainly, you lose the bottleneck that Chapman talks of, but the learner's time to competency is still the same.

Chapman also suggests that shorter courses create increased speed to competency. While it is an excellent business goal to make learners proficient faster, learning takes time. Performance proficiency requires cognitive effort, thinking, synthesizing, and practice. A short course does not necessarily mean the learner will learn something faster or even to adequate proficiency at all. It's a poor tradeoff to provide a host of short courses that fail to bring learners to proficiency when a well-designed program could actually achieve proficiency. While at Allen Interactions I designed a forty-five-minute e-learning course on how to be a better manager. There is some theory about leadership and team dynamics, but mostly practice activities wherein the learner applies this material. Could I have made it a five-minute course? Absolutely. Would the learner be as proficient after completing the course? Absolutely not.

Organizations need their staff to be at high levels of proficiency. Precluding learners from adequate practice, application, and processing time is detrimental. If we don't consider this, we have wasted both our time and the learner's and have lost an opportunity to actually change behavior.

Can We Use Mission-Critical Content Across Lines of Business and Departments? Again, I agree with Chapman's goals, but not his methods. Of course we need to leverage mission-critical content and share it as widely across multiple groups as we effectively can. However, we need to show the learner “What's in it for me?” That is, we must provide context and meaning to make this learning apply to learners and show why they should care. Appropriate contexts are likely to be different within the various business units and departments, and as learning activities are created for each different context, other elements will likewise need to be differentiated for each context. Some sharing of objects will no doubt be possible, but many will need to be edited and revised to provide the most relevant context and support for the learner.

Chapman recommends having content stored as discreet learning objects, such as a paragraph of text, a chart, or a diagram. These are then linked together in different ways to create courseware for different learner groups. But without appropriate context, this content just becomes corporate speak. Without context to give the content meaning (“Let me put that into context for you”), the learner must figure out what's important and how to apply it in her work. This is neither efficient nor effective. It's not efficient because it may be difficult for the learner to connect the content with her work, which will make the learning esoteric and difficult. More importantly, it's not effective because you are leaving it to the learner to determine what's important. If the organization has a strategic need for the training, then you need to design the training to ensure the learner recognizes that strategy. Without that, chances are slim that the learner will integrate the content in ways that meet the organization's strategic goals.

Can Learning Objects Capture and Maintain Expert Knowledge? Is it important to capture and maintain expert knowledge? Absolutely. However, I would not use learning objects for this purpose. Chapman seems to want subject-matter experts (SMEs) to just upload documents they use in the normal course of their jobs. These are rarely good teaching tools. Teaching tools need to be carefully thought out and structured to show key points and then explain those points. Just tossing a document on the LCMS won't teach much.

Further, if you ask SMEs to actually create proper teaching in their learning objects, then you require SMEs to be instructional designers. It's better to make use of your SMEs by creating a two-way conduit for open communication with learners. Have SMEs maintain a blog whereby other SMEs can correct each others' comments, share current thinking, respond to learners' clarifying questions, and so on. We can often make SMEs into helpful teachers by having them answer questions from learners. But please, be very careful in assuming all SMEs can teach.

Often SMEs are not the best teachers. One reason for this is that they have trouble understanding the learner's novice perspective. So we should create environments in which learners can ask for clarification. Ultimately, this makes the learner the instructional designer, creating the learning experience he or she needs by asking just the right questions for him or her. SMEs often become stronger teachers when they can interact with learners. To reduce an SME to only posting learning objects removes much of the value that SME can offer learners and the organization.

THE RISK OF CHAPMAN'S VISION (OR “PLEASE, PLEASE DON'T CREATE A CONTENT-CENTRIC LEARNING STRATEGY”)

I hope I have shown the importance of thinking about context and the quality of training, not just putting content into a repository for learners to access. This is like giving a learner a library card or access to the Internet and believing your work as a training professional is done. Learners often need more than that—they need courses that teach them how to apply their learning to their work, that show them the value of changing their behavior, and most importantly, that enable them to add increasing value in the most strategic ways for the organization.

Sadly, if you offer training that lacks these characteristics, learners know it. They label it “bad training.” Learners will get through their courses as quickly as possible and take as little of your training as they can. Interestingly, a lot of people want to learn at work. They want to grow and become better at their jobs. If you can't give that to them, they will go somewhere that will. If you offer bad training, you don't just get bad business results, you may end up with turnover problems as well.

Instead, we should seek to create an environment in which training is like my favorite omelet bar. Not only is the omelet made for me and with my needs in mind, but it is also so enticing and so delicious that I can't help but come back for another helping—and I won't be looking for a new restaurant any time soon.