Will Kenny
"Think Pieces"
(free articles)
Best Training Practices
Will Kenny
3927 York Ave N
Robbinsdale, MN 55422
612-978-3050
Whether or not the word "training" appears in your official job title, if you plan to use online delivery to communicate best business practices to your employees, there are a few tricks to getting the results you are looking for from the online tools you create.
The Good News is . . .
it has never been easier to build online training . . .
New tools make it convenient for anyone, with no programming background, to build and upload an online course. You can quickly create online training on a corporate intranet, or host it on the Internet for customers and clients.
The Bad News is . . .
there has never been more second-rate training
available
on employees' desktops!
Vendors of these tools will tell you how quick and easy it is to create a course, and they are telling the truth, as far as it goes. But making a good course has not gotten any easier than it ever was.
Diving into online course development without putting in the careful thought and diligent, patient work that any good training demands just provides faster access to training that doesn't produce results. Simply putting a course online doesn't automatically make it more effective, and often weakens the impact on the employee.
That's why I see a lot of excellent live, in-person presentations and seminars being turned into second-rate online events. Creating truly effective online employee communications takes, if anything, more careful design and development than do live-facilitator classes.
Don't Go Astray When You Develop
Online Training
I've pulled together some valuable principles that will help you develop truly effective online training, in my 20-page Training Tipsheet Extra!:
"Creating e-ffective e-learning:
13 Tips for Maximizing Your
Return On Investment
in On-Line Course Delivery"
Simply take this link to download Creating e-ffective e-learning in Adobe PDF format.
"Creating e-ffective e-learning" restores the context of good decisions, thoughtful design, and sound development practices that add impact to your online delivery. It takes you back to some basic concepts that are easily overlooked in the excitement of convenient online development tools, so that you can apply those tools more effectively to establish and to sustain best business practices in your organization.
There Are Some Things I Won't Tell You!
I am not going to tell you which software tools to use, or how, technically, to use them. If you're looking for a link or a company name, I can't provide that.
Why? I don't believe there is a perfect, "one size fits all" online development environment. There are enormous variations in cost, features, ease of use, support, scalability, and other factors. Without knowing a lot about your organization, your employees, and how you intend to use it, I couldn't recommend a tool for you.
And beyond that, this is an area where things change very quickly. New tools come on the market, older tools are updated, and any specific advice I gave would quickly go out of date.
But I will tell you:
- Why waiting for feedback from participants may mean that your course will never have an impact on employee performance.
- How to test your course content quickly and efficiently before you lock it into an online course.
- Why maintaining an online course is harder than the software vendors tell you, and why it is crucial to build maintenance and the first revision into your course development project.
- Why the best person to test the usability of your course, the interface and its ease of use, is someone who knows nothing about the subject of the course.
- How employees are often forced into taking online training on their own time, and how that undermines your training efforts.
Are Your Online Efforts Falling Short?
When you first start churning out online training, it's pretty exciting. It is great to be able to see deliverable content appear on your intranet almost as quickly as you can write it. It is exciting to put together professional-looking quizzes to test comprehension, with results automatically collected for later review.
Often the pace of development exceeds the capacity for review, evaluation, and revision. By the time you are seeing the true impact of the first couple of courses, you already have five more out there -- and you are converting material to online delivery so fast that you have trouble finding the time to take a close look at how effective those first courses really are.
And that's a shame, because they probably aren't up to your standards, in terms of impact on employee performance. Oh, they look great, clean and professional. They save a lot of money on travel, catering, rooms, and employee time away from their desks. They support "just-in-time" approaches, letting you quickly run an employee through the content whenever that is most appropriate.
But they don't work very well. The "message" doesn't "stick." Employees who complete these early online courses don't seem to perform all that much better than they did before they enrolled. Your courses are great for show-and-tell, and screenshots really impress people at meetings . . . but the results do not!
Where Did Things Go Wrong?
Frankly, it is fun and exciting to be able to quickly create the components of an online course. And the savings in time and money, for the staff developing the course and for the staff taking the course, are almost irresistible.
That's why so many of us get confused about the difference between content and format. You have seen this confusion at work in your office, nearly every day.
Word processing software makes it easy to create attractive memos, and to correct spelling errors. But the software doesn't make your writing any better. It doesn't suddenly ensure that what you write makes sense and has an impact on others.
Online course development software does much more to help you with format than it does with content. It makes it easier than ever before to deliver training via a web browser, organized into attractive pages, complete with a professional-looking quiz at the end of the course. You can put an online course together and have it ready for your first trainee in record time. You can even compose directly in the online development tool, creating training "as you go."
What does that mean? It means exactly what it says above, that you can put content into an online deliverable format more quickly and more easily than ever before . . . and that's all!
It does not mean that the course will teach anything, that your test will measure anything, or that people who take the online course will change how they do their work, no matter how nice your pages look, or link to one another, in their browser windows.
"Creating e-ffective e-learning" will give you the bigger picture, a more complete view of what has to happen on line and off line to make your electronically delivered courses more effective.
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A Training Tipsheet Extra!
