One of the most valuable things that internet, e-learning and social media have brought us, is that you can learn what you want, how you want, where you want and with whom you want. Learning has shifted from push to pull. Not the teacher or the developer is in control but the learner is. I my view the (e)Learning community is still adapting to this new paradigm.

Plan economy versus market economy

The learner has shifted quickly from a planned economy (company plans all training programs) to a market economy (the learner decides). For him it’s easy, there are all kinds of new learning and information resources available through internet and social media. For the e-learning department this is much more difficult, most systems focus on planning and reporting and making the shift from collective learning resources to learning opportunities is a difficult task.

Eastern Europe
It’s a bit like Eastern Europe at the time of the ‘fall of the wall’. I have visited eastern Europe before 1989 quit a few times. You had supermarkets, but they had a very limited assortment. There would be one type of product for a certain need (one brand of sugar, one brand of water) and for a lot of needs they wouldn’t have a product at all. If you had enough (foreign) money you could buy almost anything at dollar shops or import it from abroad. You could compare this with the old centralized approach for learning. There is only one solution for a learning need and if we planned for it there is no solution add all.

In the period that followed the fall of the wall shops where quit empty. Internal production halted and they didn’t have enough foreign currency to import goods. People where already used to growing their own food, but that became even more important during this period.

It’s a bit like the situation we know have in the land of learning. We offer courses and training but learners are finding their own recourses, internet and the social media make that very easy. There is an increasing mismatch between supply and demand.

Conflict of interest
There is a growing conflict of interest between the learner and the learning departments. Form a corporations point of view planning and control are important, from a learner’s point of view it isn’t. They want to learn when, how, what en where they want. You can’t plan that.

The solution lies again in an approach where you don’t steer on input (courses) but on output (learning outcome). It doesn’t matter how they learn as long as it is effective and they can do their job.

We need to switch more to a demand driven learning environment. We don’t need more Learning management systems, but more Learning management systems. I do believe that this is one of the reasons behind the success of tools like Moodle; they offer a learning environment, not an environment to manage learning. Therefore we need to change our ‘learning landscape’. But that is the easy part. The difficult part is that we need to change the way we work and think. Not the planned transfer of knowledge is leading, but the individual learners need. At the same time we need to find ways to manage this and the answer is again by applying Outcome learning. Managers should steer on out the results of learning, not on the amounts of courses we create.

While writing this I realize that this would have been a good first post of this series, well that’s a disadvantage of learning by doing. Originally I had planned that this would be my last post in this series. But I will add one more with the vendors perspective.

This post is part of a series of post on this subject:

1. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning
2. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (2)
3. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (3): The managers perspective
4. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (4): The developers perspective
5. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (5): The learners perspective
6. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (6): The vendors perspective

The developer plays a central role in the process of creating (e)Learning. It’s a difficult position to be in. You need to work based on the directions and within the requirements of the management and you need to deliver learning opportunities for people who most of the times know more about the matter than you. I think that e-Learning developers are a special kind of person: they want to deliver high quality work and they are (most of the time) very modest. Above all they have didactical skills and knowledge they want to apply in their work. But as a developer you have to work in a commercial environment (an e-Learning company or an e-Learning department of a company). I noticed that developers often have trouble managing that environment. They don’t claim enough ‘space’ for themselves and they end up compromising.

I started this series of blogs about ‘Outcome learning’ to combine all sort of thoughts and ideas into one comprehensive story. I haven’t worked it out before writing these posts; I’m trying to develop it as I write them. Before starting on this post I reread my first three post and they are okay but they lack a central point. When I wrote the first paragraph of this post, I realized what that central message is simple. When creating e-Learning you need to apply basic didactical rules and you never should compromise on them: There are just four of them:

1. The basis of every learning opportunity are learning objectives.
2. You need to asses before and afterwards what the scores on these objectives are.
3. You need to translate these objectives to content and assessments that connect the business need for knowledge and skills with the individual learning need of a learner.
4. Don’t think for the learner, facilitate his thinking. Offer him opportunities instead of directions.

The great thing about giving the learning objectives a central role is that they will help you manage your environment. You can use them to manage expectations from your managers and they give you a way to report to them in a way both parties understand.

They will also help you to communicate with the learners, managing their expectations too. Learning objectives make clear what an e-Learning course is about and they help the learner to select the proper course. Pre-assessments based on these objectives will tell the learner his ‘learning gap’ and post assessments will tell him the result end the progress he has made.

Managing your environment
You will probably notice that it is very difficult to create the learning objectives for certain courses. If you can’t define the objectives, don’t develop the course, it is probably not solving a real business issue. This is a simple example how they can help you manage the environment. Your standard procedure for developing a course after you receive an assignment is to create the ‘learning objectives’ and have them signed off by the principal. This way it is clear for both parties what the learning outcome should be, or in managers words what business problem they will solve.

Conditions
To make it possible to work with learning objectives it is obvious that your e-learning software (especially your authoring environment and your LMS) need to support working with learning objectives. You need to connect assessments to this objectives and it should be possible to inform the learner about them and to measure and show his learning progress in relation to them.

Facilitate and advice: don’t direct
As a teacher your biggest risk is that you think that you must make all decisions, that you must be in control. That in fact is a real ‘old school’ approach. With e-Learning the learner is in the lead, you are not. All you need to do is to inform and guide him the best way you can. Don’t use your branching facilities to link them to the correct chapter or next step in your scenario, give them a study advice and let them decide. It is their responsibility not yours.

Subject matter experts (SME’s)
The last issues remaining are how to create content that the learner can relate to and how to create a course on a subject that is not your expertise. The answer is simple: involve SME’s in your process. Use them to deliver the knowledge, content and insights you need and use them to determine if the course appeals to your audience. You will do the design, didactics and the editing, you are responsible for the creation process, use SME’s for all the rest.

This post is part of a series of post on this subject:

1. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning
2. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (2)
3. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (3): The managers perspective
4. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (4): The developers perspective (this post)
5. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (5): The learners perspective
6. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (6): The vendors perspective

two more post will follow.

I’m a manager myself for over 20 years now and I know from first-hand experience how difficult it is make decisions about learning and training. A training or a formal education (like an MBA) for an individual employee is often considered as a reward for that employee. From a business perspective it is often very difficult to judge what your return on investment will be.

When you have to decide on whether or not to train a group of people this becomes even more difficult, most of the times you just don’t know. How do you decide on the validity of your investment and how to measure the outcome? As a manager this is an uncomfortable position to be in. Therefore the question is: can we resolve this? I think we can.

Skill management and competence based learning
The basis for the solution lies in skill management (be careful not to lose the ‘s’). You need to know what your employees need to be able to do and to know to make them competent.

Determining the gap
You have to assess your employees. You can do this on the job, having them assessed by their manager, or you can have a formal assessment. When you know what the competency is of your employees you can determine the gap with your ideal competent employee. You need to bridge this gap by creating learning opportunities.

Sometimes the gap is clear. You introduce a new software system or a set of rules everybody needs to be trained in. Sometimes you will find gap’s that are quite common, justifying a group approach. Sometimes you will find ‘individual’ gaps that you have to solve on an individual basis.

Setting the goals and preconditions
You need to set clear measurable goals for the learning outcome for the coming period. On a corporate level these goals will translate in improved scores on specific learning objectives (the learning outcome). You have to set preconditions (time, money, expected delivery dates, et cetera) per learning objective or group of learning objectives. Besides this corporate plan you will need budget for individual learning opportunities. You must demand that an individual learner will be assessed before he will get a learning opportunity and that the outcome will show what progress he has made.

Report and evaluate
Make sure that you get regular reports on the progress of the learning activities. They should give you insight in the progress you made on the goals you have set and on the return on investment you get.

Make e-learning work
For the rest you need to focus on facilitating the learning process.

• The most difficult is to create a learning culture in your company, if you have that already than you are half way.
• You need to facilitate the employees by offering them a learning framework that supports learning based on skills and learning objectives (especially your skills management/learning management and authoring software are important for this).
• Bring learning closer to the workplace; integrate it with performance support and task support. Use social media and memory retention tools, make learning easy and effective. I wrote about this in more detail in my earlier post on (Bringing e-Learning to the workplace)

Outcome learning – saving time!
I call this approach outcome learning because it focuses on the result of the learning for your business. By organizing the learning better you want to improve productivity and quality at the end of the day. The use of learning objectives makes this measurable and it will improve the quality of the learning.

But from a managers perspective there is an even more concrete outcome (or ROI if you want). When you base your e-learning on learning objectives, your employees will learn more in less time. They will be able to select the correct course for their learning need. And when you use the objectives in a smart way they will guide the employee to those parts of the course they need to learn. Skipping parts they don’t need by giving them an exact study advice. This will save valuable time. Learning objectives form the heart of adaptive, individual and effective (e)-Learning.

This post is part of a series of post on this subject:

1. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning
2. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (2)
3. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (3): The managers perspective (this post)
4. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (4): The developers perspective
5. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (5): The learners perspective
6. Make e-Learning work: Outcome learning (6): The vendors perspective