Implementing Online Learning: One Company's Experience (Part 2)
by Kim Lambdin

Online learning is not really learning.
How do you overcome the perception that online learning is not really a learning and development activity? That’s a difficult question involving more than just evaluating whether or not an e-learning module is well designed, engaging, and appropriately interactive. To try and answer that question, I needed to think about the culture of the company as well as identify the end user better.

Company Culture and Audience
What I over-looked in my haste to implement e-learning, is that my company is a conservative financial services company that will never be leading-edge for anything. It is a stable and very successful company that is also a Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE). We don’t readily embrace change or the latest trends; it is not in our nature or our long history. Combine that culture with an end-user group whose median age is about 43, and I begin to see why they thought e-learning was not a valid learning endeavor.

The users associated online learning with “surfing the Web” and a frivolous use of time. Several of the users confided in me that they were afraid others would see them working through the lessons and be concerned that ‘real’ work wasn’t getting done. After all, my company prides itself on being a high-performance, results-driven organization, so who has time to do online learning at their desks? Managing to complete a few online modules everyday seemed like too much trouble and besides, it wasn’t really training. As I discovered, the end-user was more comfortable in a traditional classroom environment, away from work.

Lessons learned
Looking back, I can clearly see why my e-learning implementation results were so abysmal. How do you change perceptions and a company’s culture? V-E-R-Y slowly. What I discovered is that you need to start more slowly and do more “PR” work about online learning.
• Start at the grass roots level.
• Work with the employees who embrace e-learning (many have taken online college classes) and make them become advocates for e-learning. Get them talking about the convenience of online learning; it can be done on company time in short 30 minute intervals or it can be done from home.
• Talk to managers about the cost savings e-learning offers.
• Assure employees and their managers that solid principles of adult learning are embedded in the online learning and that many online modules have post-tests to measure an individual’s success.
• Start small or start with something simpler. For me that meant introducing WebEx as a self-serve, web-based presentation/conference tool. WebEx has been well received at all levels of the company, providing employees a softer and less intimidating introduction into using web-based tools.

Armed with new insights and a different plan of attack, I hope to have more success with online learning when we upgrade to Windows XP later this year.

Part 3 will look at participants who do not do well in an online learning environment.