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?

• 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.

If that’s what we know, what should we conclude? Apparently, 81% of eLearning Guild respondents believe that instructional design skills are most critical for staffing projects requiring a Rapid eLearning framework. Again, say what?! This reminds me of the definition of insanity: when people’s behavior does not yield the desired results in their lives, they do more of the same and do it with increasing intensity (instead of changing their behavior to be more appropriate to the situation)! Since SMEs have the knowledge and we can’t get their time to suck their brains and then validate that we have not munged their knowledge in the transformation to instructional content, we obviously cannot instructionally design our way into a solution for Rapid 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!