I read a very interesting article in CIO Insight magazine, April 2005, titled “Hide and Seek.” It only goes to reinforce all the other information we are seeing these days about the struggle to find and leverage corporate IP. Again, “...over 80% of corporate data is ‘unstructured,’ or does not reside in an indexed, organized, or easily searchable database.”
Quoting the executive director of knowledge transfer (nice to know such a job exists!) at QCSI, a medium-sized software development company: “About 90% of the company’s information resided in the heads of about 10 percent of out workforce.” The term that comes to mind here is "Knowledge on the Hoof." Maybe the 1950's TV character Rowdy Yates is the appropriate metaphor for the learning manager of the future. The cattle are going to move wherever the grass is greener, whether you're there or not--so you might as well be there to facilitate their movement in a direction that maximizes financial gain at the end of the trail. Keep them doggies rollin', rawhide!
Estimates from companies larger than QCSI stay closer to the 80/20 rule, but the point is still well taken—organizational IP is isolated (trapped!) and can’t be readily accessed by others who need it, let alone leveraged by the enterprise for competitive advantage. This knowledge transfer director went on to describe the search solution his company developed, and proudly reported “...the search application saves each employee 20 minutes per day, which translates into roughly 150 hours of freed-up time per week, companywide. That’s big bucks.” Sounds to me like this company has its priorities straight and is making good progress--while the rest of the industry is focused on training. When QCSI goes public, I'm going to invest.
My conclusion? Either a number of people have started drinking the same Kool-Aid recently, or there is a growing consensus around two points: the most important corporate knowledge is currently inaccessible (since it's on the hoof), and people waste a heck of a lot of expensive time trying to find what they need know--and are operating in the dark at least half the time.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
So Much Knowledge, So Hard to Find
A couple of more informal learning factoids came to my attention this week. One major tech company I work with estimates that "E-mail 'noise' results in $60M productivity loss" annually. As an example of people's desperate need to transfer knowledge within organizations, this same company says they have over 60,000 email aliases in their email system and sales people subscribe to 30-60 on average. Holy smokes! Imagine the hit to sales productivity if sales people are spending that amount of time managing their email to try to keep current with the knowledge they need to do their jobs.
In a study conducted by BAE Systems, they estimate that 80% of employees waste on average 30 minutes per day retrieving information. That's over two full work weeks each year per person. At a very conservative $30/hour salary for a typical knowledge worker (burdened cost is much higher), that would equate to a $13,500,000 cost per year for a 5,000 person company. That ain't peanuts, and it's probably a significant underestimation if we reflect on the previously cited IDC study. Again, IDC estimates that knowledge workers "spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time." That equates to at least 45 minutes per day of wasted time per person desperately seeking needed information unsuccessfully. If IDC is correct, that would raise the cost for the 5,000 person company to $20M a year. Either way, the opportunity for improvement in increasing the efficiency of the average worker's and knowledge search and retrieval process is enormous. And just think what the real cost is if we consider the productivity impact is of people not being able to find what they need to know 50% of the time! That number would really be scary...
Part of the explanation for this is "Over 80% of a corporation's business critical information is locked in unstructured formats," according to a recent estimate by Forrester Research. No wonder people are having a hard time finding what they need--the important stuff isn't even available in a readily accessible format! So, the real challenges for us in the learning business are twofold: 1) how to make a company's "business critical information" (their corporate IP) available in an accessible format, and 2) how to increase the efficiency of the search and retrieval process. Making progress on those two fronts will be a significant step forward for workplace learning.
In a study conducted by BAE Systems, they estimate that 80% of employees waste on average 30 minutes per day retrieving information. That's over two full work weeks each year per person. At a very conservative $30/hour salary for a typical knowledge worker (burdened cost is much higher), that would equate to a $13,500,000 cost per year for a 5,000 person company. That ain't peanuts, and it's probably a significant underestimation if we reflect on the previously cited IDC study. Again, IDC estimates that knowledge workers "spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time." That equates to at least 45 minutes per day of wasted time per person desperately seeking needed information unsuccessfully. If IDC is correct, that would raise the cost for the 5,000 person company to $20M a year. Either way, the opportunity for improvement in increasing the efficiency of the average worker's and knowledge search and retrieval process is enormous. And just think what the real cost is if we consider the productivity impact is of people not being able to find what they need to know 50% of the time! That number would really be scary...
Part of the explanation for this is "Over 80% of a corporation's business critical information is locked in unstructured formats," according to a recent estimate by Forrester Research. No wonder people are having a hard time finding what they need--the important stuff isn't even available in a readily accessible format! So, the real challenges for us in the learning business are twofold: 1) how to make a company's "business critical information" (their corporate IP) available in an accessible format, and 2) how to increase the efficiency of the search and retrieval process. Making progress on those two fronts will be a significant step forward for workplace learning.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Formalizing Informal Learning?
I attended an on-line webinar sponsored by CLO magazine yesterday entitled, “Formalizing Informal Learning." One colleague of mine asked, why would you want to do that and another said/asked, isn’t that akin to organizing spontaneity? And the webinar was less than news worthy to boot. But, all of that aside, there was one interesting factoid I had never seen. Quoted from IDC, Analyze the Future:
“IDC research indicates that knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of the fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.”
Who knows how anyone quantifies such things, but the essence of it rings true to me. Informal learning is essential and inevitable and trying to formalize it past a point seems counterproductive and silly. But making it more efficient by providing more specific knowledge repositories and more precise tools to access them makes a lot of sense—and the payoff, in terms of increased productivity, would be enormous. There are practical ways to do that, and I'll get to them soon.
The same presenter also quoted a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics finding that 70% of workplace learning is informal and only 30% formal. Jay Cross and others quote the percentages as 80%-20%, and I would say in high-tech industries, it is more like 90%-10% informal to formal. But at least everyone seems to be in agreement about one thing--that formal is merely the tip of the workplace learning iceberg, with the vast majority lurking out of sight below the surface.
If anyone has more quotable factoids like the IDC and BLS reports, please share them--thanks!
“IDC research indicates that knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of the fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.”
Who knows how anyone quantifies such things, but the essence of it rings true to me. Informal learning is essential and inevitable and trying to formalize it past a point seems counterproductive and silly. But making it more efficient by providing more specific knowledge repositories and more precise tools to access them makes a lot of sense—and the payoff, in terms of increased productivity, would be enormous. There are practical ways to do that, and I'll get to them soon.
The same presenter also quoted a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics finding that 70% of workplace learning is informal and only 30% formal. Jay Cross and others quote the percentages as 80%-20%, and I would say in high-tech industries, it is more like 90%-10% informal to formal. But at least everyone seems to be in agreement about one thing--that formal is merely the tip of the workplace learning iceberg, with the vast majority lurking out of sight below the surface.
If anyone has more quotable factoids like the IDC and BLS reports, please share them--thanks!
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Disintermediation: Back to the Future
We must interrupt this Rapid eLearning blog at this time for a brief cliché, a theory, and a little historical perspective. The cliché: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Related to this is the theory of social progress that states that we really corkscrew through life, rather than advance in straight lines or vectors. Inherent in both is the observation that space and time turn back on themselves and that the past becomes relevant anew in changed circumstances. OK, what does this have to do with the future of workplace learning?
In the new circumstances in which we find ourselves (speed it king, knowledge is exploding, budgets are shrinking, etc.), disintermediation of the knowledge sharing process is paramount to success. Hence, the current obsession with Rapid eLearning. That is to say, we must once again create the shortest path between experts and learners to succeed in the marketplace. Once again? Yes, there once was a time when workplace learning was completely disintermediated. That was in the pre-industrial age when craftsmanship was predominant; when learners (apprentices) learned directly from subject matter experts (journey-level crafts people). In the apprenticeship model of learning, the learner, the expert, the learning, and doing the work were highly integrated. And key to success in that period was superior workmanship, not mass execution of repetitive tasks and mass production of identical products.
But that cozy relationship was not to last with the advent of the industrial revolution. The ‘dis-integration’ of work into repetitive tasks and the principle of division of labor were the fuel for industrialism. Since workers were no longer responsible for producing a completed products, but simply performing their tasks, individual responsibility was replaced with management in order to provide needed integration of all the tasks. In order to give workers the skills needed to perform their individual tasks, apprenticeship was replaced by training. And with training came a new group of workers whose job was no longer to actually do work or even manage work, but to instruct others how to do it. Industrial-era scalability required the disintegration of work, the division of labor, and the separation of learning from working.
But “times they are a changing.” Actually, times have already changed and we just need to wake to our new post-industrial reality. The United States has been transformed into the poster child for post-industrialism, and third world societies have been transforming themselves into the industrialists of the our times. Any repetitive tasks related to products that can be exported are being “off-shored” (we are already way beyond simple outsourcing). And what we are left with in our post-industrial economy are the tasks that cannot be readily off-shored. Invention, innovation, creation—in short, knowledge work.
And there’s the rub. We are still clinging to our industrial-era learning model, training, in our post-industrial world. By definition, whatever can be trained will be off-shored. The more efficient the training, the more rapidly the subject of the training can and will be off-shored. Training in a post-industrial economy is a facilitator of the inevitable—the transfer and loss of trainable jobs.
So where does that leave us? Back to the future, where we must once again disintermediate the learning and knowledge sharing process—where we must again unite experts with learners and learning the work with doing the work.
The job is now disseminating new knowledge more quickly so that it can be leveraged by other knowledge workers to facilitate ever-more-rapid innovation, invention, and creation. Today’s successful companies are knowledge factories, not production factories, where the product is knowledge itself. Successful companies of the future will manage their IP (intellectual property) as effectively as their predecessors managed their workers, inventories, and capital. They will be the companies that realize learning is their most essential business process and our job is to improve it.
In the new circumstances in which we find ourselves (speed it king, knowledge is exploding, budgets are shrinking, etc.), disintermediation of the knowledge sharing process is paramount to success. Hence, the current obsession with Rapid eLearning. That is to say, we must once again create the shortest path between experts and learners to succeed in the marketplace. Once again? Yes, there once was a time when workplace learning was completely disintermediated. That was in the pre-industrial age when craftsmanship was predominant; when learners (apprentices) learned directly from subject matter experts (journey-level crafts people). In the apprenticeship model of learning, the learner, the expert, the learning, and doing the work were highly integrated. And key to success in that period was superior workmanship, not mass execution of repetitive tasks and mass production of identical products.
But that cozy relationship was not to last with the advent of the industrial revolution. The ‘dis-integration’ of work into repetitive tasks and the principle of division of labor were the fuel for industrialism. Since workers were no longer responsible for producing a completed products, but simply performing their tasks, individual responsibility was replaced with management in order to provide needed integration of all the tasks. In order to give workers the skills needed to perform their individual tasks, apprenticeship was replaced by training. And with training came a new group of workers whose job was no longer to actually do work or even manage work, but to instruct others how to do it. Industrial-era scalability required the disintegration of work, the division of labor, and the separation of learning from working.
But “times they are a changing.” Actually, times have already changed and we just need to wake to our new post-industrial reality. The United States has been transformed into the poster child for post-industrialism, and third world societies have been transforming themselves into the industrialists of the our times. Any repetitive tasks related to products that can be exported are being “off-shored” (we are already way beyond simple outsourcing). And what we are left with in our post-industrial economy are the tasks that cannot be readily off-shored. Invention, innovation, creation—in short, knowledge work.
And there’s the rub. We are still clinging to our industrial-era learning model, training, in our post-industrial world. By definition, whatever can be trained will be off-shored. The more efficient the training, the more rapidly the subject of the training can and will be off-shored. Training in a post-industrial economy is a facilitator of the inevitable—the transfer and loss of trainable jobs.
So where does that leave us? Back to the future, where we must once again disintermediate the learning and knowledge sharing process—where we must again unite experts with learners and learning the work with doing the work.
The job is now disseminating new knowledge more quickly so that it can be leveraged by other knowledge workers to facilitate ever-more-rapid innovation, invention, and creation. Today’s successful companies are knowledge factories, not production factories, where the product is knowledge itself. Successful companies of the future will manage their IP (intellectual property) as effectively as their predecessors managed their workers, inventories, and capital. They will be the companies that realize learning is their most essential business process and our job is to improve it.
Friday, May 13, 2005
Disintermediate or Die!
A few more critical factoids are needed to round out the picture of where we have gone (wrong!) in our thinking and how we can get back “on message.” In the same “The Rapid eLearning Development Research Report,” produced by The eLearning Guild, they asked another important question: what are the content areas most likely to derive the greatest benefit from a rapid e-Learning development? Not surprisingly, training on products and technology led the pack with over 50% positive response. This category dwarfed the next highest, compliance training, which lagged far behind with only a 29% positive response.
Not only is Rapid eLearning most appropriate for product and technology training, but such training is now dominating corporate education budgets. In a recent Chief Learning Officer magazine report , CLOs said “product knowledge training” is the front runner expenditure category, currently accounting for 20% of their educational spending. The next highest category of training expenditures was management and supervisory training, with a mere 15% of the budget.
OK. So what do we know for sure at this point?
More specifically, since product knowledge training it the most appropriate subject area for Rapid eLearning, and it is dominating corporate budgets at a time when the doors are being beaten down to lower our costs, it’s clear that in the time-to-market world of product training, instructional design is counterproductive strategy for reducing time and costs. We have to realize that we are the boulder in the path of progress. Rapid eLearning requires us to get the heck out of the way and help create the shortest path between SMEs and learners. We must disintermediate the knowledge transfer process or die!
Not only is Rapid eLearning most appropriate for product and technology training, but such training is now dominating corporate education budgets. In a recent Chief Learning Officer magazine report , CLOs said “product knowledge training” is the front runner expenditure category, currently accounting for 20% of their educational spending. The next highest category of training expenditures was management and supervisory training, with a mere 15% of the budget.
OK. So what do we know for sure at this point?
- The differentiating knowledge in any organization is proprietary.
- SMEs are the primary source of proprietary knowledge.
- The largest impediments to speeding up the training development and deployment process are the lack of access to SMEs by instructional developers to derive their knowledge and review and approve instructional content.
- Product and technology training are the areas most likely to benefit from speeding up.
- And, while product knowledge training is now dominating corporate educational spending, 70% of respondents to the eLearning Guild survey said that their organizations were demanding lower costs for the development and deployment of eLearning.
More specifically, since product knowledge training it the most appropriate subject area for Rapid eLearning, and it is dominating corporate budgets at a time when the doors are being beaten down to lower our costs, it’s clear that in the time-to-market world of product training, instructional design is counterproductive strategy for reducing time and costs. We have to realize that we are the boulder in the path of progress. Rapid eLearning requires us to get the heck out of the way and help create the shortest path between SMEs and learners. We must disintermediate the knowledge transfer process or die!
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
It’s the Knowledge, Stupid!
We all probably remember the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was made famous by political strategist James Carville, who hung it on a sign in Bill Clinton's Little Rock campaign office to keep everybody "on message" in the 1992 presidential election. And it worked. Well, I think we should revive the phrase immediately and hang it boldly in our cubicles to keep us all on message in the learning community—it’s the knowledge, stupid!
We talk a lot about training, instructional design, learning management systems, pedagogical methodology, etc., etc. In doing so, we inadvertently drown out discussion of the most fundamental factor in facilitating learning in the workplace: the knowledge. And the most important knowledge, as mentioned in previous posts, is proprietary—the knowledge that is walking the halls of every organization in the heads of employees. I’m sorry, I know this is going to offend some of my colleagues, but ‘It’s the SMEs, stupid,’ not instructional designers, who have the knowledge, and finding ways to get that mission-critical knowledge out of their heads and made easily available to learners when they need it is the key to achieving Rapid eLearning.
We talk a lot about training, instructional design, learning management systems, pedagogical methodology, etc., etc. In doing so, we inadvertently drown out discussion of the most fundamental factor in facilitating learning in the workplace: the knowledge. And the most important knowledge, as mentioned in previous posts, is proprietary—the knowledge that is walking the halls of every organization in the heads of employees. I’m sorry, I know this is going to offend some of my colleagues, but ‘It’s the SMEs, stupid,’ not instructional designers, who have the knowledge, and finding ways to get that mission-critical knowledge out of their heads and made easily available to learners when they need it is the key to achieving Rapid eLearning.
The eLearning Guild recently completed a very interesting survey, entitled “The Rapid eLearning Development Research Report.”
You will probably have to join the Guild to download the paper, so please do it—the Guild is a great resource. Let’s go through some of their findings:- Is Rapid eLearning needed? 78% of respondents said that demand for faster development and deployment has increased. That looks like a yes.
- Where does the content (the knowledge) for eLearning come from? Not surprisingly, 86% of respondents said SMEs are the source.
- What is the most common tool developers employ with SMEs to obtain or derive their knowledge? 70% said interviewing.
- If a more rapid approach is needed, what are the main culprits slowing things down? 53% said “access to SMEs” and 60% said “content review and approval” (presumably approval by the same SMEs of the content that developers created after interviewing them).
- And what about the financial bottom line? 70% or respondents said they see a moderate to significant demand for reducing costs for eLearning development and deployment.
So, let’s try to weave these data points into a realistic narrative. More rapid approaches to eLearning are definitely needed. The source of the underlying knowledge is SMEs. Rather than enabling SMEs to make their knowledge directly available to learners, training developers interview them to find out what they know. But the biggest obstacles to reducing the time for development and deployment are the inability to get the time from busy SMEs for the knowledge sucking interviews and getting them to review and approve the content after the developers took the SME knowledge and tried to formalize it. And here’s the most interesting part, since we pretty much knew all of this already—only 6% or respondents thought that more efficient and effective use of SMEs is a defining characteristic of Rapid eLearning!
Say what? Let’s try this one more time. SMEs have the knowledge, but we can’t get their time to share their knowledge, then we can’t get their time to review the content we produce, and yet more efficient and effective use of SMEs apparently is not even perceived as an important characteristic of making eLearning more rapid! And what did they think is key to achieving more rapidly designed eLearning? 77% said infrastructure and technology… 70% said that reducing costs is a major prioity, yet we think the answer is buying more tools and techology?
How did we get so twisted in our thinking? Why is it that we can’t see the SME elephant standing in the middle of our eLearning development and deployment process? How do we get back “on message” and start addressing the root cause of our problem. The only viable strategy is to “Distintermediate or Die”—the subject of my next post.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Rant Alert No.1
From time to time people in the training community say things that are so wrong, so outrageously absurd that it sends me over the edge into a barely controllable rant. At such times I am told that it is healthier to blog in response than kick the dog, so here goes. (Back to “operationalizing” Rapid eLearning in a later post.)
The general subject of this rant is not unlike that of most of my rants. It is the tunnel vision, myopia, or what amounts to the ideology of many instructional designers, and, worse yet, instructional designers who have been promoted into management. They have somehow deluded themselves into believing, against all common sense and daily observations to the contrary, that “true learning” cannot take place unless the learning experience has been instructionally designed. I suspect this syndrome develops over time from going to too many training conferences, where like-minded IDers congregate and mob psychology takes over free will and individual intelligence and they convince themselves that ID is not just a methodology that should be judiciously applied where appropriate, but in fact should be used indiscriminately to bring enlightenment to an ignorant and heathen world. As my deceased mother-in-law used to say, “May God save us from fools and save fools from themselves.”
OK, back to the incident in question. I had a meeting this week with a manager from a very large and progressive company who had recently been promoted from their eLearning department (where ID has apparently reached an art form) to head up their well established and highly successful communities of practice operation. I say “operation” because this is brilliantly conceived and executed CoP program in the sales operations department that has been, strategically aligned, well funded, well incented, and, until now, well managed. It seems to optimally combine top-down and bottom-up involvement and has been determined through independent research to actually demonstrate statistically positive relationships with explicit and tacit knowledge, job competence, and customer satisfaction. Things would seem to be working pretty well on the CoP ranch…
Having come from recent success from the eLearning department, and having fallen victim of the ID syndrome he now wants to “fix” the CoP program by applying ID to all aspects of their knowledge exchange activities and knowledge capture and delivery system. There is apparently not enough structure to the seemly chaotic knowledge exchange and no evidence, statistical and anecdotal, will convince him that he already presides over a model CoP program. Its broken and must be fixed!
The latest target in the sights of his ID gun is “podcasting.” Podcasting has recently caught fire in some quarters as a new corporate [a.k.a. trendy] learning delivery method with great potential. In this case, it is one more method for delivering corporate knowledge technical in the form of downloadable audio files. So, he wants to ride the wave and be the first innovator on campus to implement podcasting. When it was pointed out to him that he is already the MP3 king, that the knowledge capture and transfer system of his CoP program has been producing MP3s for the last five years, and that there were nearly 4,000 voluntary downloads of MP3 files in the last year alone, he scoffed! Stunned and amazed at his incomprehensible response, I feebly muttered the somewhat obvious questions, “Why do you scoff? Why aren’t 4,000 voluntary downloads, downloads mind you that are not mandated nor tracked in any LMS system, why is that unprecedented level of activity not proof positive that the current MP3 distribution system is already a huge success?”
His response? The current MP3 files were not instructionally designed! People have apparently been downloading them just to have them, just in case they might need them, but it cannot be demonstrated that anyone is really listening to them, let alone learning from them. His answer to this pressing problem? The answer is that, moving forward, he wants to institute instructional design on the structure of knowledge contained in the MP3 files. Although it is equally impossible to determine whether anyone actually listens to or derives benefit from instructionally designed MP3 files vs. MP3s more informally transferred expert knowledge, podcasts with ID will make a big difference.
It will be interesting to see how many ID’d MP3 files will actually be downloaded in the future. MP3s created by CoP members for CoP members must go, and defeat once again must be snatched from the jaws of victory!
The general subject of this rant is not unlike that of most of my rants. It is the tunnel vision, myopia, or what amounts to the ideology of many instructional designers, and, worse yet, instructional designers who have been promoted into management. They have somehow deluded themselves into believing, against all common sense and daily observations to the contrary, that “true learning” cannot take place unless the learning experience has been instructionally designed. I suspect this syndrome develops over time from going to too many training conferences, where like-minded IDers congregate and mob psychology takes over free will and individual intelligence and they convince themselves that ID is not just a methodology that should be judiciously applied where appropriate, but in fact should be used indiscriminately to bring enlightenment to an ignorant and heathen world. As my deceased mother-in-law used to say, “May God save us from fools and save fools from themselves.”
OK, back to the incident in question. I had a meeting this week with a manager from a very large and progressive company who had recently been promoted from their eLearning department (where ID has apparently reached an art form) to head up their well established and highly successful communities of practice operation. I say “operation” because this is brilliantly conceived and executed CoP program in the sales operations department that has been, strategically aligned, well funded, well incented, and, until now, well managed. It seems to optimally combine top-down and bottom-up involvement and has been determined through independent research to actually demonstrate statistically positive relationships with explicit and tacit knowledge, job competence, and customer satisfaction. Things would seem to be working pretty well on the CoP ranch…
Having come from recent success from the eLearning department, and having fallen victim of the ID syndrome he now wants to “fix” the CoP program by applying ID to all aspects of their knowledge exchange activities and knowledge capture and delivery system. There is apparently not enough structure to the seemly chaotic knowledge exchange and no evidence, statistical and anecdotal, will convince him that he already presides over a model CoP program. Its broken and must be fixed!
The latest target in the sights of his ID gun is “podcasting.” Podcasting has recently caught fire in some quarters as a new corporate [a.k.a. trendy] learning delivery method with great potential. In this case, it is one more method for delivering corporate knowledge technical in the form of downloadable audio files. So, he wants to ride the wave and be the first innovator on campus to implement podcasting. When it was pointed out to him that he is already the MP3 king, that the knowledge capture and transfer system of his CoP program has been producing MP3s for the last five years, and that there were nearly 4,000 voluntary downloads of MP3 files in the last year alone, he scoffed! Stunned and amazed at his incomprehensible response, I feebly muttered the somewhat obvious questions, “Why do you scoff? Why aren’t 4,000 voluntary downloads, downloads mind you that are not mandated nor tracked in any LMS system, why is that unprecedented level of activity not proof positive that the current MP3 distribution system is already a huge success?”
His response? The current MP3 files were not instructionally designed! People have apparently been downloading them just to have them, just in case they might need them, but it cannot be demonstrated that anyone is really listening to them, let alone learning from them. His answer to this pressing problem? The answer is that, moving forward, he wants to institute instructional design on the structure of knowledge contained in the MP3 files. Although it is equally impossible to determine whether anyone actually listens to or derives benefit from instructionally designed MP3 files vs. MP3s more informally transferred expert knowledge, podcasts with ID will make a big difference.
It will be interesting to see how many ID’d MP3 files will actually be downloaded in the future. MP3s created by CoP members for CoP members must go, and defeat once again must be snatched from the jaws of victory!
Friday, May 06, 2005
What Is Rapid eLearning Anyway?
Is Rapid eLearning a new methodology for “knowledge enabling” workers more rapidly, or is it a simply a faddish term that is merely a “nuance” on time-tested practices. Since the term is hot off the tongues of everyone from industry analyst Josh Bersin to industry giant Macromedia, it’s probably worth our time to sort thru the various interpretations. (I apologize in advance for the length of this post, and I encourage your patience—thanks!)
A recent blog posting on eLearnspace teed up the discussion perfectly, so I take the liberty of quoting in toto:
“Rapid elearning and workflow learning are two concepts that have been getting enough attention over the last year to be classified as ‘trends’. I'm not entirely sure what to think about either. We have a unique problem in the learning/technology field of giving every small nuance in a concept a new name. Then we declare the old name/concept "dead" (almost as if we are constantly struggling to stay with the ‘in crowd’). Rapid elearning simply means ‘we have limited resources and time, how can we get this stuff done faster’...and workflow learning simply means ‘learning integrated (an abused word that can cause a rash to break out in some tech workers) as a vital business process...while still focusing on the needs of each individual worker’.” [Posted by gsiemens at July 10, 2004 05:17 PM]
From this point of view, Rapid eLearning is simply doing what we have before (designing formal instruction), but figuring out ways to do it more quickly. This interpretation is consistent with that of the eLearning Guild, which is holding a conference on “Rapid eLearning Development.” The focus of the conference is to re-examine the instructional design process to figure out how to do what we have always done—but do it more quickly.
But sometimes in our rush to dismiss a new phenomenon as ephemeral, we actually miss the point of an industry-transforming trend. I am one who believes this is one of those cases. The point of Rapid eLearning is not just to do more quickly what we have done before, but to do things fundamentally differently. And the analyst who is on target in understanding this trend for what it really represents, is Jennifer De Vries, a Senior Analyst for Bersin & Associates (her recent article is worth a read):
“There's a new training category emerging, which we call 'Rapid E-Learning.' It is a whole new approach to Internet-based training - one that changes the development model, leverages new tools, and dramatically changes the economics of content development… In our research, we talked to companies who are creating e-learning content using rapid methods. We found that most of these methods are a cross between knowledge management and e-learning.”
According to De Vries, the distinguishing characteristics of true Rapid eLearning include:
- SME centricity
- Based on simple, ubiquitous tools, such as PowerPoint (sorry, it's what people use! more later on this)
- Ability to be developed in a few weeks, rather than months
- And, learning also occurs quickly
And, she continues, this new type of Rapid eLearning is most relevant in
he following situations (and I quote):- Delta: Teaching the difference between what was learned and what has changed
With this as background, I’ll continue the Rapid eLearning definition process in the next post.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Why Is Rapid eLearning Needed?
Rapid eLearning, like any trendy phrase, needs definition if it is to have any utility. One of the foundation principles laid out decades ago by quality guru W. Edwards Deming was that all terms have to be “operationalized.” I couldn’t agree more. However, I’m going to risk violating that principle for now and reserve meaningful definition of this often confused and sometimes abused phrase until the next post. For now, I want to lay the ground work about why an alternative approach to formal training methods is desperately needed. The following are eight organizational realities that make the immediate shift to Rapid eLearning imperative:
- Workplace learning is informal. Eighty percent of workplace learning occurs informally-without a course or learning management system in sight - while 80% of our learning related resources are spent addressing a much smaller percentage of learning that takes place formally. Rapid eLearning is needed to provide a method for capturing informally transferred knowledge and make it easy to access without having to register for and take a course.
- People forget. Learning retention is abysmally low. According to Rebecca Rupp, author of Committed to Memory: How We Remember and Why We Forget, "Memory, it seems, decays with awful rapidity: one hour after learning, 56% of the assimilated material has gone to the wind; one day later, 66% has evaporated; and after one month, 80% is gone." In the real world of workplace learning, the key technology is search-not learning management. On the job, people need the knowledge that is relevant to the task at hand, and they need it immediately. Rapid eLearning is needed to let learners access the exact knowledge they need as easily as doing a Google search.
- Critical knowledge is proprietary. The most valuable asset of most organizations resides in people's heads-not in training courses. Smart organizations know the key to success is transforming individual knowledge into an accessible corporate resource. Rapid eLearning is needed to capture informally transferred knowledge (their corporate IP!) on a daily basis and make it accessible as a resource throughout the enterprise.
- Speed is king. Courseware takes months to produce. Specification, knowledge harvesting, instructional design, development, testing, revision, and deployment are time consuming. Core company knowledge requires this level of rigor, but most knowledge does not. Sales people, for example, do not need to take a course on a product upgrade-they need to know what's different so they can sell it effectively. Disintermediation of the learning delivery process gets time-sensitive information out to the audience faster. Rapid eLearning is needed to radically reduce the time to delivery from months to days, and create the shortest path from those who have critical knowledge to those who need it.
- Knowledge is exploding. Business and technology are changing at alarming rates and the resulting growth of knowledge is exponential. Having a highly scalable method of capturing and disseminating this tidal wave of knowledge is critical. Formal learning effectively builds baseline knowledge and skills, but a process that takes months to deliver inhibits effective response to the sea of constantly changing knowledge. Rapid eLearning is needed to provide a highly scalable process that takes little time and few resources. What is needed is an approach the enables a small team of three to capture the knowledge from an all-day technology exchange meeting and make it accessible on-line within 24 hours--and be able to do that every day of the week. Rapid eLearning is the only viable way to keep pace.
- Budgets are shrinking. The cost of formal instructional design is very high. According to eLearning researcher Brandon Hall, the cost per hour of a simple eLearning course generally costs tens of thousands of dollars to produce, and an elaborate design can cost upwards of a hundred thousand dollars. In a world where speed is king, knowledge is exploding, and budgets are shrinking, an affordable approach to learning delivery is sorely needed. Rapid eLearning is needed to radically reduce the cost of development and provide a viable approach for keeping up with today's tidal wave of knowledge.
- Classrooms are not scalable. Globalized audiences, the need for speed, and shrinking budgets have hastened the movement of instruction from the classroom to the web. But, 70% of all formal training is still instructor-led and every large organization faces the daunting task of how to migrate large volumes of classroom training to the web. Redesigning and reproducing it all as formal eLearning courses takes too much time and costs too much. Rapid eLearning is needed to provide a fast and inexpensive way to capture classroom training as it is being given and convert it to a web-deliverable format.
- Knowledge happens! The sad truth for formal training developers is that knowledge happens in every organization every day of the week--whether they are there or not. The proprietary knowledge, or corporate IP, referred to above is the life blood the flows through every successful organization. Knowledge is being generated and transferred informally all around us all the time and we just need to be perceptive enough to be there when it’s happening and be prepared to help facilitate it.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Maiden Bloggage
Not sure why I've been resisting blogging for so long. Maybe it’s the time commitment. Maybe it’s an innate resistance to self-promotion or an aversion to be grouped with those who I have previously deemed to be self-promoters. Whatever the reason, I’m committed to getting over it.
So here goes. My deep-seated philosophy of learning is best captured in a quip by Winston Churchill when he said, "Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I don't always like being taught." I chose the title Rapid eLearning to put the emphasis where it needs to be—on learning rather than training and on speed rather than perfection in instructional design.
As eLearning guru Jay Cross is wont to say, fully 80% of workplace learning happens informally, with only 20% of learning being accomplished through formal training methods. So why the heck are we spending 80% of our precious time and limited resources focused on training? Although often used synonomously, the distinction between training and learning is essential. According to my workmate Seb Grady, training is something that is done to you (for better or worse!) and learning is something you do for yourself.
Having been an internal training practitioner for 14 years and external provider of learning-related serivces and technology now for the last seven, I feel I can contribute productively to the dialog on learning in the workplace. And that contribution will be centered around a few key themes: speaking common sense instead of trainerese, appreciating how learning in the workplace really takes place, and understanding how workplace learning can be facilitated to have greater positive impact both on individual performance and business outcomes.
I'll share my thoughts and experiences candidly about how eLearning can live up to its potential and how we as learning professionals can make a positive impact on the learners, subject matter experts, and organizations we serve. And along the way I hope discover a few kindred spirits and probably stir up a little dust with those of you who disagree!
And I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague Jay Cross who serves as a role model for having the courage to speak his mind and taking the time to do so for our collective benefit. Thanks Jay!
So here goes. My deep-seated philosophy of learning is best captured in a quip by Winston Churchill when he said, "Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I don't always like being taught." I chose the title Rapid eLearning to put the emphasis where it needs to be—on learning rather than training and on speed rather than perfection in instructional design.
As eLearning guru Jay Cross is wont to say, fully 80% of workplace learning happens informally, with only 20% of learning being accomplished through formal training methods. So why the heck are we spending 80% of our precious time and limited resources focused on training? Although often used synonomously, the distinction between training and learning is essential. According to my workmate Seb Grady, training is something that is done to you (for better or worse!) and learning is something you do for yourself.
Having been an internal training practitioner for 14 years and external provider of learning-related serivces and technology now for the last seven, I feel I can contribute productively to the dialog on learning in the workplace. And that contribution will be centered around a few key themes: speaking common sense instead of trainerese, appreciating how learning in the workplace really takes place, and understanding how workplace learning can be facilitated to have greater positive impact both on individual performance and business outcomes.
I'll share my thoughts and experiences candidly about how eLearning can live up to its potential and how we as learning professionals can make a positive impact on the learners, subject matter experts, and organizations we serve. And along the way I hope discover a few kindred spirits and probably stir up a little dust with those of you who disagree!
And I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague Jay Cross who serves as a role model for having the courage to speak his mind and taking the time to do so for our collective benefit. Thanks Jay!
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