An elearning cautionary tale I: Our online training scheme
Picture this scenario:
The MD of a mid-sized service sector organisation attends a business networking lunch where someone from a learning software company gives a presentation showing an exciting-looking product designed to be up and running quickly and easily. All you need to do is set it up on your server, add some text and pictures and your staff is on the road to better training. The MD takes a brochure back to his HR manager and suggests she have the Staff Development Team look at ways this software might help them expand and improve their training across the organisation.
The Staff Development Team runs mostly face-to-face workshops and doesn’t have much experience with elearning software. Most of the sessions involve flipcharts, presentations, breakout groups, discussion and a catered lunch, which is a fairly pleasant alternative to the usual workday, and the head of Staff Development nas never felt the need to look for new technical solutions. So the IT manager is brought in to provide technical expertise. He explores the software, which has a lot of functionality, seems robust and should be relatively straight-forward to implement. The HR manager OKs the substantial purchase and the Staff Development Team sets about looking for ways to use it.
The software is expensive and impressive, but the Staff Development Team feels a bit out of its depth. The newest member of the team used to work for a big company that had elearning specialists on staff. He’s worried they won’t get the kind of results the MD expects without the help of external contractors, such as elearning specialists, instructional designers, content writers, graphic designers, and so on.
The head of Staff Development thinks this sounds a bit OTT, but she starts to worry that what first looked like a bit of updating and enhancement to their old-fashioned but workable methods may require additional investment. She goes back to the HR manager, who knows the MD won’t cough up any more money and consults with the IT manager about whether his team can fill any gaps. The IT manager assures her that as long as the Staff Development Team can write up and upload the content, his team will make sure the software works. The HR manager is satisfied.
The head of Staff Development takes the brief back to her team and assigns two project officers to work on the project for two months. IT sets up and configures the software and the project officers get to work cutting and pasting the content from workshop notes into the software.
At the end of the two months, the project officers are pleased to have made the deadline. They’ve prepared three tutorials to replace three half-day workshops on Health & Safety, Diversity in the Workplace and Using the Outlook Calendar. All three tutorials consist of blocks of text with the occasional clip art image and a quiz at the end.
They present the tutorials to the Head of Staff Development, who acknowledges the work but secretly feels them to be dull and inferior to the original workshops, which were lively, active and social. However, she also knows that this is the wave of the future – it’s what the MD wants – and she has to move with the times. She also sees that the tutorials will take less time out of the day than the workshops and that the staff may appreciate this.
As it was originally his idea, the MD asks to be shown the tutorials. The IT manager sits in. At first, the MD seems pleased, but as page after page of text blocks go by, he gets bored and asks we they haven’t used some of the whizbang features he saw in the sales presentation: animation, movies, music, etc. They admit they didn’t feel they had the time or expertise to make use of these. The MD asks why someone from the IT team didn’t show them how to use the other features. The IT Manager gets annoyed and says they did, and the project officers admit they know how they work, but just not how to use them. This makes no sense to the MD who sends them away to add some “good stuff”.
The project officers go away wondering whether they should be looking for a new job, but one of them suggests they film the HR manager talking about Diversity and upload that. They also throw in a few more quizzes and pictures.
The MD asks the IT manager what he thinks, and the IT manager says it’s a nice piece of software, so the Staff Development team gets the go-ahead to launch. A memo goes round with instructions how to access the tutorials through the intranet.
At first, the staff are generally curious about the software tutorials and seem pleased not to have so many workshops to attend, but it quickly becomes clear that some of the less computer-literate are having trouble getting started. An emergency meeting is called, and the Staff Development team quickly cobbles together some training sessions for those who need it.
Meanwhile, the project officers get the green light to replace more workshops with tutorials. Another three are prepared in short order.
Those who don’t need the training sessions are first amused about the whole thing, then bored with endless reading on screen, and by the third one, fed up. They also begin to realise that they miss the workshops, with their social component and catered lunches.
When HR notices a groundswell of staff members ignoring the tutorials, they send out a punitive memo stating that they are mandatory: HR is collecting date about who completes them, and anyone who doesn’t may face disciplinary action. The outcome is that someone discovers it’s possible to “fast forward” directly to the quizzes and circulates a cheatsheet with all the answers.
Some of the computer-illiterate staff miss training sessions for legitimate reasons and others still have trouble despite the sessions. Some staff members who travel or work remotely are unable to access the software at all. They become angry that the tutorials may affect their employability even though they continue to perform their own jobs well.
Morale dips and previously content employees grow negative. Things are a mess.
Two questions for you to answer in the comments (my own answers in a later blog post):
- How can the organisation fix the problem from this point on?
- What should the organisation have done in the first place to avoid it happening?
