Much like monotone lectures or subtitled movies, there’s another contender for the “most likely to put you asleep” award – traditional eLearning courses, often embedded in an LMS (Learning Management System). And it doesn’t bode well for your company’s training efforts if you rely on such a passive method of training.
Once upon a time, eLearning modules were praised as technological advances, but now I don’t know of many people who look forward to this mode of learning – do you? Traditional eLearning courses are hard to love. This white paper on the topic,
The Illusion of e-Learning: Why We Are Missing Out on the Promise of Technology, explores the crux of the dilemma. The typical “instructional strategy is reading the text, watching a streaming video of the average instructor, or following an audio-over-PowerPoint presentation.” And “trainees often find the training dull, rigid, and not related to their work.”
None of this is new. Both the instructional methods and trainee reactions have been the norm since the launch of these products. And beyond an “unwillingness to insist on measurable outcomes” typical eLearning courses particularly fail for three reasons:
- There is NO PRACTICE. Available technology is limiting the instructional strategy, and are fed one-way instructional content like videos, images, and voice-overs.
- There is NO FEEDBACK. ‘Next Page’ style courses don’t allow the opportunity for the user to get feedback on what step he/she did wrong and how to self-correct. Wouldn’t it be great if an alert popped up saying “Warning: you picked the wrong tool for this step“?
- There is No Easy Way to Find Relevant Content. Typically, employees have to hunt through multiple links and files to find the correct course or test that they have to take. Nothing is easy to find.
What is being done to solve the traditional eLearning pitfalls? FLIP has been working hard to change the traditional eLearning experience by gathering massive amounts of information, existing or new, and turns it into interactive, mobile, and searchable bite-sized training that gets opened, understood and applied. Their interactive cards allow you to practice, provide immediate feedback, and enable an organization to deliver relevant testing that is released in seconds.
