As the business world continues to change at an unprecedented pace, how can learning and development keep up? It’s no surprise that L&D departments are struggling to keep up with business demands, but maybe it’s because some long-standing assumptions just don’t hold up to today’s reality and research. Here are a handful of assumptions that might be outdated in today’s business environment.
Giving Learners (and the Business) What They Want = Learning
Our workforce is changing in multiple ways. We’ve seen the research on the modern, distracted learner. Attention spans are down, and the average worker has as little as one percent of his or her work week to dedicate to formal training and development.
Even if we get their attention, what can we provide the average worker in 24 minutes? Therein lies the challenge. Workers, and the businesses they work for, want learning “chunks,” on average between 15 and 30 minutes in duration. If awareness were our goal, that would be no problem. But awareness isn’t our goal; our goal is learning and skill development. Simply providing an online course or video that fits into that timeframe isn’t doing the job of providing learning and development.
If we’re going to give learners what they want and still provide learning and skill development, we need to rethink how learning is delivered. In the past, we packed it all into a course with pre-work and post-work. That method isn’t possible any longer. Now we have building blocks of 15 to 30 minutes. A short course or video might achieve the first step of learning – awareness – but then we need to design the next steps. How can the learner engage in social learning and have discussions on this topic with coworkers and colleagues? What can the learner do to practice, apply and get feedback?
Digitization, E-Learning = Learning
At the same time that we battle decreasing attention spans, we also have a significant increase in online learning as a way to maximize budgets and deliver learning to a broader audience. But is it working? In his January “Learning TRENDS,” Elliott Masie noted a “sharp rise in the abandonment rate in eLearning courses,” especially in the MOOC category, “where there is often an 85% abandonment of registered learners after the first few segments.” So what is the solution?
Simply because there are tools out there that allow just about anyone to quickly and relatively easily develop e-learning courses doesn’t mean we don’t need designers anymore! Timelines are short, and subject matter experts (SMEs) are difficult to wrangle and manage, but eliminating instructional design is not the solution. Ineffective and boring training is still ineffective and boring online. Too often, a video of an SME talking is considered e-learning. As learning and development professionals, we must ensure that e-learning is instructionally designed so that learning occurs.
Fun and Enjoyable = Learning
It’s important to have fun as a way to engage learners, but have we possibly begun to place more emphasis on fun and not enough on learning? Study after study shows e-learning increasing as a delivery method, yet these same studies show that e-learning is not as effective at learning and retention as in-person classroom training. Even with classroom training, “trends” discussions speak of making it fun and entertaining.
Neuroscience shows us that engaging the learner is key. Yet in the research, “engagement” is defined as paying close attention and being deeply focused. It seems that we may be focusing on fun and not the true definition of engagement. As learning experts Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, Clark Quinn and Will Thalheimer shared in their Serious eLearning Manifesto, we’re falling short in providing the appropriate level of challenge for participants to effectively learn and practice new skills.
What do we need to do? We must re-focus on learning. Learning is our goal, not fun. Fun can still happen; it should be part of learning, but it shouldn’t replace learning. We must not allow the constraints of time and cost to alter of goal of engagement and, ultimately, learning and skill development.
Our challenges in learning and development are greater than ever, and we’re being pressured from all directions to change and adapt. Let’s not forget that our charge is learning. To achieve learning and skill development, we may need to challenge some outdates assumptions that we’ve been making as we re-examine what truly produces results in today’s business environment.
