If you’ve been involved in L&D for any length of time, you’ll almost certainly have had one of those conversations with a new convert to e-learning.
Given how long the medium has been knocking around now, it always surprises me that there are candidates still available to be newly converted. But there are.
Their fresh-faced enthusiasm is usually because they’ve been sold on a couple of benefits: speed of development and anytime, any device delivery. On the first of those two points, authoring tool vendors tend to be shockers when in marketing mode. they have to sell their wares, so you can see why they focus on speed as a benefit of buying their product.
But really, this is so untrue. If you are creating anything in an e-learning authoring tool that is going to be useful or worthwhile, it will always take you a significant chunk of time.
If the fresh-face converts have bean-counter tendencies, they my also be licking their lips at the prospect of saving vast amounts of money by going down the e-learning path. Forgive me for sitting in the corner, laughing cynically whenever I hear that one.
The old saying, “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is”, springs to mind here.
So much for the expectation. What about the reality?
It’s definitely possible (and desirable) to be smart about your e-learning design and development approaches and processes. But as just noted above, the development side is never as fast and easy as the technology providers would have you believe.
As for the anytime, any device mantra, the “build it and they will come” principle rarely applies.
If you are pushing out boring, knowledge-heavy, ‘PowerPoint on steroids’ type courses, then it's quite likely that only compulsion will drive learner uptake. As John Medina rightly points out in his book ‘Brain Rules’, our brains don’t pay much attention to 'boring'.
If you would like to escape the grind of churning out boring e-learning, then start by taking stock of your current situation with our Discover Your E-Learning Impact Scorecard. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete and you'll get personalised feedback almost instantly.
