Learnlets

Secondary

Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Stop creating, selling, and buying garbage!

12 January 2012 by Clark 14 Comments

I was thinking today (on my plod around the neighborhood) about how come we’re still seeing so much garbage elearning (and frankly, I had a stronger term in mind).  And it occurred to me that their are multitudinous explanations, but it’s got to stop.

One of the causes is unenlightened designers. There are lots of them, for lots of reasons: trainers converted, lack of degree, old-style instruction, myths, templates, the list goes on. You know, it’s not like one dreams of being an instructional designer as a kid.  This is not to touch on their commitment, but even if they did have courses, they’d likely still not be exposed to much about the emotional side, for instance. Good learning design is not something you pick up in a one week course, sadly.  There are heuristics (Cat Moore’s Action mapping, Julie Dirksen’s new book), but the necessary understanding of the importance of the learning design isn’t understood and valued.  And the pressures they face are overwhelming if they did try to change things.

Because their organizations largely view learning as a commodity. It’s seen as a nice to have, not as critical to the business.  It’s about keeping the cost down, instead of looking at the value  of improving the organization.  I hear tell of managers telling the learning unit “just do that thing you do” to avoid a conversation about actually looking at whether a course is the right solution, when they do try!  They don’t know how to hire the talent they really need, it’s thin on the ground, and given it’s a commodity, they’re unlikely to be willing to really develop the necessary competencies (even if they knew what they are).

The vendors don’t help. They’ve optimized to develop courses cost-effectively, since that’s what the market wants. When they try to do what really works, they can’t compete on cost with those who are selling nice looking content, with mindless learning design.  They’re in a commodity market, which means that they have to be efficiency oriented.  Few can stake out the ground on learning outcomes, other than an Allen Interactions perhaps (and they’re considered ‘expensive’).

The tools are similarly focused on optimizing the efficiency of translating PDFs and Powerpoints into content with a quiz. It’s tarted up, but there’s little guidance for quality.  When it is, it’s old school: you must have a Bloom’s objective, and you must match the assessment to the objective. That’s fine as far as it goes, but who’s pushing the objectives to line up with business goals?  Who’s supporting aligning the story with the learner? That’s the designer’s job, but they’re not equipped.  And tarted up quiz show templates aren’t the answer.

Finally, the folks buying the learning are equally complicit. Again, they don’t know the important distinctions, so they’re told it’s soundly instructionally designed, and it looks professional, and they buy the cheapest that meets the criteria.  But so  much is coming from broken objectives, rote understanding of design, and other ways it can go off the rails, that most of it is a waste of money.

Frankly, the whole design part is commoditized.  If you’re competing on the basis of hourly cost to design, you’re missing the point. Design is critical, and the differences between effective learning and clicky-clicky-bling-bling  are subtle.  Everyone gets paying for technology development, but not the learning design.  And it’s wrong.  Look, Apple’s products are fantastic technologically, but they get the premium placing by the quality of the experience, and that’s coming from the design.  It’s the experience and outcome that matters, yet no one’s investing in learning on this basis.

It’s all understandable of course (sort of like the situation with our schools), but it’s not tolerable.  The costs are high:meaningless  jobs, money spent for no impact, it’s just a waste.  And that’s just for courses; how about the times the analysis isn’t done that might indicate some other approach?  Courses cure all ills, right?

I’m not sure what the solution is, other than calling it out, and trying to get a discussion going about what really matters, and how to raise the game. Frankly, the great examples are all too few. As I’ve already pointed out in a previously referred post, the awards really aren’t discriminatory. I think folks like the eLearning Guild are doing a good job with their DevLearn showcase, but it’s finger-in-the-dike stuff.

Ok, I’m on a tear, and usually I’m a genial malcontent.   But maybe it’s time to take off the diplomatic gloves, and start calling out garbage when we see it.  I’m open to other ideas, but I reckon it’s time to do something.

Comments

  1. George Hobson says

    12 January 2012 at 8:17 AM

    Is there a lack of will to change also? The (natural) tendency that we have to “if it worked before let us tweak it and use it again” idea (am guilty of that). But it soon gets out of date, starts to look jaded. As teachers we tend to repeat our resources. Unforgivable.
    I learned about this when I recorded myself for an online course. What I had done f2f for several years I now saw and heard. Horrible. I spent many hours on that video but the feedback I got was invaluable.

  2. Brian Austin says

    12 January 2012 at 9:21 AM

    As long as we’re taking the gloves off, I think there are a number of problems. Here are three:

    1. Tool fixation. We rely too much on tools, as if they are what build training that is measurably successful (LMS, LCMS, authoring tools such as Captivate, and so on), not the actual instructional designer. Then we get stuck with one or two solution options and try to make those fit for all training needs.
    2. Fear. I worry that as an industry, L&D professionals are hyper-sensitive and overly worried that we’ll be blamed, or at least be cut, when businesses start to fail and that triggers a cycle of overly critical self-evaluation and over-complicated results reporting to clients. Those efforts then appear disingenuous to the client, who then loses trust in the training department.
    3. Hype. I think we make the mistake too often of over-promising and under-delivering. We seem to promise what could be done in a perfect world (a world with unlimited time and resources). We forget that we work in timeline driven environments with limited resources, so what we promise often ends up either being late, or not as grand as promised, or totally misses the identified gap.

  3. David Glow says

    12 January 2012 at 10:40 AM

    Amen!

    I think we should stop thinking of people as learners and just think of them as do-ers (more eloquently, performers). Approaching issues in this manner, we stop thinking of “what do they need to learn”, it’s “how do I help them perform”? If learning is part, great. Often, it isn’t. And, when it is, too often we only focus on initial acquisition (ST mindset) instead of the long game (not just transfer, but ongoing, sustained support, spacing effect, etc…)

    And, your comment on the designs (most of them are “bore and score”), is spot on. Too often, it’s deliver info, quiz on content (content- not skill!).

    One other theme I see in training- big catalogs, more info, etc… being perceived as “value” to the organization (after all, if the L&D group doesn’t “manage” all these resources and continue to extend more….). Quite the opposite is true. Learners need focused resources to help them. Something with saturated value- not a deluge of information (all you could know about…) which often doesn’t apply to supporting them in their work/context.

    Why Cathy’s Action Mapping is such a powerful tool to help folks with the discussion. Focuses people in a very understandable way to get to “all the performance with none of the fluff”. Somewhat of a streamlined Pareto analysis. The only addition I would add (I know Cathy knows this, but it isn’t explicitly in the presentation)- slice and dice the resources for reuse in the contexts it will be most needed/consumable. Not just the initial training, but in the right size chunks during task performance (I am starting to sound like Rueben).

    2012 is the time for this- so much about the industry is in flux- if you don’t clearly align on value for your organization…

  4. Jenise Cook says

    13 January 2012 at 10:11 PM

    I like this part of your post, and I quote:

    “…you must have a Bloom’s objective, and you must match the assessment to the objective. That’s fine as far as it goes, but who’s pushing the objectives to line up with business goals? Who’s supporting aligning the story with the learner? That’s the designer’s job, but they’re not equipped.”

    Most of us are equipped, Clark. But, Most of my experience has been with CLOs still “fighting” to be heard at the C-level. As a result, the business units got what they wanted, and not what was best for the learners and improving their performance in alignment with the organization’s goals.

    However, recently I’ve been on projects where the Chairman and the CEO have given the CLO (and downstream L&D team) the green light to do what learning professionals dream of doing, and I pinch myself that I’m witnessing the transformation in the organization!

    Like you, Clark, I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know it still begins at the C-level and with the Board of Directors. And then, it trickles down to the line employees. Training journals have written about this for years.

    Maybe it just takes time? I know it’s hard to be patient, but I think the air craft carrier is beginning to turn into the right direction. It just takes a long time for such a huge vessel (corporat entity) to change course. :)

    Maybe 2012 is not the “apocalypse” but rather the year we begin to see your “rant” and wishes become reality in organizations? I am hoping so. I’m seeing glimmers of hope at one organization.

  5. Ken Hubbell says

    14 January 2012 at 6:50 AM

    While working as the Instructional Technology Manager for a large learning professional services company several years ago, I made the mistake of actually reading the content we were producing and commented to my boss that there were significant grammatical and visual errors. As a reward for this, he asked me to mark up some of the issues and put together a plan for addressing the problem. The more I dug into it, the worse it got, and I realized after speaking with a number of our instructional designers that they had little or no real writing experience. What? You are an instructional designer with a Master’s Degree abd have little or no background in writing?

    This was a marketed contrast to when I first started in the business over twenty-five years ago. At that time, interactive video was the rage, and communicating the subject matter also involved telling a story of sorts. We hired former copywiters and video journalists to produce our learning materials because they knew how to conduct an interview and then convey the material in a way that their audience needed to consume it. Eventually we went as far as to bring Sony Interactive in to train them on basic ISD skills, but for the most part these communication professionals already understood what they needed to do to provide good learning content.

    My point, if not clear already, is that the content is critical. The writing must convey the objectives, not distract from them because of poor execution. There must be continuity across the course, not just a bunch of slides developed in isolation to address specific objectives instead of the course as a whole. And, quality control is vital to the success of your product. That a course ever goes out with poor grammar or bad visuals affects everyone in our industry, especially the learners.

  6. ilianna munro says

    15 January 2012 at 5:03 PM

    I agree with Clark’s insights. It’s good to see I’m not the only one who thinks some of these things. I believe that one reason for the quality of elearning you’re talking about is that the business is not willing to spend the money on developing the learning and on letting staff take the appropriate time needed to take part in good quality learning solutions and this is because there is no demonstrable ROI for the quality learning solutions. Interestingly, I haven’t seen any ROIs done by training management during my career over the last 20 years. I know it’s not an easy task, however, if L&D can’t demonstrate the value of good quality learning to the business and compete with other departments who can demonstrate how they add value then we have little hope in obtaining funding for good quality learning solutions.

  7. eLearning Consultant says

    15 January 2012 at 8:46 PM

    Follow the money. Develop a free educational seminar/video whatever and push it out to big business. Show them the irrefutable value proposition of good eLearning and how to spot it when you see it. Hopefully they will demand it from vendors and vendors will be forced to change. Sounds simple;)

  8. Kit Behling says

    18 January 2012 at 9:45 AM

    Ken, hear-hear to your comments. As a professional writer with a long career in workplace learning (as an instructor and an instructional designer), but without an advanced degree in ID, I agree. Good design is essential. But it’s in the writing that design comes to life for the learner.

    Things one learns to do as a writer — putting yourself in the reader’s shoes, finding and telling the story, coming up with a theme or compelling lead – all require creativity. The best writers take an imaginative leap into their readers’ heads, the better to engage them. No, not just “engage” – sometimes charm, seduce, intrigue, or just downright grab them by the collar & pull them into the story. (Okay, so I’m talking copywriters, PR writers, journalists here, maybe not tech writers…)

    Even in multimedia projects, where sound, visuals, & animation engage interest & convey content as much as words do, I find that writers still “get it” in a way that those in other professional disciplines do not.

    When it comes to their readers, the best writers know how to hook ‘em and keep ‘em hooked. Insert “learners” for “readers” and the same approach applies.

  9. Sydney Smith says

    19 January 2012 at 6:22 AM

    Clark,

    You are absolutely correct and so in line with published works from performance and management consultants who espouse that successful businesses and leaders need to focus on brand not commoditization of solutions, focus on the why first and let the what and how follow, etc.

    I’m watching along to see what ideas pop up. This ship has gone so far off course, I think it is going to take quite a storm or superior navigation to get us all back on course. We are too often at the mercy of the paying customer and our internal sales goals to right the course by ourselves. (I do like the idea of the webinar – or maybe a webinar series – to get the change started or at least pronounce our desired intentions.)

    Thanks for starting the discussion!

  10. Ulises M says

    19 January 2012 at 7:58 AM

    Great post. I deal with all the things you mentioned in your post, plus the never-ending politics and bureaucracy that goes on in the non-profit world. I have a rather large number of “resources” made of poorly conceptualized and designed “e-learning” tools.

    As for solutions, well, we are after all educators and training professionals, so education should start at home. It’s an uphill battle, but it’s possible to gain ground in the right direction.

Trackbacks

  1. L2A Links for January 17th | Learn to Adapt says:
    17 January 2012 at 3:52 PM

    […] Stop creating, selling, and buying garbage! – […]

  2. 10 Must-Read Articles from January « « DediCommDediComm says:
    27 February 2012 at 1:26 AM

    […] Stop Creating, Selling, and Buying Garbage, Clark Quinn, January 12, 2012 I was thinking today (on my plod around the neighbourhood) about how […]

  3. Internet Time Blog : 50 best articles on Working Smarter for the first half of 2012 says:
    2 July 2012 at 2:24 PM

    […] Stop creating, selling, and buying garbage! CLARK QUINN  |  THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2012 […]

  4. Internet Time Alliance | Top 50 articles on Working Smarter says:
    2 July 2012 at 2:28 PM

    […] Stop creating, selling, and buying garbage! CLARK QUINN  |  THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2012 […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Clark Quinn

The Company

Search

Feedblitz (email) signup

Never miss a post
Your email address:*
Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

Pages

  • About Learnlets and Quinnovation

The Serious eLearning Manifesto

Manifesto badge

Categories

  • design
  • games
  • meta-learning
  • mindmap
  • mobile
  • social
  • strategy
  • technology
  • Uncategorized
  • virtual worlds

Blogroll

  • Charles Jennings
  • Christy Tucker
  • Connie Malamed
  • Dave's Whiteboard
  • Donald Clark's Plan B
  • Donald Taylor
  • Harold Jarche
  • Julie Dirksen
  • Kevin Thorn
  • Mark Britz
  • Mirjam Neelen & Paul Kirschner
  • Stephen Downes' Half an Hour

License

Previous Posts

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006

Amazon Affiliate

Required to announce that, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Mostly book links. Full disclosure.