Breaking through the e-barriers: there's more hope than hype - State of the E-Nation - electronic learning

T+D,  Oct, 2002  by Martyn Sloman

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Three years ago when e-learning was the new kid on the block, the advice to an ambitious human resource or training manager was straightforward: Cut your training costs by agreeing to a three-year deal with a supplier of e-learning systems and content. Get the chief executive to give his or her endorsement. Prepare a brochure, plan a launch, and place a high-profile article in a training magazine.

In hindsight, another good recommendation would've been to contact a recruitment agency so you could move on before it all went wrong.

If that sounds unduly cynical, consider the following. Every year, ASTD publishes a survey of respondents in its Benchmarking Forum. The April 2002 report shows there has been little increase in the amount of training delivered through learning technology, or e-learning, remaining steady at less than 10 percent. In fact, the highest percentage--9. 1--was recorded for 1997 (there's an inevitable time lag in surveys of this kind). Although the past two ASTD reports are positive on the future of e-learning, the figures suggest a plateau rather than growth of e-learning use in the corporate sector.

The 2002 annual survey of training managers in the United Kingdom, undertaken by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, also shows no evidence of an e-learning explosion. Less than one-third of the 500 U.K. training managers polled have introduced e-learning; of those, almost three-quarters describe its use as "a little."

Some hard questions should be asked:

* Is the age of e-learning over before it really began?

* Were the hype and selling misplaced?

* Would a suitable epitaph be (to borrow a quip from President Clinton's ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich) "Rarely has a term moved so rapidly from obscurity to meaninglessness without an intervening period of coherence."

My contention is that pessimism is not warranted. Dig a little deeper into the recent ASTD surveys, for example, and a more cheerful picture emerges. Former ASTD research director Mark Van Buren struck this optimistic note in the 2001 report: "We found evidence that perhaps e-learning isn't destined for the 'it's history' pages but only raking a breather." A year later, he and report co-author William Erskine suggest that "some firms held the amount of e-learning steady while making significant investments in e-learning systems and courses." Looking to the longer term, they said, "Cutbacks on travel and the need for security have made more organizations increase their e-learning since September 11."

Significantly, the HR and training professionals who participated in the ASTD surveys have consistently believed that e-learning will, in due course, provide a fifth to a quarter of all training in the typical organization. What has emerged, however, is recognition that progress will be slower than expected. Barriers have become evident. Before we look at those barriers, let's take comfort in lessons from history.

Along the towpaths

The full potential of any new technology takes time to be realized; we must expect some false starts. We must also expect some early misunderstandings on what the technology can achieve.

A good example is found in the railway age in the United Kingdom--generally accepted as a defining period in the first industrial revolution. When railways arrived, they were seen as a serious competitor to the canals for the transport of heavy goods between industrial centers. Doubtless there was much charter on the towpaths among canal operators reassuring each other that this new fad would pass. The skeptics also would have been reassured by the events of 1845. In that year, a huge speculation in railway shares was followed by a spectacular crash--even in the shares of the companies that became giants of the industry. There's nothing new about the dot.com collapse.

The railways survived and the canals declined. What is instructive is the diverse impact of the railways. In giving ordinary people access to the coast, for example, the railways created the modern British seaside and transformed leisure. Another consequence had to do with time zones. Before the arrival of the railway network, time across British towns and cities varied; the time in Gloucester differed from the time in Oxford, for example. But to ensure predictable times for train departures and arrivals, national times were introduced.

Let's move to a more recent and more applicable example, the development of email. Writing about the origins of the Internet, John Naughton describes how email emerged from the work of the Advanced Research Projects Agency:

"Email came as something of a surprise to ARPA--or at least to some people in it. The Net was funded, remember, to enable the research community to share scarce resources. The idea was that researchers at a site would be able to log into--and run programs--on computers at other sites. So, imagine ARPA's puzzlement when a specially commissioned survey in 1973 revealed that three-quarters of the traffic on the Net was electronic mail...worse, some of these messages were nor even about computing!"