Are virtual workers damaging their careers?

This article from Information Week reports a Stanford study that claims virtual workers fear they may be making themselves redundant. First, they fear that by giving away all their hard-won knowledge and insights they diminish their personal worth. Second, they fear that being virtual reduces their ability to learn from their peers.
 
Both notions are false, being based on false presumptions about virtual teams. Or, should I say, being based on false presumptions about how virtual teams have to be. Virtual collaboration has surely come a long way since the days of client-server spoke-and-hub workgroups.
 

Stanford's Margaret Neale is quoted as saying "If your knowledge, not to mention the tricks and tips it has taken years to learn, is deposited in a database for all to access, does the organization still need you?" But the essence of collaborative virtual groups is networked knowledge, not centralized knowledge. Putting knowledge into a central database is old-school library-think KM, which assumed that in order for knowledge to be available it had to be centralized, cataloged, and indexed.
 
And while you may be able to capture some of the knowledge of a virtual team in a database, the tacit or implicit knowledge -- that expertise derived from experience in applying explicit knowledge -- has proven very hard to capture in any formal, structured, or easily-usable way. You can't put it in a database. And even if you could, it would have a very short half-life because, unlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge evolves at the pace of the environment that spawns it.
 
The other notion, that by being virtual you lose the ability to learn from others, is equally odd. The fears of virtual workers may be real, and in many instances the way in which organizations structure and facilitate virtual work groups may validate those fears. But there is no reason why members of virtual teams cannot actually enjoy significant advantages over their office-bound counterparts. I'm not talking about the obvious things like convenience, time-saving, travel-saving and so on. I'm talking about the ability to accelerate your individual learning through exposure to a much more intimate, more diverse, more available set of communication relationships than you can ever have in a crowded meeting room. Not only do virtual team members get to be closer (in mind) to their colleagues, they get to share their own expertise and tacit knowledge in a way that is more direct, more attributable, and more visible than it might be in face-to-face meetings. How can this be bad for your career?
 

Margaret Neale comes up with this gem: "Technology has the potential to destabilize the relationship between organizations and employees" YES! And that, surely, is a good thing. The disintermediation of hierarchies of control, and the mutation of silos of knowledge into spheres of influence, are common themes in my presentations. It's happening, at a pace that scares those who use an organigram as a security blanket. But organizations need to understand it, embrace it, foster it, and try to influence it to their advantage, rather than fighting it, or worse -- denying that it is happening.
 

The Stanford report was put together by Margaret Neale (Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution at Stanford), Terri Griffith of the School of Business at Santa Clara University and John Sawyer of the College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware. Their paper, titled "Virtualness and Knowledge in Teams: Managing the Love Triangle of Organizations, Individuals, and Information Technology," was published in the Stanford MIS Quarterly in June 2003. Why the report has only now hit the newswires is baffling.

 
 
 

How Web-savvy are your employees?

We have been providing e-learning courses in various areas of "Web savviness" for a few years now -- targeted primarily at the layperson -- and it is clear to me from the majority of learner reactions that (to most users) the Web is simply a tool based on magic. Not gee-wiz magic or scary magic, just plain old stuff-just-happens magic. People are curious to understand more about how it all happens, but rarely make the effort because they assume it is all too complex to get a handle on. When they get more comfortable with it, the light bulbs go off and they see the potential.

Just as there is a big difference between those who know and understand cars and those who simply drive them, I think there is a very wide "digital divide" between those who are Web savvy and those who simply use the Web a lot. Those for whom driving is a job know about vehicles, those who drive TO their job tend to be less interested. But the Internet pervades our jobs today, so understanding it is actually rather important. And I am not just talking about using search engines.
 
The complexity of the magic just gets harder to deal with as internetwoking rises above the Web and mutates into a bigger, less browser-centric environment of autonomous devices and mobile access points. Miniature RFID radio price tags on products in your supermarket; smartphones and smart vending machines; wireless hotspots; GPS chips in your car, your cellphone, and (if you believe the Mexican prosecutors) your arm; home appliances that talk to each other, and to you; and a million new implications for making ordinary business processes more efficient and organizations more competitive.

For companies, having most of their employees with a superficial (or superstitious) grasp of the wired world can be a significant handicap, or even a strategic threat. For individuals, this naïveté is not necessarily harmful, just inefficient. It is not till they get hit by their first virus, or find data or identities stolen, or see their role outsourced to someone who came up with a better way to do it, that both companies and individuals realize the value of being smarter. It is usually an expensive lesson.

Thinking outside the course

I have spent many years trying to get trainers to see the broader potential of the Web and to stop seeing e-learning merely as “courses online”. What is required is a conceptual breakthrough, not a bigger budget – indeed, creating dynamic e-learning experiences is often much cheaper than building "conventional" online courses. Naturally, “what” you are teaching and “who” you are teaching has a bearing on the learning models and media you will need to use, and equally obviously if you need to use simulations of software applications text is not going to be much help.

But there is no reason a company should delay providing e-learning till all of its technology choices have been made, and its tools and infrastructure purchased and implemented. In fact, purchasing your tools before you have any experience in designing and implementing e-learning on a shoe-string can cause you to make some expensive mistakes.
 
Striving for perfection in learning (particularly in e-learning) is admirable but irrelevant if your focus is on the tools instead of on the learning experience. Pedagogy idealogues are often way too willing to yield to technology idealogues. Your choice of learning model should dictate your choice of development tools, not the other way around. And if you don’t have or can’t afford the ideal tools your model calls for, instead of compromising on the model you should first try to compromise on the tools.  The test is always going to be what combination of learning model and development tools best achieves the learning objectives.

I simply don’t believe that creating an effective online or blended learning experience requires a complete dedicated e-learning technology infrastructure to be in place. And a major early investment in a particular toolset can cause tunnel vision, which is why I discourage it! Your learning strategy should accommodate revolutionary prototyping, in which you build and burn then re-build, starting small and working toward evolving a pragmatic set of intervention models. The ASTD forum that sparked this rant is a simple type of text-based dynamic online learning environment, as are discussion groups like trdev and ODnet, and blogs such as Internet Time. None of these require sophisticated technology infrastructures, or even much techno-competence, and the tools are often free. And, with a little creativity (not the visual kind, the learning structure kind), such tools can be used in whole or in part to rapidly build effective online learning solutions. Such solutions may not be what you want to stick with, but they can get you moving up the learning curve, and will inform the way you choose and use a more “technological” infrastructure in the medium term.

I certainly do not advocate the use of PowerPoint as an e-learning development tool in isolation (though it can be quite effective in WebEx-type scenarios). Nor do I advocate text-only as an ideal online learning medium. But I DO advocate using whatever tools you have at your disposal in whatever combinations if they will help to create a learning experience that will achieve its objectives.

Text-based page-turners revisited

Don’t confuse the medium with the message, or the expression with the experience.

Most first-generation e-learning out there is ineffective garbage. But the fault lies more with the design of the learning experience, than with the fact that the content is primarily accessed through text and images. I acknowledge the need to address learning needs and use effective means to do so. But I am just not so ready to throw text and images out the window as a foundation for the communication of knowledge. Build on that foundation by all means. But build on it with layers of useful learning experiences, not simply with more exotic media.

My previous PowerPoint comment was more about perceptions of the mode of instruction than about the tool itself. You can’t assume that anyone following a relatively linear mode of teaching is merely putting pictures and text on a screen. What matters is how mentally engaging the experience is, not whether its primary visual form is text and pictures. Further, you can’t assume that because “interaction” in the trivial sense that I hear most ISD people use it (animation, sounds, games, bright shiny objects) is absent from a particular experience, that the mind of the learner cannot be productively engaged with the subject matter. You can use text and images as a primary mode of communication, and reinforce it with real-world application exercises, practice, feedback and so on – and, more often than not, even in the most gratuitously lavish production, those vital activities tend to be briefed and de-briefed using (gasp) text!

Admittedly, it is harder to craft a good sentence than to code a jumping frog, but that’s no reason to dis the written word. Don’t knock the potential of text as a means of communication. It’s making a major come-back in people’s lives.

Creative use of existing technologies

There’s a real sense of elitist anti-powerpointism among people who think of themselves as e-learning professionals. But, really, if PowerPoint is considered good enough for 90% of ILT interventions, why have such disdain for that paradigm online? Just because you can do more in the way of multimedia and nonlinearity online doesn’t mean you should.

I have for years been advocating the use of simple, affordable, working, rapid-results familiar technologies in e-learning as a viable alternative to the “industry” dogma that if e-learning is not “produced” by instructional designers using proprietary tools it’s not good. Canned learning “products” may be appropriate for some subject matter, but for much of what people need to learn, there may be better, faster, cheaper ways to go.

Before qualified instructional designers get upset, I have no beef with that profession. But I suspect that many of the practices, if not some of the principles of ISD, as taught at any point in time, have a rather limited half-life in a field that is evolving as dynamically as the one we find ourselves in. In my view, e-learning has become a sort of self-sustaining pseudo-specialization, with barriers to entry built on sand by vendors and practitioners who really don’t want to have to perpetually reinvent themselves.

Quality learning is not about sophisticated tools, entertained learners, flashy production values, minutely mapped-out processes, or enhanced trainer job satisfaction. What matters is whether or not a learner achieves the desired improvement in performance as a result of the learning experience; and whether that experience was provided on time and within budget. Those last two items have often been major weaknesses in the concept of “e-learning as canned productions” – it can take months and tens of thousands of dollars to produce a single course. By the time it rolls out, the context has changed, the content is outdated, and you’ll never pump enough learners through it to justify the cost before you have to ditch it and start again.

If e-learning or blended learning is the right way to go in a particular instance, you can cut budgets and development times to negligible levels. Use established technologies like e-mail, PowerPoint, threaded discussions, chatrooms. Add to them relatively simple and free/cheap emerging tools like Web conferencing, online presentations, blogging, and social networking. Weave in people who are SMEs, expert practitioners, managers, or learner peers as mentors, facilitators, learning buddies, or devil’s advocates. Make learning part of the workplace and the workflow instead of some specialized activity that you have to escape from reality to engage in. Some tools that are useful are PowerPoint, Breeze (or its cheaper and instantly usable competitors like Aculearn), Spoke, Blogger, Moveable Type, iChat.

Without spending much time or money, you can create e-learning experiences and online learning environments that are cheap, rapidly developed, secure, highly targeted, always current, always relevant, and very effective. But to accomplish this you have to be willing to drop the notion that content and sculpted learning paths are king. And you have to be willing to yield to a less controlled learning process where “learning management” is less about micro-tracking learner activity and more about return on expectation, holistic and fuzzy as it may seem.

And vendors of products that produce and manage canned courses will not thank you for it :-)

Searching for an LMS?

Do not let 'what is available' dictate the functionality that you need. There are dozens (probably hundreds) of LMSs out there, and the one you pick should be the one that does the things you NEED it to do, not the one that does lots of things that are cool. So don't buy features, buy benefits that mean something to you. And don't fall into the trap of screening LMSs by factors that may not be important to you just because those factors seem to be in vogue right now (e.g. "if it's not SCORM conformant I won't consider it") .

Define your LMS needs based on the service you want to provide, the data you want to capture, the reports you want to run, the admin capabilities you want to use, the learning models and learner dynamics you want to support, the authoring systems and processes you want to use, the course vendors you want to be compatible with, the upgrade strategy you want to follow, and the ERP/HRIS systems you want to integrate with.

You'll find something off-the-shelf or ASP delivered that fits your needs. There is nothing especially complicated about coding an LMS, so I'd go beyond that and look at what it might take to develop your LMS internally, or what it might take to have an outside contractor build one for you. From what I have seen, implementing an LMS can cost more than the LMS itself, and the life expectancy of many branded LMSs is low -- in less than three years many companies find they need to get a new one. So having an internally developed LMS, and the expertise in your IT group to maintain and enhance it, may be a logical thing to do.

Opting for an ERP-systems provided LMS is another choice, but many training departments are wary of it. They are skeptical of the learning expertise of SAP or PeopleSoft. They assume they will be expensive and inflexible. And it will mean getting more involved with IT in the purchasing, implementation, and ongoing management phases than many traing people feel comfortable with. Get over it. In the medium term, learning management IS an ERP function, training needs to focus on its training expertise, IT needs to develop its e-learning systems expertise, and the sooner this all comes to pass the better.

Gender of voice-over and e-learning effectiveness

Do we use a male voice or a female voice in our e-learning? Which works better? The advertising industry has done a lot on the question of whether the gender of a voice impacts audience attitude and message retention. "Do we go male or female?" is a decision that has to be made every time an ad is produced. Unfortunately much of the generic gender research never gets published -- possily because of the (incorrect) idea that gender stereotyping is a precondition for such research. And much of the research is very specific to a product/campaign/audience.

It appears that matching the gender of a spokesperson to the gender of the target audience makes the spokesperson more aesily liked; but matching the perceived gender of the product advertised to its spokesperson's gender is more important. (see What if the Energizer Bunny were Female for some interesting insights).

But most studies that I have seen indicate no statistically significant difference between retention by an audience of one gender of content delivered by a voice of another, or the same, gender.

In my experience there are characteristics other than gender that play a much bigger role in engaging a learner audience. Things like dynamism, clarity, 'emotional bonding' with the content, enthusiasm, and perceived subject matter expertise are more important than whether it is a male or a female voice. Of course, so long as the content is not seen (rightly or wrongly) as inappropriate to the gender of the speaker-- sometimes playing to sexual stereotypes is simply helpful to all concerned.

I recommend you do what an ad agency would do, and what I have done often in the past. Select two male and two female voices, have them cut a short demo of the material, and test it on a small group from your target audience to see who they like. Not scientific, but cheap and effective!

Agreed, accent and age are also important. It all depends on the chracteristics of your target audience, and the nature of the content. For example, a British audience will often reject or challenge the validity of the content if it is narrated with an American accent. This sentiment will be stronger in interpersonal skills training than in software tools training. Regional accents also carry with them perceptions of the qualifications of the narrator.

I have found the best combination is a professional voice (preferably with radio broadcast experience) who is also a SME or experienced practitioner, or who at least understands the subject. Most voice-over artists have difficulty conveying expertise or passion for the subject, and can get annoyingly hammy when they try.

But only use someone with no professional voice experience if you are truly desperate.

Level 3 evaluation

We have seen a lot of level 3 success with a Problem Solving & Decision Making blended course that we built for Kepner-Tregoe. Throughout the pre-classroom online portion of the course, each learner interacts asynchronously with both his/her instructor and to a lesser extent with his/her manager. The interaction is around defining real workplace instances in which the rational thinking processes need to be applied, and in working through those applications.

Then, in the classroom portion of the course, those learner-specific workplace applications are practiced and coached intensively, and a few key projects for practically applying the skills are defined.

Then, after the classroom portion, each learner has several weeks in which to document those applications back at the workplace for both the instructor and the manager, who are available where necessary for further coaching and advice. The course is not completed till both sign off on those documented projects.

The great thing about doing this sort of thing online is that you can capture solid cases and metrics of practical workplace application, and demonstrate relevant and targeted value of the training immediately.

Of course, it's more difficult to do in some subject matters than others.

Ideas v. their description

An idea is not its description, despite what many writers may think. I am involved in the creation and communication of ideas -- have been for decades -- yet I have no difficulty in separating an idea from the words used to describe it. In fact, I am convinced that often the creator of an idea is not the best person to communicate it to a wider audience. I can think of countless instances from my own experience where truly gifted and brilliant thinkers (academics, marketing people, trainers, business leaders) have been atrocious communicators. And where truly gifted communicators have had atrocious ideas.

That's why the famous have ghost writers. That's why politicians have speechwriters. That's why entrepreneurs employ marketing communications professionals, who employ copywriters (not copyrighters :-)). It's a rare individual who has the talent to both create transformative ideas and to communicate them effectively - perhaps that is why such people become household names. But they are the exception, not the rule. If your words are worthy of your ideas, and vice versa, copyright fulfils its original function.

Ideas v. their packaging

I could re-express someone else's thought half a dozen times, never infringing on their copyright. Some rewrites might be more elegant or effective. My words might be those that carry their idea to a broad audience. Their words have died. But their idea lives on. They just don't get any credit for it. If the original ideas are good, they can successfully transcend the original means of expression -- to the detriment of the original thinker's ability to profit from them.

With rare exceptions, a significant idea exists independently of the medium in which it is expressed. But an inconsequential idea is dependent on its medium of expression. The harder it is to separate an idea from its expression, the less significant is the idea. No matter how many volumes you write about an
inconsequential idea, you cannot turn it into something important.

Copyright protects only your expression of the idea, whether it was your idea to start with or not. It does not protect the original thought. A transformative idea is inherently likely to be purloined and proliferated;
yet original thinkers continue to publish their work. If they did not, the world would be a much poorer place.

Storyboarding tools

I have worked with several storyboarding tools (especially when I was in the games development business), the most basic of which is StoryBoard Quick from PowerProduction.

Though it is designed for video production pre-viz work, it is cheap ($170?), flexible, really easy to use, and can be applied to just about anything. It's particularly useful if you want to sketch out ideas but (like me) can't draw -- it has a large library of characters and objects, and lets you import your own images and screen shots as well.

With a little imagination you can get a lot of storyboarding done in PowerPoint or Visio, so long as you are not looking for help with creating sketches or artwork. This is fine for mapping out simple process flows from one screen to another, using text, simple connectors and cut-and-paste screen captures. With Visio everyone has to have a copy of the program in order to read the files, and that can get expensive. Most people have PowerPoint already.

SMEs and Experienced Practitioners

There is a big difference between SMEs and experienced practitioners (EPs). SMEs are helpful in the creation of courses because their knowledge is realtively structured and easy to distill. You get content and theory from SMEs. EPs are helpful in the design of learning processes and in the implementation of learning because they have a wealth of practical experience and fuzzy tacit knowledge to draw on. You get context, relevance, and reality-focus from EPs.

I have used EPs very successfully as online instructors, particularly in reactive asynchronous or chatroom type modes where they add great value to the learning - I'd think twice about using them in ILT or Webcast modes.

E-learning development time

I am often asked what the ballpark development time is for an hour of e-learning. Industry “studies” like that from the E-learning Guild are not much help. According to a Guild study a while back, the average development period for an hour of “complex” e-learning (containing animation, streaming media, and navigation options) allegedly averages 276 hours. This is frankly absurd. But it points out the difficulty inherent in the question: what exactly are you talking about when you say "an hour of eLearning"? And what are you including in the concept of "development time?

This question was asked often in those early days of e-learning. Here's one of my responses, still valid today, to a similar question from 2001:

You are not going to find any meaningful ballpark figures for e-learning development costs, because e-learning can mean anything you want it to mean. This forum is a powerful dynamic e-learning medium, yet it costs virtually nothing to produce. A course full of spinning logos and burning icons and professional video can be a dire learning medium that cost millions to produce and gets outdated rapidly. Remember also that there are a range of hidden costs in any e-learning venture.

You have to define your individual learning objectives within the context of your overall learning service strategy. Then you have to define the learning model most appropriate to those objectives, given your environment (people, technology, existing classroom budgets, target learner sophistication). Only then, when you know what you want, should you start looking at cost. Internal development may be more expensive than outsourcing, if you factor learning curves into your costs. Send out an RFP to a few vendors and see what comes back, or just talk offline to people on this forum. The range of pricing may further frustrate you, but at least you will have a focused basis for budgeting.

There was a time when developers were happy to quote $10k per completed hour of e-learning. I still hear of vendors doing that, though now the hourly number is often $35k to $75k. But most people have realized how ludicrously risky that concept is, because development costs are not linear -- your first hour is most expensive, subsequent hours can get dramatically cheaper. And 'an hour' can be complex or simple in content, learner activity, technology, context, media used, and so on. An hour of simulation can cost 20 times an hour of text-based application instruction, and may be less effective in the given circumstance.

There are no short cuts – you really have to define the project, scope out the development plan, and cost it accordingly. Even then, you will find a huge range of pricing for the same project because not all vendors or internal development shops are the same. The big e-learning vendors are typically much more expensive (sometimes by a factor of ten or more) than a small specialized development shop that does not carry the same overhead. And, if you are happy to give the work to a multi-talented individual contractor, your costs drop even further. I have seen a client quoted as much as $600k and as little as $25k for the same project.

This has been a long answer to an apparently simple question. The short answer is that any study claiming to give a useful ballpark figure for the development cost of an hour of e-learning and an hour of classroom learning will never be useful to you in real-world budgeting.

In e-learning, as in life, what you want will always cost more than you can afford; what you need may often cost less than you are willing to pay.

A twist on copyright

Artists, writers, and inventors for thousands of years have known that, if not themselves wealthy, in order to pursue their muse they need a wealthy patron. Wealthy patrons are few and starving artists many, so only the most talented or profound find sponsorship. The lesser talents have to get a real job; the wealthy lesser talents indulge in vanity publishing. It's only in relatively recent times that marginal or niched creators have found viable markets for their efforts. And the Internet has made it even easier for such creators to market their wares, because the cost of production and distribution has dropped dramatically while finding a specialist market has become easier.

Musicians have always relied on a wealthy patron (a record company) to get their work leveraged commercially. Once wealthy themselves, many ditch the record company and seek to control/benefit from their creations directly. Those who can't find a patron in the first place are going online in droves, effectively vanity publishing their work but at very little cost to themselves and free to consumers. Those who strike a chord (if you'll excuse the expression) and find informal fame can jump to the next level and get a recording contract -- but in the beginning they actively encourage the free sharing of their work in order to promote their work. Think of it as an investment of opportunity costs in some hoped-for future return. And this despite the fact that in the music industry it is the recording itself (the expression of the idea) that has value.

In business writing it is surely the idea itself that is important; the expression of it (the published text) is less significant. If all you are doing is regurgitating old ideas and re-labeling old concepts, the text is all you have to sell, and with a bit of hype you probably can sell your books. If you are achieving conceptual breakthroughs with new ideas, you can probably change the world -- and your life -- but the words you use will be secondary to the concepts. That's why copyright is for the expression of ideas, not for ideas themselves. I'd rather produce one transformative idea in my lifetime than copyright a hundred inconsequential books.

Let me stress that I am not advocating un-attributed lifting of other peoples' writing at all. I believe in the value of protecting your intellectual property as far as sensibly possible: I have in the past gone to the expense of taking out several international patents for various software tools, and assert copyright of one form or another (mostly Creative Commons these days) on most things I publish. But you need to look honestly at what it is you are creating and decide how much of it comes from and belongs to you, and how much comes from and belongs to your world.

If creators jealously protect their words, they may condemn their ideas -- and themselves -- to obscurity. And does it make any difference in the world if a marginal thinker has the poor expression of old idea stolen by some other marginal thinker? Maybe, if you believe in the butterfly effect. Oops, maybe that's a copyrighted term. Better call my lawyer.

Protecting copyrights

Under copyright, you cannot protect an idea; you can only protect the specific expression of the idea. If there is only one way to express your idea, you have a happy situation. If there are other ways to express it, the value (to you) of your original idea is diminished. If someone else has a clearer or more compelling way to express the idea, your copyright probably was not worth much to start with.

Copyright law protects words and images, not concepts. Allowing others to quote you actually protects your original association with the idea; if others are not permitted to quote you (or if your expression of the idea is not in itself quote-worthy), they have to re-describe your concepts using their own words and images, and you stand more chance of losing any association with the idea.

As an author, you can choose to publish your work under a Creative Commons license. This selective assertion of copyright allows anyone else to copy, distribute, display and perform your work, and to make derivative works, so long as the original author is given credit, the use is non-commercial, and any derivation, alteration or extension of the work is only distributed under a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons has become popular among academics and researchers who need to share their work but where concerns about copyright and plagiarism used to hamper the sharing.

An idea unshared has little to no value. The more widespread an idea becomes, the greater its value becomes. Old-school hierarchical trickle-down of knowledge through formal publishing is a slow, expensive, and limiting model for the dissemination of ideas. Today, the networking of ideas using Internet-based vehicles is geometrically faster, cheaper, and more penetrating. And it provides a benefit that was also limited in the past -- an author can get instant feedback from a vast array of sources, making it easier for him/her to polish and improve on the original work.

Global e-learning best practices

When you deploy e-learning globally, there are obvious things to take into consideration. Here are a few that I have seen get overlooked, in no particular order of priority:

Make sure you know what the target technology environment is in each country and don't assume that just because there is a head-office corporate policy it actually happens that way in the real world. Find out about local bandwidth issues both within local intranets and for those who will use dial-ups out of the office (much of Latin America is on 14.4kbps; broadband is still rare even in much of Europe). Confirm the existence of sound cards or other media cards if you think you will need to use them. Confirm the operating systems, browsers and versions that are the minimum in the different target areas. Also establish what the local intranet policies are, especially where security, plug-ins, cookies, and firewalls are concerned. Make sure that your learning designs can accommodate any variances.

Also think about your e-learning as a 24-7 service, not a series of training products. Instructor or SME support in local languages is important, and so is technical support. You can't have a learner in Japan having to wait till 3a.m. to make a long distance phone call to the US to find out how to get his sound working. Train your local IT helpdesk to handle first-line support, or contract it out to a local 24-7 agency.

Time zones also play into the provision of real-time SME support. If your only SMEs are US-based, make sure that their schedules allow them to "be there" even occasionally for learners on the other side of the planet. We used to schedule synchronous sessions all around the clock, allowing learners to pick a slot that was convenient. and we usually logged the sessions and made them available in the course library as searchable databases, for those who just couldn't make it.

Take time to find out about local privacy policies. The way we handle the privacy of personal data in the US may be inappropriate or even illegal in other countries. For example, Germany has very strict labor laws that may forbid you from retaining certain performance records, or even from testing understanding. Sharing learner performance with managers may also be an issue, as is the question of anonymizing participation in synchronous or asynchronous group sessions. On the other hand, places like the UK have very little in the way of employee privacy protection.. so find out before you start programming.

Finally, while you will obviously try to localize language and vocabulary, also take into consideration local norms where things like grading and passing tests are concerned. In the US 70% seems to be what people assume is a pass. In other countries it's often 60 or 50. Using As, Bs, and Cs is a very American thing which makes no sense to many other nationalities.

Enough for now -- except to say that if you are doing some substantial multinational work you should look at the localizing services of some specialists in the e-learning field. In the DC area, welocalize.com has a good reputation. I have worked with an excellent company called Transware, who have offices all over the world and can do the localization, translation, and programming with people who are all native to the target language

Bandwidth and video - still an issue

I still have F100 clients who forbid streaming audio on their intranets, let alone video, and Flash is for them a definite no-no. So do not underestimate the bandwidth issues!

Video - and the other rich media - should only be used where there is a learning objective best served by it, and then only used sparingly. There is nothing worse for a learner than to have to sit through hours of gratuitous talking-head video. But if used to illustrate a point, behavior, or process, well-crafted bits of video can be very powerful.

The bandwidth demanded by your video will depend on so many factors, including the size of the window you play it in, the frame rate, the compression format you use and so on. Typically, for streaming video to a 400x200 window at 20 frames a second, you need about 360kbps of bandwidth per simultaneous user. Higher res or higher frame rate, and it can shoot up exponentially. Use a good compression algorithm like Flash MX04, and it can drop. Get your IT people involved early, define a bandwidth budget, and fit your video chunks into it.

Lessons from reality TV

As the latest season of reality TV's "Amazing Race" kicks off, I remember an episode last year that grabbed my attention and got me hooked on the show.

One couple was trying to get to a destination as fast as possible, and the man insisted on driving, leaving his wife to navigate -- something they both knew she was inept at doing. They lost he race, not because the navigator was unable to read a map, but because they failed to optimize their teamwork. Navigating required some specialized skill and was critical to success; driving was neither demanding nor critical. Why put the wrong team member on the critical task? If the man was imposing those decisions, and not managing their resources appropriately, he was to blame for their failure. If it happened out of habit, then challenging past behaviors would have been a productive thing to do -- though in the panic of a crisis, how often do we take the time needed to do this?

It is a leader's responsibility to set direction. He had assumed leadership, and was trying to lead by staying in control of the vehicle, even though he did not know where he was going. We see that a lot in business, in government, and we see it in training -- the headlong lunge for e-learning without pausing to think through strategy is a case in point.

When the driver finally realized that his navigator was not going to get them to their goal, instead of taking on that responsibility he did what so many business 'leaders' do -- he decided to follow his competitors in the hope that they knew what they were doing.

And, when it was all over, he let his navigator shoulder the blame for his failure.

I have to start watching more reality TV.

Generation gap foolishness

I have to agree with those who see the problems that occur when younger people manage older people as a management issue rather than a generation gap issue. It is perfectly natural for an older person to resent being managed by someone younger, and that has absolutely nothing to do with whether they are Generation X, Y, or E. It’s a question of mutual perception of value and credibility, not of generational values.

An older person can feel that their experience is undervalued by the company if a younger person gets the management role; the same person can feel undervalued by the manager if their experience and perspectives are not acknowledged or leveraged. Conversely, a younger person may feel threatened by an older person’s experience, may perceive that experience to be a barrier to positive change, or, worse, may not even know or care about the older person’s experience. The tension that exists between these people forms a barrier to clear communication, which exacerbates the problem. Each can end up thinking the other has attitude problems, and resentment builds.

It is not uncommon in organizations for a manager to have never seen an employee’s resume, and to know little about that person’s experience or perspectives. And it is very common for an employee to know nothing about their manager’s background. Mutual respect, the leveraging of the experience assets that each brings to a situation, and the creation of any kind of synergy, is unlikely where they are, effectively, strangers.

This can be avoided by good management practices and good interpersonal communication – the kind of basic management skills that anyone should have before being promoted into a people-management role. Knowing about Gen-X, Y etc. is likely to make the problem worse, not better: why try to get to know the specific value that an individual brings to your team when you can dismissively lump him/her into a superficial stereotype?

Understanding as a learning objective

The issue of whether "understanding" can be a viable learning objective has been raised recently on various online forums, and gets dismissed because achievement of understanding can't be measured or observed, and because behavior change is more appropriate a goal for training. I used to endorse this view, particularly back in the days when I was training people in MBO. But now I am not so sure.

First, in the academic education world, understanding IS a goal. It is fundamental to being able to analyze, form judgments, formulate opinions and beliefs, and develop intellectually. Few university courses, other than perhaps in 'the professions', aim to get students to DO anything of direct practical value. Yet renowned educational institutions the world over test understanding using rigorously designed means all the time. Try telling a professor of economics or metaphysics that you can't test for understanding. Teaching students how to understand within whatever appropriate context is, in my view, a noble and often achieved objective. Once the mental processes pump is primed, graduates are considered to be ready for the world, which was till recently a rather predictable place.

Second, that world is changing rapidly and growing ever more complex, way faster and more chaotically than say in the 50s. A core survival competence in business is the ability to rapidly "understand" new things, concepts, tools, processes, environments and so on. Without understanding there can be no meaningful behavior change. Without understanding there is alienation. So why is it considered inappropriate or unworthy to try to get employees to understand things? I have a growing conviction that the better employees understand the world they live in, the better able they are to adapt to it (or drive it) on their own, without formal training interventions.

I confess I am biased in this view. Three years ago I was approached to develop a series of e-learning courses for a telecommunications company. They knew that they were perceived by the market as old fashioned and slow, an analog-voice batch-systems operation in a world that was rapidly moving to a digital-data real-time focus. They determined that a primary albatross around their neck was their many-thousands strong employee base who simply did not understand the wired world of the Internet. The innovative thinkers in business strategy felt like they were running waist-deep in water. The drag of people who did not understand, did not care, or were passively resistant to e-business (from the mailroom to the boardroom) was a huge obstacle. And not having everyone through the length and breadth of the organization willing and able to see and react to e-business opportunities was a real threat to the company's evolution.

So we put together the courses to get every single employee to "understand" what was then called the new economy and its practical implications for them, for business, and for society. Though a lot of the training was experiential, many of the objectives were deliberately phrased in "understanding" terms, and much of what was conveyed was knowledge rather than skill or ability. But people came out of those courses grounded, confident, enthusiastic, and a lot more competent to talk about e-business issues and ideas. Today, that company is the most respected digital-data telecom in its field, and is looked to by others in its industry as setting the bar. Training was a significant part of that transformation, and developing "understanding" was a significant part of that training.

Understanding of anything lifts an employee above those without that understanding. Understanding can be taught, and adds significant leverage to any behavior-change efforts.

Or am I just not understanding?

What’s in a name?

What you name something tends to influence what it becomes.

Members of committees tend to think of their role as passive, perpetual, reactive; taskforce members think of themselves as actually having to initiate and achieve something specific with some sense of urgency or importance.

Problem-Solving Training

When I was running a computer games development company, every games publisher wanted something that was both radically new and that had been a proven success in the past. Hollywood is no exception. And these are among our most creative industries. They say that cloning puts evolution on hold, weakening the gene pool and making viruses (constantly evolving) inherently more dangerous -- in business, it's continuously innovative competitors you have to beware of.

The desire to repeat past success is one of the fundamental constraining factors in business. The assumption that you minimize risk by replicating what has worked in the past underlies much of management theory. We focus on minimizing investment risk rather than maximizing return. "Return" has uncertainty written all over it; "investment" is a little easier to control. So much of our strategic thinking is asset-based: we are good at X and we have Y resources, what return can we generate with them? It's not considered sound corporate practice to ask: we want to make $X million, what opportunities can we create? Startup entrepreneurs do it, because they have not yet become experts. And, because they have very little to lose, they focus on the returns rather than the investment risk.

I suspect that what passes for expert intuition is sub(un?)conscious pattern-recognition of the kind that allows "lesser" creatures to recognize lunch, avoid becoming lunch, and find their way when they migrate. The less experience you have, the more you feel a need to be analytical. The more experience you have in a particular field, the less you have to consciously make yourself think analytically, if you don't want to. You instinctively recognize patterns and react accordingly. But therein can lie the danger. If the world has changed, if there are factors at play today that were not there five years ago, a lazy reliance on instincts can cause you to miss opportunities for innovation, or, worse, just make mistakes.

That is why corporations that take problem-solving and decision-making seriously insist on having everybody trained in the use of analytical methodologies, and why they work at getting those methodologies into the culture of the business. If you have to work with the system, it's not that easy to get lazy and fall back on instinct.

Good e-Learning

Much of e-learning is simply content-pushing. Much of what passes for training in the classroom these days is also simply content pushing. I have often heard ILT vendors and in-company trainers lament the trend toward "fire-hose" training, getting ever-larger groups of people "trained" in ever-shorter courses. If content pushing suffices in a classroom, then why not use technology as a much more cost-effective time-efficient (and arguably more humane) substitute? It's not ideal, and of course you can achieve so much more with technology, but sometimes pragmatism comes into play. Why not just give them a book? Books are really slow and expensive to produce and nigh impossible to update in real time.

Be that as it may, I think the only criterion for deciding if a particular e-learning instance is "good" is whether it achieves its learning objectives better than any other approach would have, within time and within budget. When I say "learning objectives" I mean both corporate and individual learner objectives. I know that's not very useful, because the actual measure of "goodness" is after the fact and a little imprecise. But if you find models that worked, you can figure out why they worked, and apply those lessons where appropriate to future projects.

From my experience (balanced by some analysis!), these are some of the characteristics that go into creating goodness, particularly in a sales training context:

Accessibility (not slow and turgid, but pan and scan)
Visualization (connect theory with the task via realistic examples)
Collaboration and fostered informal learning (connect relevant learners with each other and SMEs to share concerns/experiences)
Immediacy (communicate product/policy changes in real time, ideally with a training component to the knowledge push)
Feedback loops (build in opportunities for learners to clarify issues and modify training content real-time based on problems or actual experience in the field)
There's more but I have gone on too long as it is.

None of this is expensive video-rich instructional-designed Rolls Royce learning product. And it may not fit the conventional concept of e-learning. But I'd encourage sales trainers to play with things like creating a new product blog (get product managers, marketing people, sales managers involved too), or a regional sales team blog for the sales people to build.

Check out the latest from Blogger.com -- anyone can get a secure image-rich blog up in minutes at no cost. Check out Spoke.com for a very neat social networking tool.

Problem-Solving Training

The cliché that you can't get to the future by looking in the rear-view mirror holds even more true in a world where change is no longer linear and predictable. If you don't know how to leverage experience, it can become baggage. Experience used to be an ever-appreciating asset; now you often need to depreciate it rather rapidly, or risk it having undue influence on your decisions.

Problem-Solving Training

I have been working with Kepner-Tregoe for a number of years, designing and implementing a 'blended' approach to imbedding their problem-solving and decision-making methodologies in corporate environments. KT has been doing this kind of analytical skills training for decades, and has had significant success – partly because the methodologies make sense, and partly because they focus on real-world learner-specific applications and business results. We did a joint presentation on this with KT and Honda, one of their clients, at ASTD's conference last week.

The blended approach has further added to the speed with which the skills are assimilated into each learner's real-world operations. In essence we `blend' online learning with each learner's actual problems and priorities, using both an online instructor and the learner's manager to define situations that would benefit from an analytical approach. Those `applications' are the reference points throughout the first online phase of learning, and provide the focus once the learner gets together with the instructor in a classroom session. The training has not been `passed' till each learner provides a number of documented applications of the skills back at work, which case studies seek to quantify the real business value attained by solving the problem or making the right decision.

The blend brings managers into a mentoring role, makes the classroom sessions highly productive, and makes for a protracted period, post formal training, in which learners work on personally relevant applications of the skills. Instead of one concentrated 4-day classroom session, learners have a month of pre-class online work, two days in class and up to twelve weeks of post-class work. It's tougher on the instructor, but the benefits are significant.

Having a culture that embraces a particular approach to analytical thinking clearly helps with the transfer – clients like Honda describe KT methodologies as part of their world-wide corporate DNA, and the training is considered fundamental to all employees across the organization. When everybody in a company speaks the same vocabulary when discussing a problem, the processes tend to become second nature.

Flash in e-learning courses

Don’t assume Flash is a useful development tool for a particular learning experience till you know that your learners can actually play Flash once it gets to their machine. For any client, find out what the ACTUAL (not the corporate model) learner platform is, here and in other countries where learners may be located: OS and version, browser and version, soundcard, plug-ins and versions, effective bandwidth budgets etc.

If their system is out of step and can't handle recent generations of Flash, you might as well stop right there. If their systems are more up to date, then installing a recent Flash player may not be a problem -- though your clients' IT and networking people need to be consulted. They have to install and maintain the plug-ins.

And while you are talking to the IT/networking folks, find out about bandwidth policies. I have a client (very large automotive manufacturer) who had an old network infrastructure that might seize up under any even limited use of streaming audio or video, but could just sneak in some limited silent Flash animations. They upgraded the network only this year which opens up more possibilities -- but don't assume that just because a client is a mega-corporation with hi-tech products that it has a hi-tech internal infrastructure. My rule of thumb is the bigger the corporation, the slower it is to upgrade its hardware/software infrastructure (they often skip a generation or two).

Once you know the client infrastructure reality, then you can start deciding on your development tools.

Isn't it nice when things just work?

This ad ("Isn't it nice when things just work?") was so successful in the UK last year it spawned several parodies.

You can see the original ad here or by clicking the title above. You'll need quicktime for the movie to run.

Here's a pythonesque parody by one of the UK's dial-around services.

Enjoy!

Time Squeeze and the Human Touch

The explosion of info-clutter is really getting under people's skin and changing the way we approach things. Some of us look for intelligent honey bees to automatically find what's important. Others try to be more efficient, or more ruthless in filtering. Others just give up (I've threatened to stop using e-mail completely, just to freak out people who have become dependent on it). Technology may help deal with the chaos that technology is spawning. But I am hearing more and more from my clients a desire to get back to basics and re-humanize communication and the information pipeline.

Think of it this way -- if you don't automate you have to prioritize, using that fuzzy logic and non-egalitarian networking that humans are so good at. Instead of blasting an e-mail out to a cc list of dozens, think who you'd send it to if you had to hand write and mail each copy. And in looking for information, if you didn't have Google to give you ten thousand sources, how would you know where to go? You'd ask someone for recommendations. This is why blogs have a lot of appeal, at least to me. And why discussion forums will always be useful.

I am finding that many of my clients want "a person" to guide them in filtering the info-clutter, especially where learning technologies are concerned. I get asked more and more often to do short, incisive briefings to small groups of decision makers, because they find that a very efficient and accessible way to get focused.

I've also been getting a lot of requests for what you might call micro-consulting or sounding-board services -- someone has a proposal and wants an outside objective opinion; someone is putting together a strategy and wants help in shaping and polishing it before they go into presentation. Gone are the traditional big expensive long-term consulting projects. Now people seem to want the human equivalent of an EPSS -- inexpensive retainer-based just-in-time human performance support services. I'm also finding that courses that used to be so popular online are now being requested as condensed classroom sessions -- again, "do it for me, make it crystalline, make it human, hold the fog."

The technology may still be emerging that makes information more accessible, but it clearly has not captured the hearts and minds of many business professionals. Is it just me, or are others in the training field seeing the same thing?

Mobile learning (M-learning)

What appeals to me most about mobile learning is not the fact that it is mobile but that it redefines our perception of computers and networks. Gone are the prerequisites for networked learning of five years ago -- a desktop machine, a lot of wiring, and a physical phone line or cable. Now you can access the Web with a mobile phone from anywhere you have a signal.

I used to think M-learning was dumb, suitable perhaps for simple EPSS or JIT help and reference. I saw lots of applications for that in mechanical work, repairs to machinery, military systems and so on. But the real potential completely eluded me till I started to realize that M-learning freed you from the EXPENSE of having a traditional computer and the requirement that you have a telephone landline or cable infrastructure. No big deal in affluent America -- we've got all that stuff, and we still prefer to wi-fi at Starbucks.. But how about the rest of the world? What about people who don't have a desk, let alone a desktop computer; where a phone line is simply unobtainable -- not because their job takes them on the road, but because they have to live without these things?

I have an interest in the development of alternative education systems and entrepreneurship environments in Africa. Most African countries just don't have the resources to create even a low- bandwidth phone-line or cable infrastructure, and lines are stolen within days of being put in place anyway. Most people can't afford computers, and have no real need for them. But most urban people somehow manage to have a mobile phone. If there is a way to make M-learning work (and M-commerce too), it could have a big impact on the needs of developing nations.

More on Blogs/ RSS feeds

The way in which you access content has an impact on whether or not you will use it. I avoid most push (but like RSS), but if content doesn't conform, I may still access it if it has a strong enough appeal. Technology itself can be a significant obstacle to participation, but it can never be a motivator. My point is that what matters more is the value of the content and the 'payoff' of the user experience. Sure, that experience should be simple and intuitive and convenient, but nobody invests their time BECAUSE it is simple and intuitive and convenient - - you invest your time because of the core benefit you gain from the experience itself. And that is all about content, context, focus, relevance.

Which leads me to the next point. Those of us who have populated trdev and other forums for many years used to rant that "it's not the technology, it's your strategy and objectives that matter" but I think in recent years that's become simply obvious. People still need to understand technological capabilities and pitfalls, but it's less and less common for people to let the tool dictate the execution.

If you want your restaurant to stay in business, you tune in to the needs and preferences of those who are eating your food. There are markets for take-out, delivery, candle-lit gourmet, fast food, nuked frozen meals, and lovingly prepared home cooking, among others. The technology used by the chefs in each case is irrelevant to the consumer -- it's the dining experience that matters. As a cook, you match what you want to do with a market that wants it.

One of the greatest mistakes made by many Web designers, information architects, instructional designers, bloggers, and programmers is believing that their training, technical expertise, or dogma is somehow superior to customer opinion. I think most 'quality' bloggers (as opposed to 'vanity' bloggers) are good at sharing their passion in a way that their community can appreciate, without making it all about the technology.

More on Blogs/ RSS feeds

If you look at the fundamental reader benefits (the reasons why we want to access the content), you have to lump blogs in with feeds. Sure, as delivery vehicles they are different, but they both deliver the same thing. The differences between delivery technologies don't matter so much as the differences between the intrinsic nature of blogging and the intrinsic nature of discussion groups. That's all about content, context, human interaction, and less about whether it's a push or a pull mechanism.

In the 'discussion blogs' that I am involved with (such as InternetTime or LearningCircuits) the nature and range of discussion is hampered by the technology, and has to stay issue focused, and only those of us who have the authorization can initiate threads. Even with a huge number of 'readers' every day, it is rare to see more than three or four comments in a thread.

Blog authors are often better than a search engine, in that they act as a credible guide to Web content that is specific to their context or area of interest. Search engines scan tags, content, and links; blog authors use more helpful human dimensions such as context and quality by which to evaluate relevance.

Discussion lists are not always push. I have never used discussion lists such as trdev as push -- and I am amazed that so many people still use them that way. How many e-mails per day can you actually deal with?? I visit trdev on the Web every day, and can see at a glance subjects and authors of recent posts. I read -- online -- only those posts that interest me, and reply using the online system. So discussion lists are pull for me, not push, where that option is available. If an online site is not available, I get a daily digest rather than the individual e-mails -- but I confess I rarely scan more than the topic list, hardly ever read the posts, and almost never respond. The technology just makes it less accessible for me.

I spend less time on discussion forums these days because the quality, relevance, and accessibility of information available to me via selected blogs is orders of magnitude better than anything I ever derived from participation in those discussion forums.

I think that as the Internet and its users become more sophisticated, they fragment into smaller more homogeneous clusters. With hundreds of millions of users out there, why should trainers all come to trdev when there may be a smaller more targeted discussion group that is more relevant ('sales trainers in the consumer goods field in Ireland' for example)? As far as I am aware nobody is creating those communities using discussion forums or lists -- but bloggers ARE coming close. A blog requires a champion around whom like-minded people can start to crystallize into a community; once that community has some kind of critical mass, they are going to want a better vehicle for networked communication. Which is where I think social networking software may come into its own.

I do think that 'the old way' of doing things on the Internet is increasingly time-consuming and decreasingly relevant. But it's 'the old way' that is at fault, not the ever-expanding Internet :-).

More on Blogs/ RSS feeds

There's a big difference between "information availability" and discussion. Blogs can point to a lot of references that may or may not be good information. They provide perspective and personal insight. They do not provide a good venue for dialog.

A blog is usually author-centric and hierarchical, where online forums tend to be networked and participant-centric (if that's not a contradiction in terms). The advantage of a blog (and what distinguishes it from traditional journalism) is that its author is usually an involved and passionate subject matter enthusiast, not an objective but superficial analyst. So you can find blogs that you buy into emotionally. In blogs you read unashamed opinion, not necessarily "information".

I think of blogs as personal broadcasting: the author(s) publish their thoughts and interests, and exhibit their expertise, to anyone who is interested. Those who are moved to do so can post a response. Sometimes this can lead to an extended conversation, but not often. Blogs CAN become discussion groups, particularly for small groups, though I have yet to see blog software that facilitates threaded discussion for a large number of participants.

The Internet has provided a vast distributed database of "stuff" -- some of it information, some of it opinion, some of it important, some of it trivial, some of it true, some of it false. Search engines are still primitive in their abilities to find the things you are looking for. Blogging is simply another way to find the stuff that you value, like having someone who appears to know what they are doing recommend resources within a context that you can relate to.

Discussion groups provide a different kind of experience. Much of their value lies in the pool of tacit knowledge and experience that is available to be tapped, and the ability to discourse about things that are not easily summarized in a neat published article. Most importantly, discussion groups are not hierarchical broadcast vehicles, they are networked -- which means that their potential power as a knowledge resource is exponentially greater than that of a blog.

I confess I spend much more time scanning blogs and RSS feeds than I do in discussion forums, which was not the case two years ago. But discussion forums like trdev or ASTD provide the diversity of opinion and a discussion dynamic that is still missing on blogs.

Types of e-learning licenses

I can offer a 'vendor's' perspective on licensing. Though it is not core to our business, we have for several years offered a rather small series of courses focused on getting employees enterprise-wide to be more confident and enthusiastic about e-business, and more competent operating in a 'wired world'. Originally developed for a telecom company, these courses have found a much wider audience. They are a very specific series aimed at large volumes of non-technical learners. Over the years we have sold these courses using a variety of models, and clients have paid anywhere from $25 to $300 per enrollment. As they are approaching the end of their life cycle in the US, we are about to offer reduced versions at around $10 per enrollment. We use the term 'enrollment' rather than 'learner' or 'course' because it best describes an instance of a learner in a course.

As a vendor, we provide incentives for clients to buy volume licenses with an up-front payment (and do everything we can to provide disincentives for pay-per-use). Our costs tend to be front-loaded -- original authoring and development of the courses, cost of sale, negotiation, setting up and customizing -- and ongoing costs are negligible -- a little maintenance and updating, hardly any tech support usage, bandwidth and so on. So we look for a substantial commitment up-front, and provide break points with increasingly significant discounts for volume.

Typically this involves the client having to estimate usage for each course within a one year time frame. They buy a one-year license for say 5,000 enrollments in a particular course, on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, and get it at a per enrollment cost that may be a tenth of an individual course fee. Then we provide additional discounts for additional courses wrapped into the same deal. And we provide further incremental discounts for licenses taken in the second, third, or fourth year.

This can lead to counter-intuitive things happening: one client paid an average per-enrollment fee of $35 in year one for around 7,000 enrollments; $30 in year two for 3,000; $25 in year three for 1,000; and is now paying way more than ever per enrollment in year four because there's hardly anyone left to train and pay-per-use model was the only way to go.

Advantages of course-specific volume licensing to the client are mainly financial -- much lower cost per enrollment, reduced ongoing administrative costs. You can also qualify for otherwise expensive additional services such as expanded support, customization, and so on. Disadvantages are that it's an up-front sum, with considerable work needed to minimize the risk of miscalculation. Overestimate usage, and you can end up paying for enrollments you don't use -- though in reality unless you make a major miscalculation your effective cost per enrollment is still going to be a bargain. And a good vendor will not enforce the 'lose it' part of the deal. There's also the risk that the vendor may not be around to provide the service a few months down the line.

A better model if you can't get a comfortable estimate of usage per course, is to buy a pool of enrollments that can be applied to a pool of courses. Most vendors are happy to do this, though you may end up with a slightly higher per-enrollment cost than if you went the course-specific route. The reason for this is that the more courses you add to the pool, the higher the license fee gets but the smaller the likely number of enrollments per course is likely to be. If your usage is going to be similar across all courses, this is fine; but if the Pareto rule applies, a pool system can be wasteful. In an extreme case, you are usually better off doing a high-discount volume license for your known big-demand courses, and pay-per-use for the marginal courses.

Advantages of pay-per-use are that you don't have to try to anticipate usage or make any commitment. (This has always seemed odd to me -- why would you go to the trouble of contracting for courses if you don't know there is a need?) It also allows you to train small groups of people who don't get near a volume discount mark. The disadvantages (apart from price) are in ongoing administration costs (particularly if you have to deal with individual authorizations). You also may lose out on any customization potential and additional services that kick in for larger volumes.

Most vendors have a rate sheet that is really just a starting point for negotiations. As your relationship evolves, the apparent rigidity of this liquifies, and your ability to craft custom deals increases. Vendors have differing internal cost structures and market objectives -- some have very high margins that let you get creative in negotiations; others (especially the big vendors) are already selling at a loss to try to hang onto market share. If you can find the time to try to understand where the vendor is coming from, you can probably find a licensing model that works for both of you.

Transitioning to e-learning

Remember you are providing a learning service, not just training courses. Make sure that everyone in your support team is ready for the transition. It's important to provide an instant help facility for learners who get lost. So make sure the help content of your courses is useful, and make it clear to learners who they go to for additional help and how fast they can expect to receive it. If you are using your own help-desk folks, let them know what to expect, provide them with the opportunity to get to know the courses, and use your first batch of learners to document likely problems and solutions. Also develop a FAQ list that you can append to the courses. If you can, provide learners with a threaded forum like this one, where they can post non-urgent problems for you, a tech support person, or other learners to comment on.

If people are to learn at their desks, you might also want to do something about creating a more comfortable learning environment. Briefing managers to be supportive, and not interrupt learners, can help a lot. I have seen companies provide learners with a 'learning environment' kit that includes yellow crime-scene tape printed with 'learning taking place, do not cross' -- people can pin it across their doors or cube entrances to let others know that they are not available and would appreciate quiet.

Follow-through and getting feedback is important. If you are using a LMS or equivalent, track start and finish information. Follow up with learners who appear to have stalled or abandoned the training -- remembering that for many, completion is not their objective. And congratulate those who actually complete. Leverage enthusiasm where you find it -- a happy learner can do a lot to get others into the new mode of learning.

Training in Mexico

An American trainer, about to run a workshop in Mexico for the first time, has asked for some insights into relevant cultural differences. I have done a lot of training in Mexico. It was always my favorite place to work, despite my lack of any real ability in Spanish, and many of my longest-lasting friendships and professional relationships are with people I met while running training or OD programs in Mexico.

Americans (which I am not) have a disadvantage, but not a major one. Gringos are still viewed with some (never overt) disdain and you have to earn the respect – and importantly the affection – of your participants. Being passionate or emotional about your subject (or about anything, really) earns you credibility rather rapidly. Demonstrating an interest or appreciation of Mexican culture or history gains you respect – so long as it is not conveyed in a patronizing or imperialist tone :-). Mentioning a visit to the Archaeological Museum, asking about local food or art or music (but not the mariachi kind!), can score you some points and get some interesting conversations going.

I had been a Mexico enthusiast long before I made my first business trip there twenty years ago, so I probably had an advantage. I recommend a book called "Distant Neighbors" by Alan Riding. It may be a little out of date, but it's a great primer on the roots of modern Mexican culture.

Showing a little humility and vulnerability early on, taking time to talk about your background and asking about theirs, and getting them actively participating from session kick-off helps enormously. If you are running the session in English, only those most comfortable in English will contribute. So if language is a barrier, small group work helps greatly because people can communicate among themselves in Spanish. My style is very participative, and I found that if you are perceived as a facilitator rather than a lecturing authority, and if you appear to be as interested in learning as in teaching, people open up and contribute enthusiastically.

Despite the stereotypes, Mexico has a vibrant, energetic, progressive and thoroughly modern business environment, which maps in many respects to the kind of world we are familiar with in the US. Young Mexican business people are incredibly hard-working, very well educated, and worldly. They share many of the social-conscience issues and angsts, and are as status conscious and ambitious, as their American counterparts. So motivation among the learner group is rarely an issue. I find Mexicans to be reserved and guarded till they get comfortable with you, after which the group can become very exuberant. And you know you have had a good day when you are still deep in conversation with a group of participants in the early hours of the morning, by which time your Spanish has usually improved remarkably.

Assumptions underlying online learning

One of the fundamental assumptions of all training (except perhaps on-the-job training) is that people have the ability to port contexts. In other words, they can see and understand and get good at something in a training context, and can then apply that learning where it is supposed to be applied -- in the different context of their work. This ability to transfer is probably uniquely human -- you can show Fido videos of someone throwing a ball for a dog all day, but when you then throw the first real ball for him he'll look at you as if you are mad.

In an online mode, unless you are teaching computer-related skills, perhaps we call for a greater leap of the imagination than in a classroom mode. Everything we see and do is in two dimensions on a flat screen. Making the leap from the truly virtual online world to the totally real workplace world may be heroic for some. Or maybe not -- the past few years have seen such a surge in computer proficiency that maybe people feel more comfortable than they did before.

On a more practical note, there's a bunch of assumptions. Sometimes we make them, other times we are smart enough not to assume, others we design around.

We often assume that online learners have a lot more ability to concentrate than they do in reality. We assume a relatively quiet interruption-free learning environment. We assume that they have the will and the motivation to push through the work without a classroom pace-setter. We assume people want to work at their own pace in a time convenient to them, rather than being led by someone else's schedule. We assume that learners are comfortable with all of the alarming personal privacy issues that online learning potentially exposes them to. We tend to assume a particular technology platform for online learners (operating system, browser version, plug-ins, bandwidth, performance) that in my experience is often way off the mark. We assume people read e-mails. We assume people want to take the courses they are taking. We assume either that they need to be led down a predetermined path mapped out by an instructional designer, or that they want to be able to find their own way. We assume that they want to finish what they started. And we assume that all of the unscripted "fuzzy learning" that fills up the white spaces in the classroom activities is either irrelevant or somehow handled better online.

Oh, and we assume that it all works, technically and pedagogically, because nobody tests software fully before it gets to the customer :-)

Revealing the deeper talent set

Most large corporations are proud of their "human resource" or "human capital" management abilities, yet I have so often found that very little is known about the qualities, experiences, interests, and talents that exist within those resources. People are hired to do a particular job, only the relevant qualifications become memorialized somewhere in a HR database, and that becomes who they are, the only face the company sees.

Back in the 1980's there were movements to create more transparent, multidimensional databases of personnel, particularly among multinationals who were always moving people from one country to another. But even those systems logged only the dimensions that the company thought relevant.

Tip of the iceberg is a good way to look at it -- what we see of each employee is only the bit that we care to shine a light on. Yet the talent pool in every company is probably a hundred times more valuable than the surface value of those assets. We seem to skim the surface, looking only at the familiar or the apparently relevant. This lapse is systemic, and it is personal. How many employees feel that their immediate manager undervalues them, dismisses their not- immediately-applicable qualities and experiences, and looks only at their immediate field of expertise? How many of us can remember all the stuff that our direct reports put on their resumes back when we hired them? And anyone applying for a job has only a couple of pages in which to describe their qualifications, so usually leaves out the rest of the iceberg anyway.

We will pay a couple of hundred dollars for a royalty-free stock photo, or we'll lay out a couple of thousand to commission a photographer to shoot something specific for us. But how many gifted photographers are there already on the payroll? How many musicians, artists, writers, linguists, web-designers, technicians, videographers are hiding within the mild-mannered accountants and call-center staff? And if we are looking for management or marketing or leadership, how many experienced and passionate community leaders, volunteers, mentors, lobbyists, activists, organizers, are secretly leading double lives as programmers or line workers?

Seems to me that, without invading anyone's privacy, some of the emergent social networking tools might help a company find out what kind of resources it REALLY has at its disposal.

Writing skills training

If you need help with this, I suggest you contact CDI (Communications Development Inc.)-- Brad Olander is the person to talk with (tel. 202.721.0350 ). CDI is a very competent and experienced group specializing in training report writers in clarity and structure. They do classroom work and have something online as well. They do a lot of work for operations like the World Bank, and they are local to the DC area.

Blogs and RSS

Like most things these days, the blog is not a static beast -- the ways the tools are used are evolving all the time, and one year from now today's blogs will probably look quaint.

There are lots of places to go to get started, and the blognoscenti provide plenty of links. A good basic RSS streamer that can get you up and running in minutes is Amphetadesk.

Download it for free

Training Haiku

Several years ago, someone ran a competition for "haiku computer error messages" that produced some real gems that I still remember:

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that

Everything is gone;
Your life's work has been destroyed.
Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?

It would be fascinating to see some training/learning/development/OD/PIC haiku.

Learning is asking.
Which wrench is the right one
to hammer in the nail?

Blogs and RSS

many of the concepts and functionality that enable blogging have been around in one form or another for a long time.

What may be new, though perhaps not revolutionary, in the context of "knowledge power" is the ease with which blogs allow ordinary human beings (hopefully with real knowledge and experience) to publish their thinking to a broad audience. You don't need to be an HTML expert or a Webmaster or a content management guru or a geek of any kind to get your ideas out there in, literally, minutes. This is what good technology should be like - invisible to the user.

The added benefit of RSS is that if you want to benefit from the fresh content of a particular blogger without going to his/her site several times a day, your RSS feed will bring you the updates. You can also use RSS as a kind of always-on search engine which looks for new dynamically-served stuff inside all the RSS-equipped blogs on the Web, and serves it to you when available. Ordinary search engines are really poor at finding dynamic content, really slow to acknowledge it, and quite hopeless at making it readily available.

Surviving info explosion: Journalism, blogs, and workplace learning

Journalism and T&D both ride the same wave. Both try to gain clarity in their field of knowledge, which is an increasingly difficult thing to do. The explosion of knowledge (yes, much of it junk info) is a phenomenon that trainers, learners, and journalists have to find ways to filter. Learners often turn to trainers to help them stay ahead of their game, not only in providing relevant raw knowledge but also in helping to learn how to apply it in the development of skills.

The information explosion is not a myth. According to a UC Berkley study published last year, more information has been produced in the past five years than in the total of all of previous human history. An Exabyte is a billion Gigabytes. We produced 23 Exabytes of new information in 2002 -- double that produced three years earlier. That's 3.6 Gigabytes per person per year. Much of it is fog, much is ephemeral and never stored, and a big chunk of it (400,000 Terabytes in 2002, or 40 times the Library of Congress print collection) is in e-mail, and nearly as much again is in Instant Messaging. Even looking at more 'solid' information (that actually stored in some medium or other), in 2002 we produced 800 Megabytes per member of the human race.

While blogs add to the fog, many also cut through it. Journalists are supposed to highlight relevant important information, provide analysis and tell us what it means, and (sometimes) what we should do about it or how we can apply it. Trainers, in a corporate world beset by rolling change, are often expected to play a similar role. I wonder, though, about the role of educators. Should not one of our educational priorities be to teach people how to deal with this information explosion, how to learn at an accelerating pace for life? Or should we be teaching people to STOP PRODUCING ALL THIS STUFF.

As an aside, and not wishing to be too Zen, if I write a blog and nobody reads it, does it really exist as information?

I'm going to buy stock in Johnson & Johnson, or whoever it is that makes Tylenol.

Blogs - what's the big deal?

Some see blogs as no different from personal Websites, and decry their textiness. Blogs are not Web sites, communities, FAQ boards or newsgroups. They are a little different in many respects. They may be fads in that the way Web-log tools are typically invoked today is unikely to be the way they are invoked tomorrow. But these days the capacity for rapid evolution is a key to viability. The inherent contradiction of techno-fads is that built-in rapid-redundancy is how they stay alive.

And don't knock text on the Internet. E-mail (text) is still the biggest single application of the Internet. Text in books, newspapers, and magazines is still quite common too, and most of us do not refuse to read a book because it has no pictures. Text may not be cool, but it's a pretty good tool for communication.

People will read what appeals to them. If a blog is unsophisticated and tries to target a sophisticated audience, it's not going to get much traffic. And, as with anything you see on the Web, read in your local newspaper, or hear on a press conference, you have to be ready to use your own cr@p-detector.

As a 'serious journalist' (i.e. one who makes a living primarily from traditional media), John Dvorak's perspective on blogs is bound to be a little patronising, or even defensive. But, apart from the masses who put up short-lived vanity blogs (e.g. those that publish their own poetry), Dvorak acknowledges that there are some very useful blogs around in the public domain. Closed-group corporate blogs are even more relevant and useful, but you are not likely to ever get access to them.

Technology and training

New technologies are being used in T&D, but like most technologies they are used to a fraction of their true potential. I don't mean that the "obvious" and simplistic application of the technologies should be more widespread (heaven forbid), but that vastly more creative or intensive intelligent application of existing technologies is possible. "E-learning" on the whole is regarded as pretty dire not because of technology but because it is all too often invoked in an uninspired mundane or lazy fashion. We are awe-struck by new things, get slightly more familiar with them, then don't want to venture beyond that comfort zone. Look at e-mail or blogs: the technologies that deliver them are capable of much more sophisticated, friendly, user-focused communication, yet we are content to live with "this".

Mobile Internet access, particularly cell-phones, excite me. Anytime anywhere used to mean anytime you were at a computer linked by a dial-up modem to an ISP. Now it means while standing in line at the post office. What we DO with that connectedness is a blank slate. I have a personal interest in the use of the Internet as one of the tools to help economic development in Africa, a notoriously infrastructure-devoid part of the world. The 1990's concept of the Internet assumed desktop computers linked to landlines or cables, few of which exist in Africa. But cellphones are much more widespread and affordable. A "computer" is no longer a gray box on a desk -- it's a cellphone or something like it. And the Internet is not restricted by wires -- it's in the air around us. The implications for education, teacher training, teaching support, small business development and so on are significant.

In the context of learning, and using 'product' loosely, I'd say the exploitation of data-mining and search technologies is the most under-rated product today. Even in e- commerce it is not used anywhere near its potential. We mine lead and cast dull gray ingots. It is still a primary industry. We have the potential to know so much more about individuals and their interests or abilities and to respond much more acutely. Yet we continue to ask the wrong questions, aggregate the answers, and McDonaldize our deliverables.

Some of the most important skills a trainer can have today are the ability to transcend yourself and appreciate and respond to the contexts and concerns of others; the ability to rapidly unlearn or discard that with which you are comfortable; and the ability to learn or adopt or invent new things: concepts, attitudes, processes, methodologies, paradigms, cultures, contexts. Vital also are the judgment to know the difference between a fad of no real value and important new thinking, and the ability to appreciate that the fad often has a longer half-life than the significant evolution.

Values as a trainer?

I don't think your honesty and integrity as a trainer are bent by the profession you come from, though they may have a bearing on the profession you choose.

I have to say that in my experience some of the best trainers (and the most honest) are those with “real-world” experience outside of their training experience. Seasoned practitioners, subject matter experts, or those who have recently completed their own training, are often very astute, very learner-aware, very passionate, and very attuned to the context of their teaching.

I have spent twenty five years in training and development (in one way or another), but I am a marketing professional and always will be. I got into training largely I think by accident, out of a passion for the relevant subject matter and extreme irritation at the way it was a) taught by the training professionals and b) practiced by the practitioners. So I suspect there is lurking within this unassuming exterior a crusading evangelist somewhat obsessed with impacting actual real-world performance.

I first put on a trainer's hat while I was still an idealistic business student -- as head of AIESEC South Africa, I had a mission to improve the relevance and quality of business education in universities throughout the region. When I started a real job as a market research analyst/consultant with A.C. Nielsen, I found myself teaching my peers how to do a more valuable job for their clients, which led to me teaching analytical marketing to Nielsen clients like Unilever and Revlon, which led me to become education director for the South African Market Research Association and to found and run an industry certification program.. At the same time, my passion for doing my job -- sales and customer service -- got me into teaching my colleagues basic skills such as presentations, sales, and consulting. Some major OD work resulted from that, which got me transferred to running Nielsen's international management services center to replicate the work world-wide. Since then I have run my own training/consulting/OD businesses in various parts of the world, focusing mainly on sales, marketing, and technology.

All of which background poses the question: am I a trainer or a consultant? Or am I a salesperson, or a marketer, or a researcher, or an entrepreneur? And does it matter? I believe I approach my work with a level of customer- focus, diligence and integrity that is unusual among “training vendors” and my clients would agree. I think I was born and raised to be that way. But, if my lifetime in consultative selling has influenced me, it has amplified – not diminished – my integrity.

Boring PowerPoint? Blame not the tool.

It's not PowerPoint or the blue background that causes slumber, but badly structured, poorly communicated content that may in itself be of little value to the audience. Why we prefer to blame the tool rather than the presenter's inept use of it is beyond me.

We have all read (or partially read) many really badly written books, books with poorly structured content, books that are simply uninspired. But you don't hear people say that books are dull, or snicker about the narcotic effect of black text on white paper. Except perhaps in the context of e-learning where "page turner" has acquired a meaning quite the opposite of its meaning in a book context.

Global villages and global conflict

Marshall McLuhan "global village" has not happened as he envisaged. Where's the homogenization of cultures and values that was supposed to happen with the globalization of knowledge?

This has not happened, nor will it, partly because knowledge in itself is impotent without context, and geographical/cultural contexts are enormously diverse. Global knowledge is interpreted in a local context, and its meaning changes accordingly. So cultures become enriched and further evolve down their path, rather than mutating to mimic the source of the knowledge. (This is one of the challenges of e-learning -- while many vendors like to chant the trite cliché that content is king, without an acknowledgement of context the learning will often be ineffective, or at least may achieve results that diverge from those intended).

What is also happening, though, is that the globalization of knowledge (despite attempts to manipulate mass media) is causing individuals, groups, and movements to be smarter and more aware of their context in relation to the rest of the world. This not only reinforces a sense of unique identity, it brings about an (often subconscious) evaluation of their satisfaction with the status quo. You can't covet your neighbor's cow if you don't know he has a cow, if you don't know what a cow is, or if you don't know who your neighbor is. You can't think of yourself as materially better off than or morally superior to a foreigner if you have no idea what that foreigner's circumstances are. You can't comprehend the extent of your oppression or freedom, wealth or poverty, unless you are aware of alternatives to your condition. So, far from bringing about global harmony and homogenization, global knowledge can bring about increasing tensions within and between different cultures.

Anti-American protesters often wear US-iconed clothing, and feel no contradiction. We see the irony because from our perspective foreigners should not be allowed to reject an American policy without rejecting all other things American. In our simplistic view of the outside world, anyone who embraces one aspect of our culture while rejecting another cannot be taken seriously. The demonstrator sees no irony because in his context there is none. Lots of kid's who demonstrate against "America" are more sophisticated than we give them credit for -- or at least they are able to differentiate between the issues that they protest and the things that they like or respect. If kids in America protested something that the US administration was doing, would they have more credibility if they boycotted American goods and services too? I think not.

Culture and technology adoption

The adaptation and frequency of use of various technologies is based to a great extent on national cultural factors. But I think that while adoption of a technology may -- at times -- be ubiquitous across all members of a national culture, it's intensity of use is often very sporadic, with "power usage" being limited to a few demo/psychographic groups. In the US we all have microwave ovens, but I am willing to bet there are very few "power users" of them. We all have cell phones, but only certain segments of the population use SMS "texting" with any level of comfort. We all have the potential to IM, but some use it constantly, others turn it off. We all have VCR's but many of us can't even program them to record. It seems that everyone has an SUV, yet nobody ever goes off-road.. In the US at least, the national culture is often "gotta have it" rather than "gotta use it"; we consume the tools but not their applications.

It is true that corporate culture, when exported, often does not overcome local culture. Where I have found corporate cultures that appear partially at odds with (my perception of) local culture, it has rarely been because of some value system or behavior norms exported by a foreign parent. More often, it has been a strong set of norms inculcated within a company by one or more strong, influential leaders and his/her acolytes. Corporate culture is based on a bottom-up foundation, but it is molded by top-down examples. Respect for punctuality and respect for those whose time you waste when not punctual is either a strongly manifested corporate value or it is not -- no matter where in the world you may be.

Culture and punctuality

I have found in most cultures (including the US) that time has different states of focus depending on context. In group social engagements, unless there is an external delimiter (such as the movie starts at 3:00), the focus is very fuzzy -- nobody shows up at 8:00 sharp for a party. In one-on-one social engagements, the focus tends to be a little sharper depending on circumstances. In one-to-one or one-to-many business engagements, the "one" in the driving seat tends to have a much sharper focus than do individual members of the "many" -- a trainer likes to start on time, but the trainees are late; a salesperson likes to be punctual, but the potential buyer(s) have no problem keeping him/her waiting.

Our perceptions of what is "normal" behavior are determined by the habits of our most familiar peer groups. Over the years I have done a lot of work in various Latin American and Asian countries, South Africa, and most of Europe. In a business meeting context, the sensitivity to punctuality is always less cultural than contextual. And within that context you cannot make sweeping statements about national cultural attitudes to time because corporate culture plays a major role in guiding those attitudes. There are a couple of companies that I have worked with in Mexico and Brazil where I am always the last to arrive at a meeting that I am running. Conversely, there are companies in the US and UK where I have given up expecting more than 50% of participants to be punctual, and where participants come and go at will throughout the meeting. Generation and social set also plays into time consciousness. The post-MTV perpetually-looping CNN mode of communication has produced some people who have not only a limited attention span, but who assume that there IS no beginning or end, and believe they can always catch up no matter where they start or how often they get distracted. That fragmentation of attention span seems to be getting worse with the advent of SMS.

Is Internet time overwhelming national culture? As with the CNN comment above, I don't see it on a national scale. The digital divide (if we think of it in terms of those who have embraced connectedness v. those who just get by) is just getting wider. True, "smart mobs" can coalesce and disperse with split second precision. But these are funky folks on the fringe, not mainstream people. What may become more pervasive, particularly as mobile phones become smarter, is a blurring of the line that separates "presence" from "absence". Perhaps technology will be used to inflict punctuality -- you have an electronic window of opportunity to enter this meeting and if you miss it the virtual doors will be closed on you. Or perhaps the technology will make "punctuality" an unnecessary outmoded concept.