One of the pictures I admire most is Saint Francis in Meditation by Francisco de Zurburan. It’s not the same online, but you can see it here. The most amazing thing about it is how the background isn’t something passive that the figure is presented against. It’s the black strokes of the background that shape it – not the other way round.
What something isn’t, defines it.
It’s great to describe something. But especially when it’s something that’s hard to get your hands on, like a learning project, that’s often not enough. You need to know what it’s not like. Often, that’s the clearest and easiest way to explain things. If you want to know what the online learning projects I work on look like, you can find out here.
You interpret the world based on what you know already.
When you start a project and start to think about online learning, you’ve already got some ideas in mind. I know that I did, when I first started getting into this area. I was thinking of lots of things that I hated and had no respect for. Mainly, mind-numbing e-learning, that dragged on and on. You’ve got your ideas based on what you’ve seen before. Perhaps it’s worked, perhaps it hasn’t.
What most people think of is not very exciting – and it could be bad for you.
You want something that gets results. But you’re busy, and you’re not going to be able to put the time into doing all the research on different approaches, what works, what doesn’t, what’s easy to use, what’s a pain and so on. Human beings use “heuristics” to guide how we solve problems. A heuristic is an approach that works well enough. You learn them by solving other similar problems, then apply them to new situations. When you come to an online learning project, you’re going to use the heuristics that you have. Most of the time, that’s things that you’ve seen done on some online courses. The problem is that a lot of that is not great. Actually, a very large amount of it is not great.
Learning things is good, right?
Sometimes, the poorly designed courses are just a waste of time. A 15-minute point-and-click course on new software that you don’t remember anything of, has just wasted 15 minutes. Lots of people think, understandably, that any kind of learning experience is a positive. Whatever it is that you recall, that’s better than not knowing it. People are empty buckets and any drop is getting you nearer to the top of the bucket.
Sometimes poor learning programmes really hurt you.
Top of the list of problems is that the organisation thinks their staff can do things that they can’t. They’ve done the course so they should be able to do it! But they can’t. Perhaps that leads to frustration with their “incompetence”. Perhaps it leads to tragedy. Organisations will plan wrongly and make big mistakes if they think that staff can do things they can’t. The best case will be a lack of trust in the team and a constant need to recheck what’s being done.
You can really put people off learning, too.
Maybe you had a bad teacher at school. And a subject went from being one you loved to one you never wanted to do again. Learning programmes at work are the same. Instead of wanting to learn more, bad ones make people bored and annoyed. If ideas and plans aren’t well expressed, they might spot flaws in an argument and become actively opposed to what you’re trying to do.
And you’re wasting time on something, when you’ve got none to spare.
When learners are on an ineffective course, they’re spending time on something that doesn’t help, rather than something that will. If you’ve got five thousand people doing a mandatory one-hour online course, that’s a lot of work not getting done (three or four years’ worth).
Maybe even more critical is the effort and focus used up in developing it. Teams of people are working on it, maybe for months. And they’re not working on other things. I’m sure you and your people aren’t wondering how to fill your days. Taking that precious time and focus and spending it on something that doesn’t get results isn’t a great idea.
What about the projects I work on?
Nothing is absolute in this world. There are good and bad ways to use any approach. Each approach has its right place. But some approaches don’t lend themselves well to realistic skills practice – at least not in the humanitarian sector. And even if you find the right place, they’re hard to get right. So I don’t use them. That’s not an iron law. But it’s close to it!
Here’s a question for you…..
You will have seen some online learning (mainly of the point-and-click type of e-learning) where there are lots of quizzes. There are some slides or a video or some narration explaining something, and just after there’s a “knowledge check”. This is a lot like the way you learned in school. The teacher tells you something then asks you questions about it. Maybe there’s a test the next week.
That creates problems when you’re learning at work. The first is that you’re not being tested on it next week. You’re tested immediately after you saw it. It doesn’t say anything about what you remember over time periods longer than 2 minutes. It’s also really hard to come up with good multiple-choice questions. They’re often glaringly obvious. And they don’t reflect real life. At work, you don’t have to choose the correct definition of impartiality from three possible definitions. You have to make choices that maintain humanitarian impartiality in complex situations. A lawyer may need to reference the correct definition, and practicing the choices might help them. But for others, they need to think through realistic situations. Most of the projects I work on need learners to use complicated skills in challenging situations, so knowledge checks are normally not part of the plan.
“It’s an immersive, 3D, surround sound experience…”
Fancy simulations could be great. You get put in a realistic environment and you have to practice your skills. They cost a huge amount of money though. And they’re not flexible. If your guidelines change, then the whole thing is out of date and can’t be used any more.
I’ve got to be honest – they’re also not something I’m used to working on. If someone does it day-in, day-out, maybe it’s smooth and easy for them. Good luck to you if you want to go that way. But I have managed reasonable sized IT projects. And you have to view this that way. It’s an IT project. It’s certainly not a quick-fix. You need to manage a bunch of contractors and suppliers. You have to manage the technical requirements, the learning design and subject matter experts. You have to manage it being built. It’s a lot. If you think it’s worth it, that’s your call. I’d want to be very, very sure it was going to be worth it, if I was you.
One last thought: what is that realistic environment that you’re simulating? For a lot of aid worker jobs, it’s an office. Maybe one without air-conditioning, but an office. For others it’s a conversation in a village or a refugee camp. There are others, for sure. But lots of the situations where aid agencies need to build skills are ones that you can “simulate” using an email address, a paper and pen, a simple written scenario or a role-play. We’re not repairing space stations. We’re talking to people, organising work, analysing data and so on. I think the fancy stuff is overkill.
Watch and learn.
You’ve been to a webinar. There’s a presentation, and then there are questions. Then you’re asked to lead a webinar. How do you assume it goes? A presentation and then questions.
Webinars can be an important part of an online learning experience. But many people think that they can turn their face-to-face course into an online course by running lots of webinars. That rarely works. First, lots of face-to-face courses aren’t great anyway. But more than anything, whilst I can’t pay attention to an hour-long presentation face-to-face, online, I’m clicking around on other things within ten minutes.
I very much hope your attention span isn’t as messed up as mine! But I bet some of that sounds familiar to you. It’s hard to keep people’s attention during a webinar. And if that’s the method by which you’re hoping people will learn, that means your method isn’t working.
What does make sense are online sessions with lots of discussion, questions and back-and-forth. But if we work together, we won’t organise sessions where someone presents for more than fifteen minutes out of an hour. And still – those sessions typically support the learners to complete the practice activities. They’re a resource. They’re not the learning programme.
Compulsory viewing – and I don’t mean Citizen Kane.
We’re used to a model where an expert explains what you have to do. And in online learning that means watching a video, or reading some text. And only then are you allowed to go on to the next screen. This exposes them to the information; which we then assume they have magically learned. And as they have now learned it, they’re ready to do the task. It’s logical, really. But it doesn’t work well.
The learning research is pretty clear. While people might not feel confident when they’re dropped in at the deep end with a task, they tend to learn better. What you do need to do is provide them with references and resources to help them do that task if they don’t know how. People who are already competent can just get straight to it. People who don’t have a clue can choose to do some reading first and then give it a try. Others might try it, find they struggle and then look at a reference to help them. The learner gets to choose how they use the supports.
Reading the text out loud, slowly.
In the book A Clockwork Orange, violent criminals are strapped down and forced to watch disturbing images to turn them against a life of violence. When I have to listen to a narrator reading text that’s already shown on the screen, I feel like someone’s doing that to me. I need to be forced into going through an experience at their pace, under their conditions, for my own good. The designer has complete authority over me. If you’re wondering what I really think – I’m not a fan.
Giving learners the ability to access resources when they need them, at their own pace is much better. It also keeps our mind on what they have to do, not on what content we want to show them.
I watched Star Wars. I guess I’m ready to be an astronaut?
You want your people to learn. But you want them to actually learn, right? They should be able to do something they couldn’t do before. Or they should do it differently. One of the greatest enemies of real learning is the feeling of being able to do something when you can’t really.
This is a very common side-effect of those “knowledge checks”. People think they’ve learned something. After all, they passed the test on it. So they feel confident and finish the course thinking they don’t need to work much more. Or maybe they know deep down they haven’t learnt it really – so they don’t try to apply that skill.
It’s not just the knowledge checks though. Too many lectures and too much reading can make it seem like you’ve understood something, but actually, you can’t apply it in practice.
That’s why realistic skills practice is the backbone of the projects I work on. Learners can’t fake it. Certainly not to themselves. And they will put in extra effort and focus more if they’re finding it hard. That’s no bad thing. But if they (and you) are used to it being effortless and there being no mistakes on a course, it can be quite a change.
Thanks for coming – here’s a certificate.
I’d need a filing cabinet drawer for all the certificates I’ve been given over the years, if I kept them. But I don’t keep them. Because they don’t mean anything. I haven’t had to do anything apart from be present in a room to get it. I haven’t demonstrated any skill. I haven’t even shown I remember something, for all the flaws in that approach. I’ve actually held on to about three – that’s all the times I’ve really had to show I can do something to get the certificate.
Online, if anything, it’s worse. Click through all the screens of an e-learning course and it will automatically generate a certificate that you can download. It’s meaningless. Even if you have to answer some multiple-choice questions – you can always go back and do it again and again until you get them right. It’s not telling you anything. On some levels it’s devaluing certificates where you actually do need to be able to do something. Though nobody takes these training certificates really seriously, so who are we fooling, really?
For me, your organisation knowing who can do the tasks they need to and who can’t is more important than any certificate. But sometimes you and the learners want or need a certificate. In that case, giving certificates will need to be based on doing specific tasks, and normally to a quality standard that we agree. You need to be ready for some people to not get them.
Are you intrigued, or are you appalled?
By now, you should have a good idea about what you can expect if you want to work with me on an online learning project.
I love to talk about training and learning, so even if there are some things here that you’re not sure about, I’d still really enjoy talking about your project. Perhaps you’ve got a unique situation where one of these approaches really would work – there are some! Or perhaps you’ve got some ideas I’ve never thought about that are going to turn my preconceptions on their head. I’m completely open to that.
If you’re horrified by this though, it seems like we won’t be a great match. There are lots of learning consultants, and I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone who’s got a perspective that better fits what you’re looking for.
Do just email me if you’d like to talk though your project – and we can kick some ideas around. Reach me on greg@gregorjack.com .
