One of the benefits from my regular tussles on the tennis court with Steve Rayson of Kineo is the intelligence we get to share on the elearning marketplace as we attempt to recover our composure at the finish. This time Steve alerted me to some research that Forrester has been doing for Adobe on the development of rapid elearning in the USA. This research was summarised in a webinar run by Claire Schooley of Forrester for Adobe in March. Steve covered this in his March market update. There doesn’t appear to be any write up of the research by Forrester, so if you want to see the details you’ll have to do as I did and watch the recording of the webinar.
The research took place at the end of last year with 103 ‘online learning decision makers’. It is important to make clear that only those organisations already using rapid e-learning were asked to participate.
Here were the findings that caught my attention:
Learners like rapid e-learning because they can fit it into their schedules more easily / because the material is presented in short chunks / because they can go back and review content: This reflects what other surveys have told us about learner preferences and makes sense for many kinds of learning / performance support challenge.
Organisations like rapid e-learning because it’s easier to maintain and update content / they can design and deliver training content more quickly: As you would expect here, the arguments are ones of efficiency rather than effectiveness.
Some 24% of learning content is created as rapid e-learning, compared to 28% for the classroom, 21% more formal in-house e-learning development, 14% off-the-shelf content and 13% custom content developed externally: We don’t know exactly how this pattern has shifted over the years, but 72% of participants did claim that their use of rapid e-learning had increased. It’s also interesting that, if you add up all the forms of e-learning, it comes to 72% of the total.
Rapid e-learning has enabled 32% of the organisations surveyed to speed up the shift from classroom training to e-learning: Interesting in that this was the goal in the first place, but understandable given that respondents also stated that “Training is moving online to reduce cost and provide learner flexibility”.
Rapid e-learning is used most to create content that must be developed quickly / updated often / repurposed from existing documents: Which makes sense, assuming of course that it works.
Rapid e-learning is leading to a significant increase in the amount of content created overall: Which, again, proves that rapid e-learning is efficient.
Rapid e-learning is used mainly for compliance training, IT training, induction and ‘processes, procedures and business skills and practices’: Hardly surprising, but it’s also used quite a lot for leadership and sales training, albeit less than the classroom.
A major challenge is in getting authors to do much more than create the most basic content, primarily due to a lack of design skills: This is especially likely to be an issue given that in 20% of cases, subject-experts develop content independently. Someone should mention the 60-minute masters!
So, there’s a lot of it about. Perhaps Forrester would like to conduct some more research to provide us with some indication of how effective this transition has been.
