Effective corporate IT training: Bursting the e-learning bubble

Contents

The lure of "technology-based" solutions

Why e-learning is virtually guaranteed to fail

How about time and cost efficiency?

It all comes down to competency

In the more than half a decade of e-learning availability, one thing has become clear: the Internet is not a good platform for teaching complex
technical topics.

For the past several years, there has been a lot written about the "miracle of e-learning" and how it would fundamentally change the way companies train their employees to meet the increasingly rapid evolution of information technology.

Proponents of e-learning hailed its development as an educational breakthrough enabling employee-students to work at their own pace, time, and place. E-learning advocates have touted it as the cure-all for everything that ails corporate IT training: the expense, disruption, and dislocation of employees who have to enroll in live, hands-on training seminars, often in cities far removed from their place of employment.

But with over half a decade of e-learning availability, emerging statistics and studies conducted by a variety of institutions have yielded some interesting results:

- 57% of respondents to one study described their e-learning experience as "frustrating, lonely, and stressful;"

- The best e-learning environment (which includes audio and visual techniques) yields only about 40% retention of the material covered;

- Humans, by nature, learn best through social interaction - a critical element removed by e-learning;

- Much of e-learning course material is simply live lecture material posted to the Internet, resulting in a poor learning experience in which crucial context is removed because there is no human instructor to impart it.

The Internet has become ubiquitous, offering many conveniences and advantages, but teaching is not one of them.

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