ilgera

Using eLearning as a delivery medium for corporate training is common now. Corporates have lapped it up seeing crucial benefits in costs and time savings. Early adopters have experimented with various media formats & delivery options and realized that blended learning works best. Any advent of instructional technology hasn’t meant the elimination of what pedagogical methods existed at the time. The new technology has typically been co-opted and added to the blend. This should happen naturally with game-based, mobile and eLearning too.

Training companies are now adopting eLearning for survival & growth. Bersin & Associates in a report earlier this year said about 40% of training organizations have an LMS. For training companies considering offering eLearning solutions, Blended Learning is the best bet too – albeit for a slightly different reason.

We have had several meetings earlier this month with prospective customers (training companies) about how we could help them with their eLearning initiatives. Some of these training companies are very new to the world of eLearning. Their interest in eLearning is due to several reasons, of which the most common ones are how to reduce costs and reduce time away from job. Their clients have slashed travel budgets, while managers in client organizations are not willing to let their employees go for training – as they are already managing with less manpower. Such factors are pushing training companies to look for alternatives to long classroom training programs.

eLearning fits in very well here – to the extent the content and program objectives allow.
However, from the training companies’ perspective, there is this big decision to be made – How much to let go (to eLearning)?

Training Companies would ideally want to hang on to all of their classroom training as that’s their core competency – something they really excel in and have relied on to satisfy & retain clients for years. Balancing market demand and the desire to retain the core competence leads to ‘blended learning’ emerging as a natural choice. It gives them the flexibility to customize programs to suit their clients’ budgets and time availability. We believe by doing blended learning well (and sooner than their competitors) training companies can further their competitive advantage.

For detail:
http://www.upsidelearning.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/22/blended-learning-is-the-best-option/

In his blog, Jay Cross points to relative old, but interesting article on informal learning: Informal Learning and the Transfer of Learning: How Managers Develop Proficiency and notes, “If you’re still relying on formal training to develop managers, you might want to give this one a read.”

The paper is more interesting for what it omits, rather than what it purpose seems to be. That is, it seems to tout the importance of informal learning, rather than from what I see is the real key finding — its the mix that matters. For example, it makes several comments along these lines:

“Because skills learned informally are likely to share similar features with transfer tasks in terms of context and content, the potential exists for skills learned informally to be more readily transferred than skills learned in formal training contexts.”
“Our study suggested that managers learn mostly from informal learning, that proficiency is the product of informal learning, and that metacognitive knowledge and self-regulation skills moderate informal learning and the transfer process.
In the paper they show the following chart (p377):

When referring to the chart they note, “The distribution indicates that managers reported learning all twenty skills predominantly from informal learning activities.” Yes, while the managers believed they learnt more from informal learning, the chart actually seems to be showing that they learn a core base from formal instruction, and then they build from their proficiency from there. In addition, some core skills only need a drop of formal learning to get the process going, while others require a heavy dose.

This goes back to the previous post in which I noted that some learning episodes that are strictly informal may be too narrowly based in that the learner only learns part of a task or superficial skills that may not be transferable to the job (Bell and Dale 1999).

Thus, just as we have a “blend” of learning media and processes, we also need the proper mix of formal and informal learning. This means you not only have to select the proper blend of formal learning, but also select the proper mix of formal and informal learning. In turn, you then have to select the best blend of informal learning that will help the learners transfer their skills to the job.

In the paper they mention a study in which pilots with more flight experience perform better on a simulated flight test (that is, a transfer task) than did their novice counterparts. Now I don’t believe that anyone is going to argue this point, but the other part to it is that those better performing pilots would have never been able to perform in the first place if it was not for their core skills gained with formal learning.

In the comment section on my previous post Michael Hanley notes, “…the reality is that all of these exist on a ‘learning continuum.’” This learning continuum is also the subject of a post by Clark Quinn: The Formal/Informal Continuum.

Thus, its not a matter of designing learning from one side of the continuum or the other because you need the core skills from one side and the proficiency of actually being able to put those skills into practice from the other side. In addition you need that mix from the middle that is not readily identifiable as either formal or informal.

For details:
http://bdld.blogspot.com/2009/10/brick-mortar-mix-of-learning.html

Online higher education is growing, but a lack of transparency is preventing it from reaching its full potential. Even though online colleges are now receiving increased respect from top employers, diploma mills and the like limit the prestige of a legitimate online degree. We think more transparency is a good thing; a set of objective, quantitative rankings — however imperfect — should help shed some light on the relative attractiveness of the most popular accredited online colleges.

These rankings have been produced by OEDb, a database of accredited online education programs. In our rankings we included the most significant degree-granting undergraduate online colleges that operate nationally, as determined by our selection criteria. To our knowledge, our 2007 rankings were the first of their kind, and these 2009 rankings are meant to serve as an update.

For each college, we gathered data for eight different metrics — acceptance rate,financial aid, graduation rate, peer Web citations, retention rate, scholarly citations,student-faculty ratio, and years accredited. The overall ranking, shown below, ranks each college by its average ranking for each metric for which data was available.

Overall Results

This table simply shows the overall ranking of each college, with its average rank in the right-hand column reflecting the sum of all of its ranks divided by the number of metrics for which data was found for that particular college.

http://oedb.org/rankings

http://www.amanet.org/blended/white-papers.htm