E-learning or e-reading? How online courses often fail (Part 2)

In part 1 of this blog [Part 1] I asked whether most e-learning courses are about learning or reading, and suggested that an explicit consideration of reading levels was essential to enable learning.

Instructional designers and writers must have a sense of the reading skill of their audience for reading-based courses to succeed. Assuming we have made this leap to ensure the material is being comprehended by learners, how do we ensure or foster both retention and on-the-job skill transfer?

First, let’s reduce the distance of transfer between learning and its application. Second, we must cause thinking and deep interactions within our training. Third, we need to incorporate social learning activities into our courses.

Transfer – To reduce the distance of transfer between classroom learning and on-the-job application, you must include real world applications of the behavior you are trying to teach. Use problem solving, debates, writing position papers, or making proposals to ensure the learner moves from the lower levels of learning (knowledge and comprehension) to the higher levels (evaluation and synthesis) (Bloom, 1984).

Thinking – Is reading the same as thinking or is it nothing more than data input? What did you just do in response to the last question? Questions cause thinking, and I suggest questions cause learning when properly designed. Many e-learning courses have interactive questions, but our tendency to use multiple choice questions because they are easy to grade causes our learners to engage in knowledge recall rather than deep thinking.

We need to move beyond these simple questions and utilize scenarios and “muddy water” interactions that we can use to guide the learner toward developing the “correct” answer. I suggest that the process of solving the problem or answering the question is more important than the answer itself, rather like our childhood mathematics classes, where teachers regularly admonished students to “show your work.”

Learning is a Conversation – Reading is the process of decoding text, forming words, and inferring meaning based on the author’s approach. Learning, however, is a shift in one’s knowledge or behavior. When designing e-learning, it is important to remember that “adults are volunteer learners” (Knowles, 1980). Use blogs, instant messaging, threaded discussions, and other forms of structured and unstructured discussion to cause thinking and the shifting of one’s views and even, ultimately, of one’s beliefs. While these strategies are more difficult to design and logistically manage, the benefit to authentic learning and performance improvement is tremendous.

Conclusion – Designing e-learning that attends to the learner’s skills will increase the probability that the learner will digest the content being presented. Shifting the course design from passive reading to problem solving will challenge the learner to engage in deep thinking that incorporates the newly acquired information.

The icing on the cake is to engage the learner in learning conversations based on real-world situations in order to foster performance improvement. This recipe will enable learners to rapidly digest new information and apply it in the context of real world problems. The result: an opportunity for both individual and organizational performance improvement.

Measuring Your E-Performance – I offer that an e-performance intervention or course should spend at least 40% of the course on either deep thinking activities or real world problem solving. I consider performance activities to be those that apply learned content, engage in active problem solving, or cause deep thinking about the learner’s post-training performance. Reading content screens and answering recall questions, however, I consider to be non-performance activities.

I suggest the following formula to calculate an e-performance index (EPI) for your course:

E-Performance Index (EPI) = performance activity time* / total learning time*

* number of pages can be substituted as an estimate of course time

You may wonder what an optimal EPI is. A good consulting answer, however, is that “it depends”. It depends on the maturity and self-directed nature of your learners, and it depends on the nature of your content. The great teacher Socrates would probably suggest that 100% of the course content should revolve around inquiry or thinking activities. I offer that the goal is to continually increase your EPI in order to shift your learners’ role in the learning process.

Challenge – 1) Assess the e-learning courses you published in 2010 using the table below and determine an EPI for each course, then average these indexes to determine the average EPI of your courses.

2) Develop a strategy to improve your average EPI.

3) Let me know your EPI and, if desired, we can chat live about strategies to improve it.

Good luck in shifting your courses from e-reading to true e-learning!
Thanks,

Denis Finnegan
CLO, CERTPOINT Systems

References

Bloom, B. (1984). Taxonomy of educational objectives. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Finnegan, D. (2010). Reading and readability affect on e-learning success in a fortune 100 company: A correlational study. Unpublished 3405501, University of Phoenix, United States — Arizona.

Knowles, M. (1980). Modern practice of adult education: From pedagogy to andragogy (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge Books.