I work in vocational education and am old enough to remember when local campuses ran a variety of learning programs. Often these were to provide basic skills for business trainees or skills in areas of interest, such as arts and crafts. Campus cafeterias were filled with a variety of learners, bohemian and industry. A riot of knowledge, noise, colour and activity.
Well, not quite as this photo from Flickr Commons of Servicemen eating in the home economics cafeteria in 1917-18. Troy photo. by Cornell University Library, depicts, but you get the idea 🙂 Local campuses were busy.
Adult Community Education (ACE) programs have now been shelved for the realisation of job related outcomes. There is just no time or budget to learn paper mache, visit workplaces, or chat about local events.
E-learning is often seen as the saviour of shrinking teaching budgets, and another sign of the times is the movement from face to face classes to faceless MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). And our campuses are emptying.
Why would you lose productivity to send your staff to a local campus to learn the complicated program like Adobe when you can watch Adobe TV? http://tv.adobe.com/channels/ or attend a mathematics class when you have the Kahn Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/ or learn the basics of water treatment from a Denmark University https://www.edx.org/
I started writing water treatment e-learning courses for operators in Australia back in 2005, and have helped the industry accept and embed this way of learning. In many ways e-learning just makes good sense. It makes learning available to remote operators who had difficulty accessing training opportunities. Webinars give our Diploma class access to international guest speakers and industry specialists. Adult learners can progress at their own pace, and complete their learning at a faster or slower rate, and with more support. They can sit in a quiet place and focus on the learning. Digest new ideas, explore further. Experienced workers can use the material as refresher training, and skip the boring bits to go straight to the assessment. Done and dusted learning.
But it can also make you invisible.
As the teacher you are not there, in the workplace, or sitting next to the learner, or talking to the whole class at once. Your students cannot see how you have worked hard to be where you are, that you have years of experiences and stories to share, that you acknowledge they may not understand it first go round, that you can help them. Your industry hasn’t seen you for a long time, and feels you are now out of touch. They may even sign up with a different training organisation, now learning is free, global and generic.
Training and Development Managers are somewhat numb to the inbound marketing strategies, disengaged from self-paced learning, and a little sceptical that the teacher can remain current without the face to face interaction of industry and students. They are not yet confident of the outbound marketing strategies either, to put their limited training budget against an Edmodo group or Facebook page. They don’t always believe your LinkedIn profile with its various recommendations and skills endorsements.
You have become someone they don’t personally know, offering a course they can’t tangibly hold, for skills they desperately need.
This is the feedback I received at a recent industry conference and made me reflect on how industry has responded to e-learning. We are now adapting our strategies to maintain the physical touch by:
- Scheduling onsite visits or video conference sessions to review our trainee’s learning progress.
- Offering short face to face programs on campus to compliment our online courses.
- Setting minimum webinar class sizes to ensure there are group discussions.
- Negotiating with the workplace to hold the training onsite.
- Negotiating longer industry placements for trainers to ensure they maintain currency and visibility.
- Encouraging students back to campus with personal training options (you have a personal trainer for maintaining your fitness, so why not for your learning?).
Don’t leave your e-learner to hold blind faith in your ability to deliver. Every time they enrol you will need to prove this.
E-teaching 