Marc My Words: The Three Laws of eLearning Failure

“It’s fine tocelebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” 

—Bill Gates

Few things in life are certain. Death and taxes, as they say, for sure.You might think of more. But in our business, despite our often-blindinginsistence that eLearning is great, and wonderful, and true, i.e., certain to succeed, there is,unfortunately, lots of failure out there.

Despite our best efforts, we can’t always be sure eLearning will work. Wecan’t be certain it will save money, or be greeted with open arms. We can’t becertain the next tool, technology, or system will be better than the last. Wecan try to reduce the odds of a fiasco, but nothing is ironclad.

OK, maybe not nothing. In my travels around the eLearning space, I’vecome up with three situations where, almost certainly, eLearning will fail.

Alaw, as in a scientific law, always applies under the same conditions, and implies thatthere is a causal relationship involving its elements (Wikipedia). I believethe same can be said for these three “laws”of eLearning failure:

Law 1: Great eLearning technology combined with bad contentresults in more efficiently delivered bad content.

Learning without learning technology cannot scale. But learningtechnology without any learning is just a shiny object (as in shiny object syndrome).

Adding technology to the mix will not make learning better if it’s notgood to begin with. It will not magically make incomplete content morecomplete, irrelevant content more relevant, or suddenly make incorrectinformation correct. All it does is increase the efficiency of doing the wrongthing. This is why content curation is becoming soimportant.

Often, technology—eLearning and otherwise—can make things worse. Puttinga lousy course online doesn’t make it better. In poorly designed classroomtraining, there is—hopefully—a knowledgeable instructor who can clarify,explain, and demonstrate hard-to-understand concepts and topics. There is nosuch support online. Which is one reason why instructional design still matters and may be more critical foreLearning than for classroom training.

Law 2: eLearning that is compensation for bad documentation, tools,processes, or management will ultimately prove to be a waste of time and money.

eLearning is not a cure-all. Despite what we’d like to think, we can’tsolve deeper, more systemic problems simply with more online training. Howoften have we in the training business (excuse me, the “learning” business)been asked to use training to compensate for documents that no one canunderstand (use eLearning to explain each page), inefficiently designed toolsor processes (use eLearning to teach “workarounds”), or bad management (offereLearning on dealing with “difficult” people)? Too often, I imagine.

Instead, suggest that efforts focus on the root causes of the problem. Redesign the documentation, fix worktools and processes, and select better managers. Performance support can helphere. eLearning might be part of the solution, but without getting at theunderlying issues, you are merely kicking the can down the road. Eventually,you will run out of road.

Law 3: When great eLearning comes up against a lousy learningculture, the culture wins every time.

An organization that has a learning culture is one where knowledge,insight, and expertise are freely shared. Having lots of training, includinglots of eLearning is not enough. A learning culture goes to the heart of howthe organization is led and managed, how performance and knowledge sharing isrecognized and rewarded, and how the organization sees and deals withexperimentation, risk, out-of-the-box thinking, and innovation.

Becoming a real learning organization is much harder than becoming atechnologically savvy organization. While both are important, a solid learningculture can thrive without the latest technology, but the latest technologywon’t, in and of itself, create a learning culture.

Peter Druckeronce said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” How true. A bad organizationalculture can smother almost all innovativeness. This is surely the case wheneLearning, even great eLearning, comes up against it. When it fails, as it willinevitably will, you must get beyond the technology, the strategy or thelearning design, to the broader environment. It is there you will find yourculprit.

Look around your organization. Think back on your eLearning career andremember all the program implementations you’ve been a part of. If they failed,it’s almost certainly due to one or more of these three laws. Now, get in thereand fix it.