Turning over a new leaf

When the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development invited me to speak at their annual HRD event at London's Olympia I was delighted. I wasn't so keen when they asked me to supply my slides many weeks in advance. The organisers wanted them so they could produce delegate packs that included paper versions of my slide show. I could understand their eagerness, but I hesitated. I don't normally send my slides too far in advance of a presentation for three reasons - firstly I don't think it's a good use of resources to produce paper based slides and secondly, it's not good pedagogical practice because looking down at a paper rendition of slides you are about to see can be distracting for delegates when they should be engaging with the front-of-house presentation. It's even more confusing if the slides don't match the presentation.

Which brings me to my third point - my slide decks change almost by the day. Learning technology is a fast moving topic. It changes by rapidly, and there are always new things that can be added. So I sent a provisional set of slides to the organisers about 2 weeks before the event, with the warning to them that these would not be the final production. I duly arrived on the day with a drastically updated set, as I had anticipated I would. Even in the middle of my presentation (during a brief break in the workshop) I was still tinkering, adding an extra few slides which I had seen on Jane Hart's blog that morning that were very relevant to my presentation (such as the chart above). She talks about the five key ways knowledge workers like to learn today. You can see the slide set below, with Jane's research report included in the middle, and I would also encourage you go to her blog to read the full report.

Learning Futures: Introducing eLearning into your Company from Steve Wheeler

The message I definitely had to include from Jane's work based research study is that when implementing elearning into any company, one of the most important things to avoid is simply 'shovelling across content' from traditional classroom based learning into a digital medium. Electronic page-turning, she argues, just isn't enough, and of course, she is right. And yet the practice still persists, either because managers consider it to be cost effective, or they don't know that there are better, more effective ways to present digital learning. Page turning approaches may be cheap, but they are actually false economy, because they simply turn employees off. The result is that employees fail to learn what the company has paid for them to learn. This kind of thinking was voiced during the session. Someone mentioned that they thought elearning would be attractive to many companies because it would 'save money'. The ensuing discussion quickly demolished this notion - it is rare indeed that a company actually save money by implementing elearning, and surpringly, cost saving should not be a consideration when elearning is being implemented. More important reasons for implementing elearning are that it provides learning opportunities for employees who would otherwise not have a chance to learn, and it offers flexibility of pace and style.  As Jane Hart argues in her report, one of the things most knowledge workers desire is to be able to learn flexibly, whilst remaining within the flow of their work, and preferably without leaving the work space to do so.

We had a good time during the session at Olympia. I guess though that some of the delegates were a little confused that the slides they had in their pack were not identical to the ones they saw on the screen. They were engaged in their own version of page turning, and perhaps some of them benefited, because I saw them scribbling notes on the slide images. Yet there are much better ways of presenting learning than simply sequencing content in a linear manner. I am sure that most were more engaged with the discussion we enjoyed during the session than they were with the linear content provided as slide handouts. The same principle applies to elearning. I think it's about time organisations and managers began to wake up and realise that digital learning is different to traditional learning. It's about time they all turned over a new leaf.

Image courtesy of Jane Hart


Turning over a new leaf by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.