Face-to-face, e-learning, mobile learning, web-based classes. Which is best? Is there a definitive answer?

One of my favourite bits of research into learning goes back to 1947. It was conducted by Hall and Cushing for the US Army. 

There was a feeling at the time that film was the 'big new thing' and that this would surely teach people better than classroom instruction. So the army set up some research to find out. 

They set up a very thorough comparative study using film for one group of students and classroom instruction for another and tested both groups at the end. The results? No difference in learning between the two groups! 

Numerous studies since have shown that it's really not about one medium being better than another it's typically all about three things: modes, methods and instructional design. Get these right and the learning happens, regardless of the delivery medium. 

Here's the briefest of explanations of each of those three elements:

Modes 

Whatever your medium, you will use some combination of text, audio and visuals - either still or animated. These are your communication modes. There's been plenty of research done on how best to use each of these modes to promote learning. 

Methods 

These are the examples and practice activities that lead to learning. If well-crafted and thought through, they will support the mental processing learners need to do to help embed new information and skills effectively. 

Instructional design 

This really is the blueprint for your learning that captures the sequence and type of content and activities that will make up the finished course or module. 

So on the path to building expertise through effective learning, it's not so much the medium, but the best mix of modes, methods and design that will help you achieve your goals and outcomes.

Getting started with designing courses or feel like you need to strengthen your underpinning knowledge about all this? Our free Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Instructional Design Success is a great starting point.

You know the old adage. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

Brutal? You bet. Eight short words that devastate. Teaching, training, learning (whatever you call it) is a waste of space. Anyone involved in it, is a second-rate loser.

Unfortunately, those eight short words contain some truth. Look at secondary education. Why are good schools so over-subscribed? Because there are too many failing ones, chock full of teachers who are - well, not very effective.

Higher education is not that different. It may be overflowing with clever people. But they are often clueless about how to transfer their knowledge and skills effectively.

And look at the world of work. Plenty of dreadful second-rate training going on there - frequently delivered by subject matter experts who know their stuff - but have no idea how to teach it effectively.

Of course, it’s not all bad. But far too much of it is. And there’s a theme. Lots of clever people. Mostly eager to share their knowledge and skills. Unclear about how to do it effectively. They use a broken model, developed a long time ago, for a very different world.

It’s a model which should’ve been consigned to the rubbish heap long ago. But it’s a model that just doesn’t seem to die. What am I talking about? Good old chalk and talk. Or perhaps more accurately in the 21st century, PowerPoint and talk.

Why this model persists is a mystery. We know more about how to transfer knowledge and skills effectively than we ever did. We have the technology to make this happen more quickly and effectively than ever before. Yet we still struggle along using 19th century methods of teaching and learning.

Here's the real problem. Subject matter experts thinking teaching is about helping people know lots of stuff. Learners usually need to learn to do lots of stuff. And that provides a clue to the problem. Because there's a huge mismatch between the focus of most learning events: all about knowing; and the needs of the learners: more about doing.

And the key to re-aligning that mismatch? Meaningful practice.

Which raises the question, why is meaningful practice so absent from so much learning? Because it's hard to do well, if you don't know how. Faced with the challenge, subject matter experts in particular tend to side-step the problem completely. Much easier to throw a bunch of PowerPoint slides together and talk about them - at length.

And why do lots of people involved with training find it hard to create meaningful practice? Because they are largely unaware of instructional design. The very guidelines, principles and techniques that would help them to create learning that has meaningful practice at its heart.

If teaching or training is something you’re about to get involved with and you were thinking about using the PowerPoint and talk model; or, if you’ve been ‘PowerPoint and talking’ for a while now, there is an alternative way ahead.

Our Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Instructional Design Success can’t teach you everything you need to know about instructional design in a dozen or so pages.

What it can do is to set you on that alternative path. Steer you away from PowerPoint and talk. Guide you towards a better way of transferring knowledge and skills. Help turn your teaching, training or learning into something your learners look forward to, because they know it works.

Get your free copy.

When developing learning materials, most instructional designers and trainers rarely give much thought to how they use visuals and graphics. Typically, they just add them as a way to liven up dull looking text. 

In contrast, as most graphic designers know well, there is an entire vocabulary and language connected with the use of visuals. This is something rarely included as part of conventional instructional design training. A pity, because it is a language which instructional designers and trainers would get a great deal of benefit from knowing.

If you are interested in learning more about the language of visuals, as good a starting point as any is an understanding of the five instructional functions for graphics. These functional categories are as follows:

Decorative visuals: used to make instruction more appealing and motivating. They typically do not have a strong association with the instructional content. Interestingly, in a study of sixth grade science textbooks in the US, Richard Mayer found that over 85% of graphics fell into the decorative category.

This statistic seems to support the view expressed in the opening of this article - that many instructional designers (and text book publishers) pay little attention to the significance of visuals and graphics. In the light of this finding, it’s probably fair to say that decorative graphics should be used with caution.

Representative visuals: used to make information more concrete. They convey information quickly and easily, reducing the need for lengthy textual explanation.

Organisational visuals: help learners understand the structure, sequence and hierarchy of information and help people integrate that into their existing knowledge. Examples include charts, graphs and displays that help people see relationships between elements.

Interpretive visuals: used to help learners understand difficult and ambiguous or abstract content. In general, they help make information more comprehensible. Examples include models of systems and diagrams of processes.

Transformative visuals: used to make information more memorable. They are intended to aid learners' thought processes. They focus more on helping the learner understand than on presenting content. Transformative visuals can be a little unconventional and because of this are not widely found in learning materials.

In conclusion, we've all heard the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words". And many people accept this wisdom without question. 

In fact, just because something is communicated visually doesn't necessarily make it more valid or easier to understand. A poorly designed visual or graphic could just as easily impede learning as facilitate it. 

Indeed, a poorly designed graphic where the purpose and instructional function are mismatched might need a thousand words to help explain it clearly to learners.

Looking for e-learning software or e-learning authoring tools, can be a pretty time-consuming process. There are many tools out there, and nowadays most of them are pretty sophisticated. 

Apart from the obvious criteria of budget, it can be hard to know how to choose. As I noted in a previous post, focusing relentlessly on feature comparison of selected tools is not necessarily going to get you anything other than a headache!

Let’s be clear, understanding the features and capabilities of the authoring tool you ultimately choose is a very important part of the selection process; but it’s not the only part.

Here are some more tips for avoiding ‘feature-itis’. They apply to both businesses and individuals and are particularly pertinent to anyone looking at using e-learning software for the first time.

1. Consider who in the organisation will be using the software

I’ve already mentioned that most e-learning authoring tools are pretty sophisticated and many offer a very similar feature set. But not all are created equal when it comes to user interface and general ease-of-use.

I won’t name names but I can think of several tools which all more or less offer the same features. Yet the experience of  using them can be like the difference between night and day.

Why is this important? If your users are hard-core techies who work out how to use whatever you throw at them, this isn’t a particular issue (although in my experience even hard-core techies appreciate a good user interface).

But if you r users are less technically adept, a poorly designed piece of development software could dramatically slow development, de-motivate users and cost you a good deal of extra time and money in remedial coaching and training. 

2. Know your initial instructional design capabilities

Everyone in the e-learning and training world claims to be an expert in instructional design. Yet if this were true, we’d only ever attend fantastically useful training courses or take brilliantly developed e-learning modules.

The reality is very different.

We’ve all been on (or taken) far too many mediocre courses and e-learning modules. So honestly, how good are your instructional design skills? Are you truly original, creative and forward-thinking and, therefore, looking for software that will enable you to push the envelope?

Or are you a little unsure of what e-learning development requires from you and, therefore, need software that in the early stages of use might provide a bit of structure or support before you spread your instructional design wings and get more creative?

Looking for help using Articulate Storyline? Check out our available course options.

When you are designing learning (regardless of the delivery medium) key to success is an understanding of how adults actually process new information and, therefore, acquire new knowledge and skills.

Different instructional design experts use slightly different ways to describe the basic knowledge transfer process, but when you are thinking about in-person training in essence it boils down to three broad stages.

Typically, at the start of this process is the presentation stage. This is when the trainer is introducing new or partially familiar knowledge and/or skills to the learners. Ideally, this is done through a familiar and meaningful context, rather than in a dry, abstract way. Once the trainer has carried out some basic checks to ensure learners have grasped the new information, the transfer process quickly moves to stage two.

Here, learners are given the opportunity to practice what they have just learnt in a structured environment. During this phase, the learners might take part in one or several activities - depending on the level of difficulty and how much need they have for initial practice. 

Once the structured practice is complete and the learners have grasped the basics, it is time to move to the final stage - more spontaneous practice. Here, learners are encouraged to use their newly embedded skills and knowledge with less structure provided. Ideally, this stage will use a context and activity that is both relevant and motivating to the learners.

Overall, the three stages move from a very teacher or trainer centred starting point through to a highly learner-centred one - where the trainer can take a back seat, observe the learning in action and provide feedback at the very end of the process.

One of the advantages of this broad approach is its flexibility and adaptability. You can vary the amount of structured and spontaneous practice you use based on the needs of your learners. 

You can increase or decrease the amount of feedback you provide based on the results you are seeing. This feedback can be adjusted during the structured and/or spontaneous practice stages. You could even add remedial structured or spontaneous practice at the end of the entire process, if you decide this is appropriate.

Additional flexibility is available to you with the sequence of stages. For example, you could use a structured practice activity as your starting point. This would enable you to diagnose existing knowledge and possible areas of difficulty before embarking on a customized presentation and follow-on practice activities.

Alternatively, with more experienced learners, you could turn the process on its head and start with a spontaneous practice activity to see how they cope. Following on from this, you can draw out learning points, leading you to structured practice (or additional spontaneous activities) for the purposes of revision or consolidation.

Understanding the significance of this flexible 'presentation, structured practice, spontaneous practice' model enables you to create effective learning events that help your learners to quickly acquire and embed new knowledge and skills.

Need help with instructional design for yourself or your team? As a starting point, why not download our free Essential Guide to Instructional Design Success.

There are plenty of websites and articles providing advice about how to assess and choose an e-learning authoring tool that’s right for you, your team or your organisation.

I’ve looked at many of them. One thing I've noticed time and time again? They only focus on comparing the software features of selected tools. Understanding the features and capabilities of the authoring tool you ultimately choose is hugely important; but it’s not the only consideration.

It’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. What about the people? What about the content you want to write and publish? These are all important elements that play a pivotal role in the development of e-learning. Elements that are easily forgotten in the rush to understand the detail of what a piece of software can or can’t do.

Leaving aside feature comparison, there are 3 broad areas you might want to focus on when you assess and select authoring tools: people and costs; content, design and quality; publication and distribution. In this blog post, I’ll cover just the first of these three points.

People and costs

A good starting point, clearly. Authoring tools vary so greatly in cost, that you need to be clear about what your limits are from the outset. At the very bottom end of the scale, you could go free or spend under a £100 on a single copy of a desktop tool; at the high end you could pay as much as £100,000 a year for a collaborative system available to hundreds of people.

Whatever your starting budget, is there some flexibility in what you can spend? I ask this because as you assess your requirements you may find you need something more than your original budget can handle. Equally, you could start off thinking you’ll need something sophisticated and expensive, only to discover less is more.

Some authoring tools are available by annual subscription (as opposed to owning the software outright). As a rule of thumb, subscription models tend to be more attractive to teams with bigger budgets, while standalone desktop tools are more attractive to individuals and small teams. There are pros and cons to both models but both are valid ways of getting hold of what you need.

Who's involved? This is a critical question. You need to take a couple of things into account. First, what job roles will be included as part of your team. Will it just be just instructional designers or will you have a range of other roles, and therefore, skills? 

Will the people using the tool be adept at learning it or are they going to need quite a lot of training and coaching? Are they the kind of people who embrace change and new ways of working or will there be an uphill struggle to get them involved? Finally, will you have the resource and budget to provide technical support to your team if needed?

Will people developing the learning be experts in the subject matter or will they need to get this information from someone else? Do they have the right skills to do this? If they are the SMEs will you be in danger of getting a brain dump? In other words, do they understand the importance of audience analysis and shaping their content around the audience, rather than simply telling the audience everything they know?

Linked to this is the question of instructional design. Even if your SMEs are good at scoping content for their intended audience, do they understand the importance of good instructional design and the specific do’s and don’ts that apply to e-learning?

If you are new to e-learning, you may have people brilliant at developing classroom courses, but no real experience of instructional design for e-learning. Some of their existing instructional design skills will be transferable, but their existing knowledge alone probably won’t be enough.

I know, the title sounds a bit dramatic, doesn’t it? But Tom Kuhlmann (who writes Tom's Blog for Articulate users) tells an inspiring story of a piece of e-learning created over a weekend. Rapid e-learning, indeed. 

And it was rapid with good reason. The company producing it had several manufacturing facilities working 24/7. On this particular weekend, there was a serious accident at one of the facilities and an employee died. 

The safety team (of two) quickly got to work, creating pieces of content (including video footage), to highlight the sequence of events that led to the loss of life and remind people of the safety rules they needed to follow to avoid a recurrence. 

12 hours later, the site safety manager had pulled this all together into a piece of refresher e-learning, distributed to all manufacturing facilities across the company. 

Imagine how long that could've taken with the involvement of a large, corporate e-learning development team?

The final output from the site safety manager may not have been perfect, but it met the organisation's needs at a critical moment.

This story brings home a hugely important point it's easy to forget - especially if you work in a large organisation

Organisations are not interested in creating a piece of e-learning, per se, but in meeting a specific organisational goal. E-learning is simply one way of helping achieve that goal. 

So at the very start of your e-learning development process, it's always a good idea to step away from the solution and focus on the organisational goal. This gives you the opportunity to assess the best learning solution to meet the goal. 

This simple assessment can potentially save you many hours of wasted effort and many thousands of pounds of mis-directed budget.  Use your resources as and when appropriate. Not all pieces of learning need to be created equal!

If you need help with designing your e-learning, check out our e-learning design options.

If you are an L&D manager or L&D team member, you’ll probably get bombarded with requests for training week in and week out.

If your L&D function is well-positioned and well-respected, then you’ll almost certainly be in a position to do some analysis before you simply acquiesce to the training request ‘as is’.

And there’s a good reason for wanting to be in the position to do that analysis. Because in many cases when a request for training is received, a little digging reveals that a new piece of training is not the solution at all.

Here's an interesting situation that we encountered quite a while ago that neatly illustrates the point. 

An airline wanted some e-learning to cover pre-flight safety checks and procedures for its cabin crew. They wanted the e-learning to be engaging, they said.

A little digging in the early stages of the project revealed the following.

The checks and procedures were slightly different for each type of plane the airline used. As cabin crew would fly on a variety of planes and might not be on a particular model of plane for several months at a time, it was unlikely they’d recall all the variations without a prompt. 

Nothing in the checks or procedures was particularly complicated. Everything the cabin crew needed to know and do was clearly and throughly documented already in a paper-based manual. They were supposed to carry this with them whenever they were on a flight.

Turns out many of them didn't. It was heavy. People didn't like carrying it. Some supervisors had stopped carrying theirs. So subordinates took their cue from their supervisors and stopped carrying theirs, too.

Over time, with no manual to refer to and to jog their memory, the checks and procedures were being carried out from memory and were not always being completed fully or accurately. 

The procedures within the existing manual were clear, concise and easy to follow. But the existing means of delivery (a big heavy manual) was clearly not working. However, the proposed solution was not much better. Starting up a laptop or tablet, firing up an e-learning programme and navigating to the correct place in the course to find the information you needed is hardly a frictionless approach.

In reality, this was a performance support issue. The solution lay in finding the simplest and least cumbersome way to provide those existing procedure steps to the cabin crew, in the moment of need.

Not all e-learning is created equal, that's for sure. If you are a 'big guy' with a team of designers and developers and a fairly sizeable budget, the e-learning you produce will look markedly different from the courses produced by a team of two with an authoring tool and not much else.

If you're the team of two (and that's much more typical that you'd imagine), it might not feel ideal. But, in fact, with good instructional design approaches, the team of two are just as capable of producing really effective e-learning as the big guy.

(And let's not forget, the big guys get so distracted by all the clever things they can do, they frequently end up creating a flashy looking course that seems impressive, but is largely ineffective).

Regardless of your available resources or the size of your team, the most important question for everyone developing e-learning - what are you wanting to achieve with your course?

Once again, not all courses are created equal. If you need to make a big difference to some aspect of your organisation's performance, the kind of course you create will need to be different from the one that is just updating people on changes to their working conditions.

The former is about changing behaviour and thinking. The latter is about sharing information. Which brings us to that all-important distinction that many e-learning courses fail to make: inform or perform.

It seems like a simple enough distinction but it's one that, in my experience, is largely forgotten or side-stepped. And there's good reason for this. Because if your e-learning really, truly needs to focus on perform, it raises a whole host of difficulties. 

Creating perform e-learning is a real challenge. Thinking of ways to develop practice activities that move beyond predictable multiple-choice and true-false questions is hard. Especially hard with a basic authoring tool - but still problematic even with a high-end one

And if your development tool really is basic, your budget and resources really limited and your timelines ridiculously short, then the challenge you face is even greater still.

No surprise then that many people just throw in the towel at this point and go the conventional route - creating boring slides of content with a few tests and quizzes added along the way.

If you then throw into the mix, subject matter experts with no previous experience of developing e-learning, deathly dull, page-turners are almost inevitable.

A conventional approach might tick some boxes somewhere and satisfy the bean counters, but it's pretty much a disaster for the learners. Time and again, they are desperately in need of a course which helps them improve their performance, but they end up with something that just gives them lots of information. 

So when you know your focus needs to be on perform, but you are tempted to just inform, you really need some kind of instructional design framework to guide you through. 

A simple framework can shift you away from the default  present-then-test approach that most people take and that most authoring tools push you towards. It can focus you in a different, more task-focused direction. 

Even if you are stuck with a very basic authoring tool, an instructional design framework can help you think imaginatively about how to harness the capabilities of your authoring tool to create more authentic, job-realistic practice activities.

An instructional design framework isn't like a magic wand that you can wave at your content and your learners to miraculously solve all your e-learning problems. Applying a framework successfully requires some effort. You'll be finding ways to balance the needs of the learners against the limitations of your authoring tool, your own skills and available resources. 

You'll almost certainly pursue a few ideas that lead nowhere. And you'll probably experience a few false 'eureka' moments. But it's almost always worth it. Because in the end, the result is a more-effective, more learner-centred approach. 

If you'd like to find out more about a simple but highly effective instructional design framework you can apply to your e-learning, take a look at our Effective E-Learning Toolkit.

You might not be 10,000 miles away in the jungle. But maybe you feel like you've just been landed with your very own training version of a bush tucker trial.

The one where they call you into their office and tell you the 'good' news. The news that starting next month, they're going to begin moving some of your training courses to e-learning.

And the 'even better' news? They won't be making you redundant, but they will be expecting you to systematically turn your classroom courses into e-learning ones.

And probably after that, you didn't hear much else. All the corporate L&D speak about the benefits, the technology and the systems. All just background noise, as your heart pounded and your head throbbed and you broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about the prospect of suddenly becoming an e-learning designer.

When you are faced with a 360 shift in your world like that one, what do you do? Where do you begin? 

Without question, you have to think differently. A new start. A new paradigm. Trying to take the classroom skills you've honed for years and graft them onto a computer screen simply won't work. And in your heart of hearts you know this.

You've sat in front of those deathly dull e-learning courses that page turn their way like a user manual. The ones where they sometimes have you dragging things pointlessly across the screen. And set you insultingly stupid quizzes and tests every 10th screen. 

So where do you start? To begin with forget about content. Sounds crazy, but it's not. You must shift from thinking about content first to thinking about context first. This is your new starting point. Where your learners are at. Their reality. Their environment. 

This is the key shift in your thinking that will grab their attention. This is the key shift in your approach that will draw them in. This is the key shift in your learning design that will help them practice and retain new knowledge and skills.

This is the shift that will break you free of the boring e-learning so many of us have been subjected to, for far too long.

Need some help with the transition to designing for e-learning or remote learning? Take a look at our instructional design training options.