digital learning - Blogs - DPG Community2024-03-28T20:59:32Zhttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/blog/feed/tag/digital+learningOne man's fight against awful e-learninghttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/blog/one-man-s-fight-against-awful-e-learning2018-11-30T17:55:25.000Z2018-11-30T17:55:25.000ZChris Hallhttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/members/ChrisHall325<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/180499919?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>Before we start, this is an area which really irks me. You’ll probably be able to tell this by what follows.</p><p><em><strong>"We can offer your staff access to hundreds of e-learning modules</strong></em>."</p><p>Every time I hear or see these claims by e-learning providers I get a compelling urge to launch something at the wall. And yet, they state this over and over again because it’s a sales strategy which clearly works</p><p>But why? Why are we obsessed with volume? Who in their right mind wants to do hundreds of e-learning modules? Especially when they're off the shelf generic tat which have little or no relevance to the work that they actually do.</p><p>What are the business needs these courses are addressing? You know your business needs, linked to your business strategy. Oh they aren’t? Well we’d better order us 20 then! It's just ridiculous.</p><p>When it comes to e-learning we seem to believe that it looks better to be able to offer as many courses as possible regardless of whether they are any good, relevant to our businesses or engaging to our staff.</p><p>But soft skills are universal and transferable, I hear people say. They may be. But how each organisation uses them isn’t. Furthermore, why would we want our people to do e-learning about people skills when they work in offices full of other people who, y'know, they could talk to?</p><p>Take leadership and management for example. Off the shelf leadership modules won’t be based around your organisations values, mission and vision. If they are you should be ashamed because you’ve managed to pick the most generic and cliched set of values in history.</p><p>Even if you do luck out and find some modules which contain your exact values. It still won’t explain how your organisation lives these values. The behaviours, processes and cultural idiosyncrasies your business has.</p><p>Modules which describe best practices won't explain how your company does things. Ultimately they won't help your people do their jobs better, easier or more efficiently.</p><p>You wouldn't just buy hundreds of random workshop sessions off the shelf for your people, so why do it with e-learning?</p><p>No wonder e-learning/digital learning gets such bad press.</p><p>So how do we fix it?</p><p>1) First of all, declare a cull on your e-learning. Re-examine all the courses you currently have from the point of view of what specific business needs are they addressing. Any which don't fix a problem within your business can go.</p><p>I'm guessing that's pretty much all of them? Good.</p><p>2) Hold digital learning in the same esteem as face to face learning. You wouldn't design and inflict face to face courses on your staff without properly establishing the needs which they address and clear learning outcomes which can be measured and ultimately impact on the profitability of your business. Treat digital learning exactly the same. Respect it as a meaningful tool not a catalogue filler.</p><p>3) Design with the learner in mind. This is crucial. If the first e-learning course your staff take is naff then you've lost them.</p><p>The content must be engaging and relevant. Work out what your people need to know and do, and how they will apply it in their work and stick to this. They don't need to know the history of everything or how other companies do things. Tell them how your company does it.</p><p>Equally, I can't stress enough how important user experience (UX) is. If you've managed to pry your staff away from YouTube to use your own in house e-learning then it better be easy to use. If learners can't find the things they want in 2 clicks or so then there'll find somewhere else they can go where they can.</p><p>Take time to make sure your e-learning is easy to use, that people can find and do what they want intuitively. If you need to build a "how to use this course" page then you've already lost.</p><p>So let's fix these negative perceptions of e-learning by binning the generic off the shelf courses, respecting our staff and the tools afforded to us by e-learning, and taking time to design engaging relevant content with a kick ass user experience which actually helps people do their job and develop within your organisation.</p><p>Rant over, thanks for reading (If you've managed to stick it out this long).</p></div>Unleash the Potential of Digital Learninghttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/blog/unleash-the-potential-of-digital-learning2015-12-18T10:37:17.000Z2015-12-18T10:37:17.000ZMike Collinshttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/members/MikeCollins<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2216688?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p></p>
<p>Employers urgently need to rethink and modernise the digital learning available to managers. While virtually all organisations now offer management digital learning solutions, they are doing it in a half hearted way. As a result, organisations and managers are not realising the huge potential that good quality digital learning offers and there is a real risk that managers will switch off from using technology to learn new workplace skills.</p>
<p>So says a new Chartered Management Institute (CMI) survey of 1,184 UK managers. The report, ‘<a href="http://www.managers.org.uk/digitallearning" target="_blank">Learning to Lead: The Digital Potential</a>’, found that 97% of UK managers spend at least one day a year on digital learning, but 37% say the learning is not aligned with organisational objectives. A further 79% say their organisation is not realizing the digital learning potential of smartphones and tablet web-enabled apps.</p>
<p>According to the CMI, it’s a real problem that organisations need to address: “Many employees need to rethink how they go about helping their managers learn new skills,” it says. “Just dumping textbooks onto smartphones is a dumb way to upskill managers. Managers want personalized bite-size content, to share knowledge and learn from connected peer networks, to ask questions and get feedback in real time. Why? Because it’s now part of how we work and live.”</p>
<p>Many managers think employers are not approaching digital learning in the right way. Seven in 10 (69%) claim employers choose digital learning for cost-cutting reasons. Only two in 10 (20%) think it is used to improve the quality of teaching.</p>
<p>Three quarters of managers want digital learning to become much more personalized through the use of adaptive learning technologies. They say the content and approach should be tailored to the personal learning style and progression of the user. As peer learning becomes ever more important and widespread, 58% of younger managers polled in the survey would like to see better networks become part of their learning. And they want learning to be accredited, but right now, just 20% said the digital learning they have undertaken so far has been accredited.</p>
<p>One surprising finding of the report is that younger managers are more likely to opt for face-to-face training. The CMI suggests that rather than this being because they don’t like digital learning, it is much more likely that they simply don’t like the digital learning currently on offer at their organisation. This is a generation that is accustomed to high-quality smartphone apps, so the e-learning materials provided at work fall well short of what they experience outside of work.</p>
<p>Those younger managers would like to see a lot more advanced digital training approaches offered, such as gamification. Those under the age of 35 are more than twice as likely (41%) to find games and apps useful than those aged over 55 (16%).</p>
<p>It is not a problem that is confined to managers either. There is plenty of research that shows that organisations and L&D departments are not leveraging technology properly for the workforce as a whole. The latest CIPD <a href="http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/survey-reports/learning-development-2015.aspx" target="_blank">learning and development survey</a> found that while three-quarters of organisations use learning technologies, only one in four (24%) were confident or very confident in their ability to use technology to increase L&D effectiveness.</p>
<p>It’s an issue that L&D & HR really needs to get to grips with, for the sake of managers, employees and the business.</p>
<p><em><strong>How are you embracing digital approaches to support workplace learning?</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>What challenges are you facing?</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>What opportunities are there to support learning via digital means?</strong></em></p>
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