E-Learning: The Product of a Risk Is a Lesson - Page 5

“In all of our webinars, we invite librarians to participate as cofacilitators in the event, sharing the experiences, rather than a sage-on-stage approach,” TechSoup Strategic Communications Manager Sarah Washburn explained. “You’ll never sit in a MaintainIT webinar where just one person is lecturing. We use ReadyTalk, and we wanted to give folks as much opportunity as possible to engage with the participants. This meant taking risks and allowing all functions of ReadyTalk to be open to everyone. With risks, there are challenges: We’ve experienced a couple of moments where participants didn’t fully understand the power they had, and accidentally selected functions that hindered the experience for others, but those were more rare than common.”

Those hindrances can range from participants advancing or backing up PowerPoint slides while presenters are speaking to accidentally closing down the entire visual feed during a live presentation, leaving everyone only with audio. The result was an edgy and engaging learning experience for everyone, and the presenters modeled first-rate training techniques through their ability to work with whatever surprises participants provide.

“At first, we were a bit unnerved,” Washburn admitted, “and would always ask: Is it worth it to allow such power? And always, we’d come back to the answer: Yes. We’d learn from our mistakes and try to be more clear, and also more poised, about dealing with the implications when the worst case scenario surfaced. Sometimes this approach means taking risks, but the product of a risk is a lesson.”

With all that online learners face in live formats such as webcasts and webinars, they may sometimes be overwhelmed the first time they join a session. When all tools are in place, the learner may be watching PowerPoint slides; hearing the audio feed from the presenter; joining the conversation through the use of a headset or speakers and microphone or by dial-in telephone access; using drawing tools to interact with what is visible on the computer monitor; jumping from the slides to another website via live links; and following and participating in the typed chat, which sometimes proceeds at a dizzying pace down one side of the monitor screen.

Experienced users find the experience helpful and exhilarating. “Running chat is one of my favorite tools,” Gutsche said. “It’s like being encouraged to pass notes in class—these are notes that everyone gets to read and, therefore, everyone benefits. It’s done without interrupting the flow of instruction. It gets people involved more continually.”

The various forms of input can be daunting even for experienced presenters, so many have at least one assistant next to them during live sessions. “If you are doing a synch [synchronous] class, you must have a producer. Big time,” Coleman insists.

Measuring e-learning outcomes

Assessment and evaluation was of interest to several of those interviewed, but few were actively engaged in anything beyond the most elementary of efforts.

One potential evaluation model for libraries is the Friday5s technique developed and used by Fort Hill Company, which uses online follow-up to training sessions. Fort Hill has managers and employees meet before training occurs so that they can discuss goals and objectives; has the learners participate in a learning event; and engages them in the Friday5s program, which encourages contact between learners and their managers for up to three months through online exercises designed to take five minutes or less to complete every Friday. Learners use drop-down windows and text boxes to document how they have applied what they learned and to set achievable goals for the following week, and managers see these brief reports as soon as the learners complete them.

The process “increases transfer and application effort, interaction with managers, improvement by participants, and return on investment in the program,” wrote Calhoun Wick, Roy Pollock, Andrew Jefferson, and Richard Flanagan in The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development into Business Results. It also made managers “significantly more aware of their direct reports’ learning transfer objectives” than was documented in a control group, they reported.

“We know without a post-program support process (like Friday5s) only 15% of people follow through in a way that changes behavior,” Michael Papay, vice president of business development for Fort Hill, confirmed during a live chat. “That means there is an 85% waste following learning events without a follow-through process.”

Even without an automated follow-up system, library leaders can engage in follow-up exercises with learners. The staff of Georgia’s multicounty Uncle Remus Regional Library System, for example, have two months to complete e-learning courses they are taking and then bring their certificate of completion with them to the manager’s meeting, and a discussion of the topic is part of the agenda.