Designing e-learning for business impact, by Lars Hyland, Training Journal, September 2010

This is an article that makes a number of good points but appears out of date in its thinking. It starts by a strong advocacy of e-learning as the way of achieving ‘productivity gains and tangible business improvement’ during these hard recessionary times. This seems to me to ignore an important point; that the recent development of live on-line sessions, led by a facilitator, can often provide more effective learning at lower cost than traditional - and less flexible - e-learning solutions.

The author has developed a rather clever pneumonic to describe his ‘IMPACT’ framework, though I confess to a certain suspicion of such convenient word matches. IMPACT stands for:

- Interaction
- Multimedia/Multimodal
- Personal
- Actionable
- Challenging
- Timing

It would certainly be difficult to disagree with any of these headings but the subsequent content of the article does not always match the chosen words. I certainly agree with his emphasis on interaction; there are still many e-learning packages that are merely ‘text on screen’ and add even less value than a text book. Multiple choice questions and short exercises are essential ingredients of effective e-learning, particularly in the areas of business and finance where we operate.

I was curious about the term ‘multimodal’ but it turns out to be another term for blended learning (perhaps this was rejected as there is no B in impact!). I would also like to have heard more about the practical implications of making learning ‘personal’; one of the limitations of the early e-learning packages was the need to make them generic, because of the high initial investment and the extra costs and complexity of tailoring. It would have been good to have the author’s views on the extent to which self-design packages like Adobe Presenter have solved this problem; our own concern is that these do not do much more than add voice and a limited quiz facility to PowerPoint slides.

Under the heading of Challenging it is suggested that too much e-learning is simplistic and does not challenge the learner. Whilst accepting that this is true in some cases, there are some advantages in ‘easy questions’, particularly during the early stages; it makes sense to start with some simple content to build up confidence and then gradually increase the challenge. There is as much danger in being too challenging and frightening the learner away, as there is in being too simplistic.

My final concern about the article is a weakness that is typical of those who write on this topic, a reluctance to accept that e-learning is better suited to some subjects than others. It is fine for knowledge-based topics with clear content and accepted right answers; it is less appropriate for skills based areas where experience and discussion are essential for learning. And blended solutions can be designed to integrate the different approaches into a coherent whole.

I guess that the kind of narrow, self-serving approach shown by this article is inevitable when magazines like the Training Journal accept contributions from those who are selling specific products. Though you can gain some insights from such articles, much more would be achieved if the publishers would look for more contributions from those who are at the user end of the market.

Click here to read the article in full;
http://www.trainingjournal.com/feature/designing-e-learning-for-business-impact/