This is my summary and reaction to the first part of Sharon Boller‘s whitepaper, Learning Trends, Technologies, and Opportunities. Boller is the president of Bottom-Line Performance, a learning design firm based in Indiana.

The 26-page whitepaper has two main sections:

• Six truths about today’s learning environment.
• Emerging trends and technologies

I think it’s well worth reading in its entirety. Here on the Whiteboard, I wanted to summarize some of those truths in part one, and add comments for which Boller has no responsibility whatsoever.  

ILT is not dead.

When I read this, I tell you, you could have knocked me over with a smilesheet.

I’m not mocking Boller–far from it. Among the many useful features in her whitepaper are summaries of facts. For instance, ASTD said last year that 59.4% of companies reported using instructor-led classroom training, and another 13.3% use instructor-led by online or remote (such as video).

Self-paced online? 18.7%, and a whopping 1.4% are using mobile as a distribution method.

I looked at this summary from ASTD about the State of the Industry report that Boller mentions. While this isn’t the entire report, I found a comment about “content distribution” striking:

Technology-based methods have rebounded to account for 37.3 percent of formal hours available across all learning methods.

If I read that right, then non-tech methods (you know, like instructor-led classroom training) accounts for more than 60% of “formal hours available across all learning methods.

Even the phrase “learning method” is telling. I’m not the kind of fanatic who goes around correcting punctuation and menus; I can even hold a civil conversation with someone who uses “understand” as part of a training objective–because I’m inclined to see it as shorthand for something that can eventually be observed.

So I do understand that people in the industry use “learning method” for things that can only aspire to encourage learning. I do think it’s helpful to state that explicitly from time to time. Absolutely, you can design and create activities, experiences, exercises, games, what have you, that are aimed at supporting, encouraging, and so on, just as you can  find recipes, buy ingredients, set a table,and prepare dishes. What you can’t do is guarantee that people will eat your food.

mLearning: lots of talk, little action

That ASTD report tells us that 1.4% of formal learning is delivered via mobile. Like Boller, I’m sure the current figure is higher. After all,  an increase of nearly 50% would get you all the way up to 2.1% .

I can’t help wondering whether one serendipitously limiting factor is that you can’t easily cram a 300-slide barrage of PowerPoint onto a smartphone screen. Tablets are an easier target for this pumpkin-headed kind of leveraging, though, and are probably already plagued with far more legacy content than the Geneva Conventions should permit.

I want to underscore that in this first section, Boller’s talking about the way things are, not how they will or should be.

I confess that I’m a little leery of “mobile learning” in a learning-industry context. I fear it’ll be stacking and tracking: loading stuff up because it can go onto a mobile device, and then using ever-better software to track whatever somebody thinks ought to be tracked. It’s always easier to track a score on a quiz than the quality with which someone handled an actual problem from an actual customer.

Outside vendors matter.

One thing Boller says in this section is really about attitudes inside an organization:

Most companies are NOT in the L&D business; they are in business to do something else.

This ought to be obvious, but it’s sometimes only a ritual nod that L&D makes toward the reason there’s a organization at all.

Employees don’t get much formal training.

31 hours a year is the average in ASTD’s data, or 1.5% of a year’s worth of 40-hour weeks.

There’s a way in which much “formal learning” in the workplace is really “focused introduction with maybe a little practice.”  31 hours is like a 2-credit course in college (which may explain my level of skill when it comes to History of Art).

Boller says she thinks of this time spent in formal training like driver’s education. “Would you rather have your kid spending more hours in the classroom… or more hours behind the wheel practicing driving with a qualified adult providing constant feedback?”

In Maryland, where I live, the formal training requirements for a new driver, regardless of age, include completing a standardized driving course with at least 30 hours of classroom instruction and 6 hours behind the wheel.

That’s the formal-training requirement. But obtaining a provisional license also requires 60 hours of driving with “a qualified supervising driver (parent, guardian, or mentor)” who completes and signs a practice log documenting those 60 hours.

I can picture the diagram in my driver’s ed textbook that explained how to parallel park. That was helpful, in the way that a dictionary definition of a word is helpful. But if your goal is more than “repeat the definition when asked,” you’ve got to work up to fitting your car in between two others on the street.

That might not take 30 hours–but it will take spaced practice; it will take varying conditions; it will probably benefit from scaffolding (such as starting with a span of three empty spaces behind a parked car).

And that’s just the parking part of the driving-a-car set of skills.

Majority of eLearning “doesn’t match” what’s optimal.

I can’t possibly improve on what Boller says:

Clients ALWAYS say they want something that is “engaging” and not too content-heavy. Yet the stuff we routinely see looks very much “Text and Next” with tons of content and little relationship to any behaviorally-based outcomes. Sometimes this is the result of a subject matter expert who ruled with an iron fist in terms of focusing on content rather than outcomes. Other times it was the result of an internal person who decided to get Articulate or Captivate and started creating his or her own stuff – with no background in learning design.

Most of the people we talk to inside organizations HATE taking eLearning courses (including lots of folks who hire us to produce it). They hate it because most of it is boring, bad or it’s not really eLearning – it’s a communication piece squished into an eLearning shell so someone’s completion can be tracked via an LMS.

My only quibble is with the “not really eLearning” part. My hunch is that most people in organizations hate elearning because it’s far more about the E (as in ease of delivery and easily outsourced and easily tracked) than it is about the learning.

LMS: few pull data, but they all think they need it.

Boller says is that the majority of people “do not actually access or use the data available to them within an LMS.”

This sounds so much like the SCORM evangelism I used to hear–“there’s so much good stuff in there; it’s just not implemented right.”

To which my (occasionally spoken) reaction was, “No kidding.”

There must have been places where SCORMification actually helped increase the likelihood that people learned on the job–but that’s a belief on my part, or perhaps a hope. My own experiences with projects where the management team included a SCORM hall monitor was that the fetishization of the SCO could overrule any argument based on ephemera like principles of learning or on-the-job relevance.

Just as with mainframe-based CBT back in the olden days, just as with the 12-inch laser disks and players grafted between the PC and its VGA monitor, just as with the nearly unavoidable audio response systems that have reanimated the multiple-guess question, there are convention-halls full of vendors eager to explain how their particular magic beans are just the thing you want to trade your corporate cow for.

CC-licensed image of bandwagon by Jed Sullivan.