By
Michael
Grant
Co-Founder and Director of Research
eLearn Campus
Last week, I discussed a key element of doing, namely capacity
development for eLearning. This week I want to discuss some
of the ongoing management challenges you may face when implementing
eLearning and review some of the ways you can determine whether
your initiative is adding value.
Assuming that you have been successful in developing your eLearning
program, there are a few management challenges that you may need
to address along the way. I will run through some of these
in the order that you may encounter them.
Poor Marketing
We have worked with organizations that have done a great job
of designing a course and an absolutely horrible job of telling
anyone about it. I would put this into the general category
of eLearning marketing. Good marketers understand that they
have to design a course that addresses a specific need. But
even the best course will not be attended if no one knows about
it.
When it comes to online learning, this is not just about advertising
or promotion. You have to know where your learners are coming
from in terms of their past learning experiences. It helps
to emphasis the flexible and interactive nature of online learning,
especially these days when many people are experiencing time management
challenges.
Even if your learners have the technical wherewithal to access an
online course, they may need you to “hand hold” them through the
process for the first time. Anything that you can do to make
the whole experience as enjoyable and pain free as possible will
help you in the short and long run.
(In)Completion Rates
Even if you are successful at marketing your course, you need
to think about how to keep the learners in your program through
to completion. Certainly engaging design (both in the pedagogical
and graphical senses) plays a very important role. But it
is also important to provide a lot of support through the process,
especially for first time learners. One element is learner
support through an experienced online facilitator. But it
also helps to have ongoing technical support, particularly in the
early stages.
Completion rates are often related to the motivation to learn.
We have found in our courses that some people are highly motivated
and others less so. That is pretty much the same for most
learning modes, but online learning is often seen as less structured
in terms of time and space. Of course, this is one of the
key advantages of eLearning, but for the less motivated learner
these characteristics amount to fewer disciplines (e.g. “I don’t
have to be in class at a particular time”). As such, disciplines
may have to be incorporated through, for instance, the regular completion
and submission of assignments.
Disengaged and Dissatisfied Learners
In many ways, online learning demands more from the learner
than a typical classroom course. Once again, that presents
an excellent opportunity to create a rich learning experience because
you are not as dependent on the charisma of the lecturer.
When well-designed, eLearning offers the possibility to create a
much higher level of interaction so that learners learn from the
material, the facilitator and the experiences of other learners.
But if your design depends on this interaction and you have
some disengaged or dissatisfied learners, you may have a problem.
In these situations we find that a skilled facilitator can play
a key role in keeping the momentum going. For instance, a
facilitator can, to some extent, fill in gaps in the learner participation
where learners are disengaged. But it is also important for
the project manager and facilitator to be sensitive to dissatisfaction
and responsive to adjusting their approach to learner needs.
Deal with dissatisfaction directly and as quickly as possible.
Evaluating Your Efforts
I made the point earlier that learning organizations may value
their online programs differently than, say, for-profit organizations.
It doesn’t really matter what metrics you use to evaluate your efforts
as long as:
- The metrics are meaningful to your learners
and/or your management
- You develop valid and timely measurement
systems
- You allow the facts to tell you what to
do differently
Some examples of different types of metrics:
Financial metrics: these can be very
simple or highly complex depending on who needs them and the managerial
decision. My advice is to keep it simple at first. Know
your fixed and variable costs for program delivery and how much
revenue you generate per learner. You will generally find
that eLearning has higher fixed developmental and technical costs
than classroom learning but much lower variable costs.
Learner satisfaction: it is a good
idea to survey the learners both on their expectations of what is
important to them and their score on how well you do on those things.
This will allow you to weight the results by the learner’s stated
needs or to do a gap analysis.
Internal metrics: it never hurts to ask the people who are designing
and delivering your online course how they think it’s going.
You don’t have to be too formal here, but these people often have
a unique perspective on what is going well and not so well.
Interaction metrics: it is fairly
easy to configure an online solution to produce lots of data around
the amount of time spent on modules, the level of interaction (e.g.
postings), completion rates and the like. Just make
sure you have a way of interpreting this data and understand how
these metrics are related to the learners overall experience and
the achievement of learning outcomes.
In our
Certificate
in eLearning Management courses we survey our learners twice,
mid-course and at the end. If something is amiss in the mid-course
results, we take immediate action to correct it. We use the
end course result to make more fundamental changes and pool this
data over time to tell us both how we should be improving our courses
and also what other learning we should be offering to satisfy our
learners.
Any Questions or Comments?
This series has run over the course of four weeks. A compendium
report is available to subscribers. The report elaborates
on the themes covered over the course of the last month and includes
an executive summary. If you are interested in the final compendium
report, stay tuned and we'll let you know when it's available for
download.
We continue to work with learning organizations and are always interested
in their views on these issues. If you have any questions
or comments about any of the material in this brief, I would be
happy to hear from you at
michael@elearncampus.com.
We ran our most subscribed webinar
ever yesterday. Sixty-two participants from a variety of sectors (financial
services, health care, pharmaceutical, food, telecom, retail, energy,
education, entertainment, legal, etc.) participated in our session
on Using Simulations to Bring Your eLearning to Life. We obviously
struck a chord, as it appears that gaming and simulations are getting
a lot of attention these days as methods for making education and
training more engaging.
