Moving Beyond Event-based Learning—a Managed Journey to Demonstrated Proficiency

We’regoing to open with a bold and brash statement—eLearning has really dumbed downthe training world.

Weknow that’s blasphemy from two people who have both been immersed in theeLearning world for over 20 years.

Here’swhat we’ve seen: with the onset of technology tools and the ability to create“courses” with just the flick of a button, people have created masses ofpoor-quality content that get labeled as training.

Manyof these are PowerPoint decks with text bullets and a few animated graphics.Some of them have multiple-choice quiz questions. Most of them bore people totears. And yet this is what some project sponsors have come to expect when theyrequest “training” for their teams. Employees have low expectations ofeLearning as they’ve come to equate “training” with “death by narratedPowerPoint.” Learning, for most people is completely different from training—ithappens on the job and not during “training.”

Asa profession, it’s time we all gather together and walk through the streets inindignation. It’s time for us to do a better job.

Thesingle-eLearning-course approach has helped solidify an event-based learningmindset. Event-based learning generally assumes that you hit me once with yourcontent and then I’ve got it and am ready to go forth into the world.

Thereality is people need to go out and try things a few times, mess up, getfeedback (if possible), and go back to the books even before they get back onthe horse and try again. Building this type of structure and scaffolding into atraining program moves you out of an event mindset and more into anapprenticeship model—where you’re taking people on a journey through yourcontent—from novice to mastery.

Whenit’s well-executed, eLearning can be a great investment. But far too often, itlives in a vacuum. It’s an event that happens in an echo chamber with no realconnection to the outside world. There’s no follow up, no tie in to real jobsor problems that need to be solved today.

Anotherdownside to the proliferation of eLearning is that it’s allowed busy managersto escape responsibility for their people’s performance. Their mindset couldvery well be I don’t have to trainbecause L&D has provided training for them.

Sohow can we reinsert the manager into the learning and development equation?This is one of the problems we’re challenging ourselves and our clients with.Using technology to support the process, can we create a more efficient andstructured way to get a front-line leader or manager back into the role ofmentor or coach? We think so. We’re calling this approach “managing the journey.”

So what does it look like?

We’recurrently working with a fast food company. They came to us with a challenge: everyyear they train more than 1,000 people on mostly procedural content. We couldhave created 20 hours of eLearning for them. Sounds natural, right? But our concernwas that this approach wasn’t going to help them improve results. Theirultimate end goal is about improving performance and getting people toproficiency—and ultimately mastery—as quickly as possible.

Takea look at some of their challenges:

• Theyhave a tremendous variety of tasks, which are mostly relatively simple.
• Traininghappens on the job, where you get interrupted all the time.
• There’sa lot of physical “feel” to the work—you can’t just watch a video and get it.Practice is critical to mastery.
• Peoplehave a tremendous ability to learn on the job if they can only get beyond acertain level of proficiency.

Attheir company, people are in it for the long haul. They have employees whostart as fry cooks and work their way up, staying with the company for yearsand sometimes landing in senior management along the way. They have a clearlydefined set of capabilities determined for each operational level in the organization.You graduate when you can show that you can do all those capabilities on thejob. The model is not novel; essentially you see it, you do it, and you areevaluated. But their investment in authentic evaluation is much higher than wesee in most organizations. You don’t just take a multiple-choice test. Youractual performance on the job is “observed” using a clear rubric. This is a lowstakes evaluation and you get formative feedback. Then you are “assessed” usinganother rubric. This is high stakes. You need to pass to earn the ability to dothe job. Again, you get formative feedback. Then you move onto the nextcapability and the next skill level. The level of operational discipline theyhave implemented is off the charts.

Thisapproach has been part of their training DNA for years and a big part of theirsuccess as a company. They nurture team members and provide mentored tasks andstructured journeys through the content in order to foster that environment andbuild the right culture. They came to us looking for more structure andtracking. They knew they wanted to develop some online content and capabilitiesto create a more efficient system, but they also didn’t want to break what wasalready working so well. As we started our initial design conversations withthem to put this model into an online format, we knew that the mentored face-to-facefeedback component needed to stay front and center.

We’vecollaborated with them to design a training program where technology doesn’treplace people, it backs people up and enhances the work and support they’re alreadydoing. We’re creating a beautiful open source LMS that looks nothing like anLMS—it’s branded to their organization and feels like a part of the work. Muchof the training still happens on the store floor, where people are shoulder toshoulder with experienced mentors and managers.

Takinga flipped classroom model, we provide short eLearning nuggets to explain whysomething matters and provide up close demonstrations. The trainers on thestore floor then get to keep their focus, not on lectures, but on mentoredpractice and coaching. Checklists and observation forms launched from the LMSprovide rubrics—and tracking—for managers to identify where team members needmore support.

Whatwe are actually doing is supporting their original training approach ratherthan trying to replace it. This means creating a blended journey in whichdemonstrated performance is the clearly understood end point. Through easy-to-readreports, results are transparent across the system. Individual stores caneasily see how individual employees are doing. Badges and ratings systems, bothin the system and in the real world in the form of pins, allow team members toproudly show their capabilities. eLearning modules are inserted in the processwhere they make sense—it’s not a splatter approach, but a thoughtful processwhere we identified those moments where eLearning could help a training managerbe more efficient.

Thisis definitely not event-based learning. There’s a view to the long-term endgoal for an individual team member—performance improvement and proficiency.

Sowhy don’t we do this for more cases where we require demonstrated performance?Let’s go beyond designing an event-based eLearning intervention and insteadhelp our businesses take charge of their critical learning journeys.

Note from the editor