Why eLearnings fail (#2)

Stefan Cornelius • 4. Mai 2020

"Sorry I was on mute”. That seems to be the new cheapest excuse since “I did not have time”. Log on, say hello, then mute and continue doing other stuff: reading emails, taking a call, texting an IM, taking a comfort break, folding laundry. Sounds overly dramatic? Here is my confession – I have done all that (blushing while posting this). And my gut feeling is I am not the only one – hand on your heart.

First of all I am to blame: lack of focus, poor judgment, wrong decision. Trying to do one thing while in the midst of another. Neurologically our brains are not made for multitasking. Not the ladies’, not the gentlemen’s nor anybody else’s. Still doubting? Read related research. Now why is it that we are still trying, especially when attending digital trainings or meetings?

According to research the attention span of learners in a face-2-face environment is 20 mins – in the virtual environment attention drops after 6 mins – repeat six. Do you copy? In communication notably in learning the competition for our attention has fiercely intensified. While we have a certain oversight and even control over attendees in a physical classroom setting we have got almost none in a virtual environment. 

Some platforms now are trying to counter that giving the facilitator a flag next to the participant’s name if they are working in an application different than the meeting platform. Rumour has it though that people are using a secondary laptop, their tablet or mobile phone as a countermeasure. Another confession.

Now we might be on mute, have bandwidth issues or other connectivity problems – I buy all that. Question is whether and how we as hosts can, say, make it harder for participants to disengage – or better – engage them more? One approach is, like in the physical setting, interaction – yet even more frequently. Challenge and reward – so they repeatedly get mini doses of dopamine. The Silicon Valley gurus openly admit this is the underlying concept of all addictive mobile device apps.

Why not start the meeting on time, welcoming everyone and give them another 3 mins to just finish that one email they were composing, get a cup of tea or brief their kids to not disturb for the duration of the virtual meeting? Have a grid on screen to put their names and next to it just one expectation they have for the meeting? Acknowledge by calling out occasional ones for clarification. 

Ask them to (virtually) raise their hand when they have muted their mobile, muted their secondary mobile, switched off email and so on. Make it serious fun. When you share content ask them for their opinion and examples – again listen and acknowledge. Run polls occasionally to activate them and gauge how your audience is feeling. Use some whiteboards in between for a full brainstorm, pick some of their ideas and discuss.

Even upfront there is stuff you can try next time: send them an email and sign-post prerequisites clear and concise. One client group of 20 wanted to gather in a meeting room and participate from one machine while content would be projected to one screen. We insisted everyone participate from their individual computer – with great interactions eventually. 

Ask them to tell their teams, bosses, peers to not interrupt during the meeting. Suggest sitting somewhere silent and hidden from the usual office mayhem. Recommend they check technology at their end e.g. to install latest updates of selected communications platform and browser, to clear cache, have webcam on, have headset, have back-up headset. Have them come prepared and ideally bring something to virtually share.

When it is showtime acknowledge every effort they make to participate and contribute. And you can give them the ultimate reward: by all means finish on time or ideally give them some time back by finishing somewhat early. Better they feel “gosh this was a little short”. 

Why eLearnings fail (#3)

von Stefan Cornelius • 1. Juli 2020
Traffic jams, crowded trains, late planes, budget hotels – the side effect of attending a face-2-face learning event – these days participants don’t really miss them. The run-up to a virtual learning event seems relatively straightforward. But is it? Find a quiet spot in your home where none of the two-legged and four-legged family members can visibly nor acoustically interfere, switch off email and put mobile phones on silent mode. You wish! At this point we have got to zoom out a little, though. Indeed business does not pause while experts and leaders are attending a learning event. Participants do have teams, colleagues, clients and bosses. Those all have different needs and expectations which are not suspended just because of the fact learners undergo a training. Catching a participant on his mobile during a face-2-face leadership programme he just replied “Business goes on, you know”. You could argue that participants should be able to take a conscious decision to either participate or do business - notably (emerging) leaders. You could argue the general rules of politeness and appreciation would keep them from using their mobile device when people are talking to them – far-fetched. While in a classroom setting there is some social pressure and control from peers and facilitators to participate and contribute, in a virtual setting this is different. There is the temptation to just send that one email, instant message or quickly take that brief call because this seemingly goes unnoticed. Funny enough when participants do the latter without properly muting themselves on the virtual learning platform. While part of the problem is learners’ desperate attempt to multi-task (we briefly talked about this in part #2) another part is learners’ bosses attitude. Don’t get me wrong here: many of them are of great support to their direct reports’ learning experience. Still some managers call learners on their phones during the learning intervention or send an email and expect a timely response. OK there might be a business urgency – fair enough. Yet in many cases they expect participants’ contribution to a proposal or to do a piece of research for them. For blended learning programmes for example participants repeatedly report back to us that their managers discouraged them to participate in the “virtual stuff” and advised them to just attend the face-2-face portion of the learning journey. This is also where HRBPs (HR Business Partners) come in. In many cases they could signpost in a clearer fashion to the learners’ bosses how the learning programme works – and that the virtual portion is a full-fledged part of it rather than a nice-to-have digital chit-chat. On top of that we urge participants to set an out-of-office notification for the duration of each learning intervention. With some clients we do video conferences to set expectations with learners’ bosses BEFORE we even kick-off the programme with the learners themselves. We help them to understand their role in supporting, encouraging and coaching their team members. They realise they have a stake in contributing to a positive return on their investment i.e. opportunity cost and real expenditure related to their team members’ attendance. Doing this they better understand and, eventually appreciate, the benefit of the programme in its entirety.

Why eLearnings fail (#1)

von Stefan Cornelius • 20. April 2020
Which eLearning did you recently attend that you would go recommending to your boss to attend? Seriously? Please share with us. Two decades of eLearnings have passed. And we still have miles to go to make this fun. Ok fun does not matter to you? Fine – still a lot of ground to cover to make them effective then. You might argue this is generational. Fair point. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers (count me in) are used to being taught in the classroom. If you were a subject matter expert of some sorts your boss nominated you to teach (to-be) peers. That was the cheapest non consequential promotion they could get you. You felt recognized, elevated. Yet effectively this meant an additional role on top of your existing one. Preparation in your spare time. And then make time to catch up on the “real work” you did not do while teaching. Pay raise? You wish. And yet we loved the teaching, the exposure, yes we confess: the stage. As the learning industry moved on eLearning came about. Conventional Trainings were so 90s - they had to be converted into “Learning Journeys”. State-of-the-art learning had to be “blended” – no we are not talking coffee or whiskey. Classroom trainings had to be upgraded with virtual interventions – either before or after to begin with. And eventually to be completely replaced by it – in many cases. At first many of them stalled. You see it coming: Yes of course the prime reason was us – the facilitators. We felt they took the stage away from us replacing it with shaky communication systems, a camera with low resolution and even worse: no instant audience response. I still remember an executive of corporate learning breaking the news in room 2.01 with around 50 classroom trainers: “It’s here to stay” he said with an unmistakable blend of French and English. To us it sounded like a threat rather than an encouragement to embrace the new. So here’s reason #1 why eLearnings fail: The facilitator. Knowledge is a given – you would hope. Like in classroom they should understand what they talk about. That said while there is instant response in the classroom if the facilitator produces nonsense a digital presenter easier got away with being light on content, poor on rhetorics using boring slides. The learners often were in blank fear their name might be called out and they would need to speak into the void – and did hope this would go by soon. Other than that facilitators would turn into a mere “slide reader”, not a lot of variation in pitch, speed and volume and being visibly uncomfortable, embarrassed and stressed when webcam was on. Solution was: leave it off “to save bandwidth”. Unlike in the physical classroom they would not ask learners any question nor elicit any other reaction e.g. examples they could think of. While we next time need to look at other factors like visuals, flow, duration, learners’ attention span, learners’ bosses interventions, and, yes, technology here are a couple of things we learned over many hundred hours Web-based Learning Interact frequently Less teaching more facilitation Call participants repeatedly out with their names to elicit a reaction Think TV-Host: speak, smile, pause Manage your voice projection – vary pitch, speed and volume Know your stuff – and have a cheat sheet handy And: don’t suffer: Enjoy!