The E-Learning Revolution - technology transforming training

Training & Development, Dec, 2000 by Patricia A. Galagan

Behind the scenes, you'll find some of training's founding fathers serving as discreet tour guides to the newcomers. Their management teams rarely include training pros. Instead, you'll find execs from other fields: toys, games, publishing, soft-drink bottling--all old-economy moneymakers. But as any geneticist knows, marrying outside of the clan enriches the gene pool.

Is nothing sacred?

What could be more sacrosanct to a trainer than the instructional systems design process? Yet, it too is being challenged by e-learning, whose essence is speed--the antithesis of ISD's cover-all-bases approach.

"The way we were taught to implement ISD 20 years ago often doesn't work anymore," says Diane Gayeski, principal in Omnicom Associates and professor in the Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. "It's too slow. By the time you find master performers and attempt to clone them, or by the time you write exquisitely detailed behavioral objectives, the business problem has changed. Trainers are trying to achieve a kind of perfection, and in that slow process you can miss the business opportunity."

The Internet has blurred the distinction between who is a content user and who is a content provider, throwing off balance another pillar of training--the role of instructor. "A lot of e-learning is a collaborative sharing of knowledge rather than an information dump," says Gayeski.

ISD models don't address the task of managing conversation and collaboration, she notes. "They are meant for something very different--project management and problem solving, which are applied very rigidly. It's not that ISD models are bad but that, typically, they are applied badly and their limitations aren't acknowledged. They may be good aids in learning instructional design, but master designers tend to be more fluid and rapid in the processes they use.

"In new training approaches, you should be able to address emerging problems and expect that some of your participants are actually the content experts. The just-in-time capability of the e-learning medium allows us to capitalize on new ideas."

E-learning also allows learners to displace the trainer at the center of the learning experience, says Joe Miller, president and chief learning officer at KnowledgePlanet.com. "The science and the instructional methodology and the standards are emerging now for an individual to be at the center of the experience, instead of being at the end of a flow of information from a subject matter expert or a trainer. That not only energizes the learner, but also shortens the time to mastery, making training time more efficient."

Miller continues, "I think the training industry will embrace that over the next 10 years and that it will appear in multiple modalities of training, not just e-learning, because trainers will see it as both valuable and doable."

"Technology is the great enabler," says Karen Vander Linde, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner and the lead for outsourcing learning for PWC's clients. "It's creating new opportunities for learning professionals in how we can deliver learning." She sees knowledge management systems as prime examples of how technology can make learning continual rather than event-based. "CBT promised to do that, but it was really just a book on a screen. Now there is the capability to do much more."