Busting the barriers to e-learning

Howard Hills describes how you can overcome the blocks to e-learning adoption in your organisation.

Directing effort at the barriers that matter is the cost-effective way to ensure that e-learning will break barriers. What are the most significant barriers to E-learning perceived by users over the next three years?

Cost, relevance and staff resistance are the three most frequently cited examples of barriers to the successful deployment of e-learning. Their relative importance varies with the experience an organisation has in deploying e-learning. For the less experienced, cost is perceived as the most important barrier but this becomes much less significant once organisations start to use e-learning seriously. Ensuring relevant content and overcoming staff resistance are seen as more important as organisations gain experience. In practice these two barriers are linked as users show least resistance to using e-learning when they perceive the content as relevant to their current job.

Other key barriers mentioned by users are lack of knowledge about the potential of e-learning, lack of e-learning management skills, lack of quality material, available content being too generic, lack of staff IT skills and inadequate ICT infrastructure. All these are linked, and overcoming staff resistance is the top priority.

At an early stage of deploying e-learning on a significant scale organisations must have strategies aimed at overcoming staff resistance - unfortunately it is only after deploying e-learning that many training managers realise this.

What advice can we offer for organisations at an early stage of adopting e-learning?

Overcoming staff resistance requires:

• e-learning directly relevant to the job (today’s job rather than tomorrow’s);
• marketing and sales effort to encourage and inform usage;
• senior management support and endorsement;
• that examples are set by directors and top management;
• encouragement by line managers; and
• opportunities to integrate lessons learnt into workplace assignments.

E-learning that requires the completion of work tasks, the results of which feed back into the next stage of e-learning ensures that e-learning is relevant to today’s job; users themselves regard it as better quality (not because of some gold standard of design but because it is more relevant). If this is combined with collaboration with tutors and colleagues the whole process is more dynamic with a greater level of learner involvement. E-learning ceases to be about content and is much more about shared learning, particularly where learners are separated by geography or time. For example a 24/7 operation benefits from study groups in different shifts, people who may well never or rarely see each other, with supervisors who only go home when they can be relieved. They deal with common problems in the same environment but at different times. The modern virtual learning environment includes some content, some workplace tasks, some learner assignments reviewed by tutors and some collaborative projects. This breaks down the barriers of time, place, social involvement and lack of appropriate content (workplace assignments have to be directly relevant to the job).

Some care should be taken over collaboration. For many this is an ideal way of encouraging learners and breaking down resistance. Some of us are less inclined to participate and may prefer to do so with smaller groups of people we know well rather than larger groups. e-learning provides the flexibility to suit all personality types and trained tutors can recognise patterns of behaviour in their learners, much as classroom trainers do.

The implementation of e-learning that will break barriers requires a management team with the necessary skills to influence senior management, to get the technology right, to market e-learning as well as relevant content through analysis and design, and to measure, survey and evaluate the results. All these skills are rarely present in in-house training teams even though more than a third of organisations intend to do all this themselves!