Fancy Shmancy Elearning!

Elearning is one of the buzz words in learning and development these days, but sometimes it get's lost in the world of ticking the box of learning rather than delivering the development required for your employee or team.

As a learning and development professional, many clients ask how can we deliver learning when and where our people need it? Offsite workshops become cumbersome, managers are too busy to develop their teams and more often than not new recruits are too busy serving customers to actually do some learning.  

Learning is seen as a chore!  The answers to elearning tests get passed around, people try to concentrate on elearning modules that are too long and often drop out or fail at the last click and there are expensive and cumbersome Learning Management Systems (LMS) to record the learning, many times for reasons of compliance rather than people development.

With all the knowledge at our fingertips today, it would seem cost effective to add a culture of trust to the role of learning and development in our organisations. Ultimately staff will learn; if they need the learning for their role (relevance), they can see the benefits of developing themselves professionally or personally, that the learning that they have been given is a little challenging and it is not a matter of rote learning content.  

If they are asked to solve a problem, it is more likely that they will engage with the learning.  This is where elearning meets gamification, one of the key parts of gamification is turning learning into a game, knowing what the goal is, solving problems to get there and that the learner understands the relevance to their role.  The closer the game is to what they do in real life the more practical it becomes.  The more people involved in the game, the more learning conversations the team has between themselves.  Have a look at the types of games your children are playing, the more people they are connected to the more fun they have!  Clash of Clans is one game my boys are playing, along with their grandfather, cousin and uncle as well as friends from school!  

If L&D professionals are to decide whether or not learning has indeed happened, then a completion of a test with 100% would only prove that knowledge has been attained.  Herman Ebbinghaus (Late 1800's) when he looked at how quickly we forget things found that we would only remember 20% of it the next day.  Just gaining knowledge then is not the answer, we are looking for the learning to be applied and behaviour changed.  These fancy schmancy LMS' can't do what a real human being can do.  So the real management of learning has to return to manager or realistically to the individual themselves.  

Direct performance improvement has to happen.  Therefore it would appear that LMS' aren't the answer but a well organised Performance Management System (PMS) is.  If learning is directly attached to the KPI's then surely this would be the best place to manage learning.  For most people clarity in their performance measures are key.  Younger generations are asking to be judged for their output rather than how many hours they are working, this thinking should be the same for learning and development.  It is not how many courses or modules you have completed, it is about how has this changed your performance!

What do you think?