Learning Technologies in the Workplace

How to Successfully Implement Learning Technologies in Organizations

Donald H Taylor

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780749476472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione delle risorse umane
• Index: Business

Knowledge was once power - difficult to find, slow to transmit and coveted. Now we can access almost the sum total of human information with a swipe of our thumbs. The impact on the knowledge economy has been vast, leaving learning and development (L&D) professionals wondering how to keep pace. Many organizations naturally turn to technology to ensure workplace learning at scale and at speed, but stumble when it comes to successfully deploying and using it. Learning Technologies in the Workplace examines 16 years of learning technology implementations to find the secrets behind the most successful.Examples in the book from the Hershey Company and BP, airlines, tech companies and manufacturers point to four common factors. Successful learning technology teams all have APPA: a clear aim, a people focus, a wide perspective and a pragmatic, can-do attitude. Learning Technologies in the Workplace gives readers practical pointers for each of these four points, helping them implement and use learning technologies well, with particular emphasis on the essential skill of identifying stakeholders and winning their support.

PART ONE

The learning technology landscape

01

A learning utopia?

Most people know nothing about learning. THOMAS MORE, UTOPIA, ENGLAND, 1516

I get that we have to do this, but why do they gotta make doing it so hard? ‘SALLY’, STARBUCKS, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES, 2013

In January 2013, David Kelly, a technology-focused learning and development specialist in New York visited his local Starbucks to get some work done. It was a crisp winter’s day, and he was enjoying getting into the rhythm of work with his favourite large tea at his side when his concentration was broken by the person sharing his table making a call on her mobile phone (Kelly, 2013). She was staring with annoyance at her computer, open in front of her.

‘No,’ she sighed in exasperation into her phone, ‘I’m able to sign into the laptop. I just can’t get signed into the training.’

Once her colleague had talked her through accessing the training system, she sat at her keyboard, staring at her screen, mostly bored, occasionally frustrated, as she repeatedly clicked the ‘Next’ button, which moved her e-learning course on.

After about 90 minutes, she called her colleague again. She had to leave the café and wanted to know whether it was possible to leave the course halfway through, because, as she put it, ‘I don’t wanna have to go through all this again’.

David felt he had to know more. As soon as she had finished her conversation and shut her laptop, he introduced himself, explained who he was, and asked what was going on. Her initial reaction was to put some distance between herself and someone who came from the profession who had made her life hell for the previous hour and a half. Assuaged by a caramel macchiato and the promise of anonymity, ‘Sally’ explained that she was taking a mandatory course. It was almost the same course as the previous year.

‘Maybe you can explain to me why I have to take the same course year after year?’ she asked in understandable frustration.

Every year her organization updated the course to reflect changes that employees need to know, and updated the test, too, to include those changes. Sally appreciated the need to be aware of the changes, but not the way the information was conveyed. ‘I know they want us to take the whole course,’ she said, ‘but wouldn’t it be easier to also tell us what’s changed so we can be on the lookout for it?’

In was not only the content of the course that had riled her – repetitive, with the important changes buried amid the familiar and trivial; it was not only the nature of the course itself, which consisted of reading screens of information and clicking the ‘Next’ button to progress; it was also the process of getting to the course, through a system that needed a separate login, different to her regular login for the company systems. On top of all this was the frustration that this ‘training course’ had nothing to do with learning. ‘We don’t learn anything from these,’ she said, ‘and everybody knows that. They just want to know that it’s done.’

A committed employee just trying to do her job, Sally summed up her frustration in a single question: ‘I get that we have to do this, but why do they gotta make doing it so hard?’

Sally’s experience is not unique. Too many employees experience the combination of a tedious course with non-intuitive software. Too often the content they are exposed to seems neither relevant to their job, nor to have much to do with learning. And too often it seems to have little to do with the business, either.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At the 2014 Learning Technologies Conference in London, a case study from major UK healthcare provider HC-One included a short video of care worker Kate Cairns, who had been through the company’s touch programme. This programme, which we’ll hear more about in Chapter 9, was designed to support an ambitious cultural change programme and relied heavily on e-learning. The reaction of those in the programme, in contrast to Sally’s, was overwhelmingly positive. ‘E-learning has been great for me,’ Kate said in a matter of fact way, ‘but also great news for the residents. I don’t have to leave my shift to do my training. It gives me more time to spend with the residents, which is why I’m here.’

Other staff agree. Well over 95 per cent of a survey of 4,244 employees said that touch had given them new knowledge and understanding, and over 90 per cent felt the programme had given them more control over their learning and development. In addition, over 90 per cent of managers said that the programme had increased competence and not just compliance ratings (Innes-Farquar, 2014).

We will see other, similar examples in this book where learning technologies have been implemented well, in ways useful for employees, help learning and add to the value of the organization.

Most adults have always understood the value of learning (Thomas More, whose quote opens this chapter, did when he wrote Utopia 500 years ago). The vast majority of employees certainly understand it, and know its importance for their work. Learning technology offers a promise of easy access to engaging, accessible learning content. The frustration for employees, therefore, is that our understanding of learning’s importance and the promise of learning technology too often does not translate into anything effective. On the positive side, the use of learning technologies does seem to be improving, but inconsistently and slowly. This book is an attempt to identify and spread good practice more widely, and so protect people from Sally’s frustrating experience. Employees deserve better. They deserve a learning utopia, not the dystopia it too often turns out to be.

In writing this book, I talked to many people who use learning technologies well. I looked back over 16 years of case studies from the Learning Technologies Conference. I explored case studies from other sources, too. In the course of all this, it became clear that successful learning technology implementations are not a matter of chance. By the same token, failed implementations usually happen for reasons that are predictable and preventable. To understand why these errors are so common, and so often repeated, we need to travel back in time to 1999, to the height of the dot-com boom, when learning technologies were in their infancy, and one influential man in particular was predicting a great future for them.

References

1. Innes-Farquar, A (2014) Supporting performance with technology and showing its impact, Learning Technologies Conference, 29 January
2. Kelly, D (22 January 2013) [accessed 22 November 2016] What do people *really* think about that course you’ve designed? [Online] http://davidkelly.me/2013/01/what-do-people-really-think-about-that-course-youve-designed/

02

How did we get here?

Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail look like a rounding error. JOHN CHAMBERS, CEO OF CISCO SYSTEMS, SPEAKING AT COMDEX 1999

The COMDEX information technology exhibition of November 1999 was one of the largest IT events ever staged in the world. Over 200,000 attendees flocked to Las Vegas for five days of information technology heaven. Those were heady times. The information technology sector was riding high on a dot-com boom, which had driven the NASDAQ stock market to five years of spectacular growth. In a fervid atmosphere, vendors pitched their products and services and, in the huge main auditorium, industry luminaries led by Microsoft chief Bill Gates delivered their vision of the future (McCann, 1999).

When Cisco’s John Chambers stepped up to the podium on the third day, he introduced to the general public a term that had only been used previously by specialists: ‘e-learning’. The term was so new that in its reporting CNN put quotation marks around it, comparing its potential with the explosive impact of the newly arrived e-commerce (D’Amico, 1999a).

In his keynote address, John Chambers was prophetic about the future of learning technologies when he said that education over the internet would be huge. He was, however, wide of the mark on the detail, including the speed at which it would happen. Similarly, COMDEX did a good job trailing the future in places, with a watch-phone from Samsung and discussions on the importance of open software. The event, though, also featured set pieces from then-dominant companies such as Novell and Corel, which have long since been sidelined, and a complaint from Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina that for too many people the internet was still ‘too foreign, distant, cold and threatening’. Fiorina correctly saw the need for a more familiar, friendly internet; she probably did not foresee how quickly it would arrive or the impact it would have (Schwartz, 1999; Sykes, 1999).

For what neither Carly Fiorina nor John Chambers nor almost anyone at COMDEX could have foreseen was how the internet – or more precisely the world wide web that sits on top of the internet – would blow apart the existing, centuries-old model of how we understand and handle information, and the wide implications of that change.

Chambers was the head of one of the world’s largest and most successful software infrastructure companies, a savvy operator and visionary, he was one of the reasons behind its success. But in his speech he overestimated the likely pace of change in the use of technology in learning, even though he correctly identified one major hurdle to its adoption. Pointing to the education system, he said that the technology to support learning was already there. The key roadblock to adoption was that many teachers didn’t like to surrender to students the power to decide what to learn. In contrast, he suggested, over the coming two years, training would become a continuing process as companies educated their employees via the internet (D’Amico, 1999b).

In that speech, Chambers identified a key issue – that using technology for learning threatened an existing, entrenched system of what he called ‘command and control’. He also exhibited a technologist’s typical over-optimism about ...