Long ago, but not long enough, in cold rooms brightly lit by fluorescent tubes, new employees are watching an overpaid bullshit merchant read from a slideshow. A new piece of computer software, soon to be called PowerPoint, has been taking the business world by storm and behold; corporate training is born!
After a decade of this nonsense, employees were begging for mercy and employers were desperate for something quicker and cheaper than 5 days in a classroom. Enter; e-learning. Remember back in the 90s when we put "e" in front of everything to make it sound futuristic? How much of that stuck around? e-learning and eBay. I can't think of any others, can you? But, I digress...
e-Learning was supposed to be the holy grail of L&D; a simultaneous silver bullet and magical panacea, that would both kill the monster of corporate L&D and then magically resurrect it as a beautiful, engaging and most importantly, cost-effective way to train employees. However, as anyone who has been subjected to e-learning in those fledgling early years, "beautiful" and "engaging" are probably not the first words to spring to mind. Pages and pages of text, with maybe a few low-res bitmaps to jazz things up a bit, learners were sentenced to a purgatorial eternity of clicking the "next" button, eventually being rewarded for their penance with a 10-question multiple-choice "quiz" to prove their learning.
Oh, how excited we were when we heard the early whispers about blended learning and experiential learning! Yes, there would still be e-learning, but it would be complimentary (maybe) to the learning we'd do in the training room, or out "on the floor". Hell, now there's even role plays, workshops and simulations. e-Learning, as the dominant delivery method of our industry, was finally dead. Yes, sir. We can all relax, it's totally safe to go near the body, there's no way it can harm us now...
As I write this, I'm nearing the end of my third week of home-working, isolating following the outbreak of what is currently being referred to as novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. A month ago I was still fully in denial (like most people in the UK and many other parts of the world) of exactly how serious things were getting and so was still firmly in the process of planning my 2020 L&D strategy. Haha. Good times.
Almost overnight all that seemed to change, and an entire industry (many industries, to be fair) imploded. Organisations with no prior remote-working policies were now sending their employees home with laptop computers, ergonomic office chairs and somewhat distrustful glances. There's just one thing... how are we going to train these people to work from home??
You know the horror movie formula by now; just when you thought it was safe, the boogeyman of hastily adapted PowerPoint slides uploaded into a SCORM package is back! It's like the bad old days again. I hear that gangs of roll-over graphics have been breaking into houses to steal whatever java script they can find. Our phones ring incessantly, our inboxes are flooded and we receive infinite connection requests on LinkedIn from salespeople seeking to strike in our moment of weakness. We must fight back.
Joe Harless said that "Inside every fat course is a thin job-aid crying to get out". Don't be tempted to fall back into bad habits of providing information-heavy, bloated training courses. Now, more than ever we need to be smart about what we do. Agile methodology never made so much sense as it does now. Iterate, iterate, iterate. It doesn't matter if it's crap as long as it works; we can make it less crap later.
We need to bootstrap it.
 |
| "I literally read this for the first time on the bus on the way here..." |
Enter; e-learning
After a decade of this nonsense, employees were begging for mercy and employers were desperate for something quicker and cheaper than 5 days in a classroom. Enter; e-learning. Remember back in the 90s when we put "e" in front of everything to make it sound futuristic? How much of that stuck around? e-learning and eBay. I can't think of any others, can you? But, I digress...
e-Learning was supposed to be the holy grail of L&D; a simultaneous silver bullet and magical panacea, that would both kill the monster of corporate L&D and then magically resurrect it as a beautiful, engaging and most importantly, cost-effective way to train employees. However, as anyone who has been subjected to e-learning in those fledgling early years, "beautiful" and "engaging" are probably not the first words to spring to mind. Pages and pages of text, with maybe a few low-res bitmaps to jazz things up a bit, learners were sentenced to a purgatorial eternity of clicking the "next" button, eventually being rewarded for their penance with a 10-question multiple-choice "quiz" to prove their learning.
 |
| "... I wish to formally submit my resignation..." |
It's totally safe to go near the body
Oh, how excited we were when we heard the early whispers about blended learning and experiential learning! Yes, there would still be e-learning, but it would be complimentary (maybe) to the learning we'd do in the training room, or out "on the floor". Hell, now there's even role plays, workshops and simulations. e-Learning, as the dominant delivery method of our industry, was finally dead. Yes, sir. We can all relax, it's totally safe to go near the body, there's no way it can harm us now...
 |
| e-Learning be like; "psych!" |
As I write this, I'm nearing the end of my third week of home-working, isolating following the outbreak of what is currently being referred to as novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. A month ago I was still fully in denial (like most people in the UK and many other parts of the world) of exactly how serious things were getting and so was still firmly in the process of planning my 2020 L&D strategy. Haha. Good times.
Almost overnight all that seemed to change, and an entire industry (many industries, to be fair) imploded. Organisations with no prior remote-working policies were now sending their employees home with laptop computers, ergonomic office chairs and somewhat distrustful glances. There's just one thing... how are we going to train these people to work from home??
 |
| I've got some great ideas for Learning at Work Week... |
Inside every fat course is a thin job-aid crying to get out
You know the horror movie formula by now; just when you thought it was safe, the boogeyman of hastily adapted PowerPoint slides uploaded into a SCORM package is back! It's like the bad old days again. I hear that gangs of roll-over graphics have been breaking into houses to steal whatever java script they can find. Our phones ring incessantly, our inboxes are flooded and we receive infinite connection requests on LinkedIn from salespeople seeking to strike in our moment of weakness. We must fight back.
Joe Harless said that "Inside every fat course is a thin job-aid crying to get out". Don't be tempted to fall back into bad habits of providing information-heavy, bloated training courses. Now, more than ever we need to be smart about what we do. Agile methodology never made so much sense as it does now. Iterate, iterate, iterate. It doesn't matter if it's crap as long as it works; we can make it less crap later.
We need to bootstrap it.
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