Panelists:
Ed Sattar – CEO and President, 360trainingBjorn Billhardt – Founder and CEO, Enspire Learning
Kenneth Dublin – CEO and President, The Learning Pad
Sanjay Nasta – CEO, MicroAssist
Pick one challenge facing us in the field of e learning. What opportunity do you see nestled within that challenge?
Bjorn Billhardt – We live in a time of the next step of how technology will influence the learning field. Interactive and social media are ways in which you can now collaborate with other people. Technology is there before the applications catch up to it. That’s the opportunity – to use this interactive face-to-face media and figure out how to best create learning environments that take advantage of this. The challenge is that there’s always a lot of hype. Separating what actually will work and make people learn from what is not going to work is the challenge.Sanjay Nasta – I’ll agree with Bjorn. Our customers are getting more and more focused on the business value and effectiveness of learning. Learning for the sake of learning and learning purely for information is dying. I’m a huge proponent of social learning. Also, the availability of learning anytime anywhere. The idea of an eight-hour class, while it will still be around, is going away. I learn from YouTube. I originally come from the software development field. Everyone wanted to make their own accounting program. Quickbooks killed that.
Ken Dublin – Our companies overlap and they each have very distinct end users. The challenge I’m facing as a vocational education institution is the lack of computer skills. My end users haven’t heard of a podcast or wiki. So we can have all of these great tools but if the end user is not able to use the software…there’s an opportunity in training them to use technology. I believe in blended learning for vocational education. Another challenge is making sure the assessments are being taken by the person taking the class.
Ed Sattar – We deal with consumer-based and corporate-based compliance training. The first is realtors, broker, cosmetologists, etc. pursuing some sort of certification. The challenge we see is that there’s a huge margin and price erosion. There’s relentless price pressure from corporate decision-makers to drive the prices down. However, they demand interactivity—moving objects and video, which is very expensive. The other thing is the challenge of demonstrating that elearning leads to behavior change. You can assess if people understand the rules, but does this lead to behavior change? Internationally there’s the ROI issue. In the U.S. that used to be more of an issue than it is now.
Are you seeing more opportunity for e learning in the U.S. or Global companies?
Ken Dublin – From the spam I get from all the companies in India and Brazil, it definitely is global. When you see companies who have a global workforce, you need to provide them with tools. Global Industry Analysis Inc. expects global learning to reach $107.3 billion by 2015.Ed Sattar – From a compliance perspective, the U.S. will be the main market, due to Sarbanes-Oxley, Medicaid, etc. That will continue to grow. They’re expecting Asia to be the second largest market behind the U.S., surpassing the U.K. I see more opportunities in leadership training vs. compliance training. I was in Manila recently and they wanted leadership training. The reason is that in Asia, educational programs are very focused. You don’t take electives. So you come out of school not very well rounded. You need these leadership training courses to supplement that. Most of the people that run these global companies are ex-pats from the U.S. or Europe. Middle management in global companies is not yet well-groomed.
Are there particular industry sectors where you anticipate greater growth than others for e learning?
Sanjay Nasta – Government’s on the decline for us. Health and energy, even within government agencies, is thriving. We’re doing a lot of training around health awareness. In our particular company, we do a lot with law enforcement, which never seems to dry up.Bjorn Billhardt – We do a lot of leadership training. Internationally, there’s a huge thirst for leadership training especially China & Indonesia. More and more of our employees are traveling internationally to deliver both in-person training and online training. The brand of American education (i.e. getting a degree) is so powerful still across the world. I’m from Germany and it’s still the case, even there. From a leadership training perspective, the opportunity is where the knowledge workers are. The amount of information they have to process and put to productive use in their field is tremendous, in a much deeper way than it used to be when companies were more hierarchical. You need to understand as a knowledge worker what the company’s goals are and how you can contribute to them. Financial services, technology, the medical field. Soft skills, business skills, communication skills. Those things will continue to grow.
What kinds of skill-sets would you like instructional designers to have?
Bjorn Billhardt - Cross-functional, higher-level thinking skills. There’s of course the product knowledge, which is critical, but above and beyond that, what our clients are looking for is for us to understand their business. Not just the learning objectives but their business objectives and why the HR department was tasked with creating this training. We need to understand what the business is about, what their strategy is about, what the CEO is trying to accomplish. Showing that you have the ability to think on a higher level as to why a course is needed. And then thinking creatively outside of the box.Ed Sattar – I would definitely second that. Someone who has the mindset of a product manager. Who thinks strategically. Who has the ability to interact with stakeholders and C level executives. Prices are dropping, so the cost of e learning has to drop. A lot of the tactical stuff has to be off-shored. How do we build better tools into our content management system so that even a layman can use them? Also project management skills.
Ken Dublin – Most of the instructional designers I know start out as teachers or trainers. That helps them know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to learning. I’m a proponent of KISS, keep it simple. I’ve seen some instructional designers use open-source software and design fantastic stuff. Don’t break the bank. You can use CamStudio and Skype.
Sanjay Nasta – I’ll agree with Bjorn and add that things are changing so fast…the ability to acquire new information quickly. We want to be able to speak with authority to our clients about how to create a course using instructional design principles, but the technology changes so fast. Flash is dying to HTML5. Instructional designers have to be able to absorb the rate of technology. I think learning is behind in absorbing technology. We are about to start catching up, though. I think the next three years are going to see a rapid change in technology and you have to be flexible.
Bjorn Billhardt – Mindy Jackson is one of the best IDs in Austin if not the U.S. and really delves deeply into people’s background in hiring. Mindy, what are you looking for in talent?
Mindy Jackson – A trans-disciplinary person. Someone who can integrate the learning sciences with the business acumen. Speak the language of business and synthesize a lot of information very quickly. Pull information from many different sources and make sound decisions from this.
With the proliferation of mobile devices, why are we lagging behind in creating mobile courses?
Annette Priest – The cost. The customers are driving the prices down. Right now there is a fractured playing field. When you develop for mobile, you need to develop for different devices and the apps are not consistent. As HTML5 takes off, it will get better, but there will still be differences on different devices. We’re getting to a better place.Bjorn Billhardt – I don’t think we’ve figured out how to use mobile devices for learning. We have a webinar on our site about mobile learning. There’s a misunderstanding among clients that we can take a two-hour e learning course and transform it easily to mobile.
Annette Priest – Context is really key and is complicated. Who’s using the device? What type of device? Is the environment loud, bright? How much time do they have? Are they being interrupted? This requires a totally different thought process.
Sanjay Nasta – We don’t have an enterprise mobile device yet. Companies are working on that. We need to resolve affordability & infrastructure issues. Intel’s development will help. The government issue is accessibility.
Ed Sattar – There’s a mindset of, “let’s do mobile learning for the sake of mobile learning.” And then there’s the ROI mindset. Then there’s whether there’s a way to apply mobile learning to a company’s objectives.
Laura James (360training.com) - For the compliance industry, a mobile device is useful, because you can be practicing for your exam when you’re waiting in line, etc. It’s great for reinforcement and practice during small chunks of time we have throughout the day. But we do thousands of hours of training a year. Maintaining that on multiple platforms is a huge issue.
Ken Dublin – K-12 students are already doing their homework on their smart phones. Kids have better eyesight than adults.
We’d like to hear your take on IDs doing less technical instructional design and being in more of a consultant role.
Bjorn Billhardt – The Khan Academy is brilliant. Sal Khan explains very complicated subject matter in very easy terms. As the mediums change to more modular quick content and SMEs are becoming more familiar with the medium…it used to be there was very clearly defined “classroom” training. And then Sal Khan comes along with his little screen doodles that are incredibly effective. It goes back to thinking of how an instructional designer can be a consultant to the expert. Bring the expert on-screen.Laura James (360training.com) – We’re working directly with a lot of SMEs. Some are very good at training, but a lot of them don’t have that background. I’m looking for IDs who are good coaches to help the SMEs be more self-sufficient.
How do you make decisions on the tradeoff of cost versus quality?
Ed Sattar – Compliance training that used to cost the student $139 now costs $39. We decided to do crowd sourcing. We brand our site as an “Amazon” of training and education. We drive traffic leads and call out to trainers and content experts. We syndicate that content with classroom training. That was our counter-strategy. You can upload SCORM content. And we have moderators behind the scenes: our instructional designers. They look at if the course is instructionally sound.Participant – For vendors like Dell, the development cycle is getting shorter. There’s a question of how to modify the e learning process to keep up with shortening development cycles.
Ed Sattar – Regarding quality, when we’re out there pitching to corporate clients, they say different things. Some need interactivity, some want a barebones course. We’ve created an option for PowerPoint submissions.Are there new ways to assess proficiency that are more compelling than traditional ways?
Linda Warren – Medical simulators are a good example. They track what you’re doing. In the end, you have output showing what you’ve accomplished. So the assessment isn’t based on a test but how well you’ve done the task.Where are the credible studies demonstrating that learning actually takes place in an e learning course?
Sanjay Nasta – Can I reframe that? It’s performance taking place.Linda Warren – We’re a vendor. We create the training and see how it works. Our relationship ends when we deliver the training. It’s up to the client to engage us to do that follow-up study or to do it themselves or with a 3rd party, unless a pilot study with testing is part of the process.
Is there a journal study or citation that tracks the effectiveness of e learning?
Annette Priest – I did some work for the Army and they’ve done research on it. If you dig into the ASTD Yearbook (compilation of studies) I’m sure you can find some more detail. The Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL) has that.Participant – Look particularly at the US marines.
Bjorn Billhardt – The dearth of hard evidence that e learning is truly affecting behavior may relate to the fact that it’s really difficult to measure this. The question is asked more about e learning than classroom training. It’s just as hard to measure it for a day-long lecture or an MBA program as it is for e learning. You have to know what you want to measure first. Maybe it’s more of an art than a science form. When a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) says “this is what I want” to the CEO (say, for a Superbowl ad), there are so many factors going into it. Marketers speak the language of ROI and they understand that you can’t really measure things. CMO’s reframe it in terms of anecdotal trends. You can piece together a preponderance of evidence that a course is effective. They use both credibility and marketing communication.Looking at the ADDIE model, which part is the easiest to compromise to get the product out there faster/cheaper?
Mindy Jackson – It’s a very important model because it keeps us attuned to the important aspects of designing learning. For the advanced practitioner, once you’ve used that model many times, it helps you in your work. You get a lot from your training partner, and then you have to decide what’s missing that will inhibit the construction of the learning. Sometimes they’ll give you what you need and sometimes they won’t.What kind of social learning has been effective and what do you see on the horizon?
Sanjay – We run a peer-to-peer group called Elearning Council. It’s a very “try and see what succeeds” structure. It’s very experimental.Birgit Schultz – At the panel yesterday, they talked about the “control and command” vs. “encourage and engage.” One argument for building social media in is that if you let the learners create content, it may not be accurate. But the rest of the group will mediate that. The outcome of using social media for learning is a more self-reliant individual who will think outside the box and be a more well-rounded employee.
Sanjay Nasta – In social media, people check the facts, which creates a more active and engaged learner. The Horizon Report outlines what they call near-term, mid-term and far-term technologies that will have an impact on learning: mobile, ebooks, augmented reality, game-based, gesture-based computing, and elearning analytics. That’s one place to keep a finger on a pulse of what is changing. Where else can we go to keep a finger on the pulse?
Ken Dublin – Tapping into organizations like ASTD. Other national agencies: salt.org – look under Resources on their site. osalt.com shows all of the commercial software and open-source alternatives. I work with a company is looking at working with using 3D technology/iPhone camera to train employees on physical structures they encounter in the workplace. Other individuals who have been on that spot where the structure is located can add information to the 3D modeling again. This was from salt.org.
Bjorn Billhardt – Our industry is often very myopic. Let’s go outside our industry. TechCrunch and Gigaohm are great sites for looking at technology. A lot of their stuff will fade, but some will stick.
Sanjay Nasta – I’m creating a personal learning network. I have a Twitter group called “Best of Learning.” You can create a flipbook on your iPad of your Twitter feeds.
Laura James – The Elearning Guild. Looking at other fields can add a different perspective. Books on creative writing and storytelling. Demographics, audience, and psychology books. Branching out a little bit and picking out a book from a completely different field.
Ed Sattar – LinkedIn’s Instructional Technology group.
Participant –There’s a saturation of information. [The panelists agreed.]
Karen Wade – Austin ASTD has a group called the Cliff Notes Club. If you want a great reading list, go back on our calendar and look at the books.What did we miss tonight? What questions we should have asked?
Ken Dublin – What I tell my staff is to be a lifelong learner. As a learning professional, you’re always giving. What are you taking? Always replenish yourself. Take care of yourself and it will keep you creative and thinking out of the box. Be learning other areas so that when one area dries up, you can transfer to another.Sanjay Nasta – When I go through an airport, I’ll buy a random magazine and get inspired. Yes, entrepreneurs have a nasty habit of looking everywhere (the shiny penny syndrome), but every once in a while it pays off.
How has the competitive landscape changed your business in the last few years?
Bjorn Billhardt – I truly think we’re just at the beginning of this interactive revolution. In 10 years, we will be learning completely differently from how we’re learning today. As learning designers, you cannot relent on thinking, “How can we use this new technology?” Maybe the killer app of mobile learning is using the iPad in the classroom, for instance. Don’t just get enamored with the technology but think about how it can be used to improve learning.Sanjay Nasta – How people learn about their hobbies is very different from how they learn about their professions. For instance, people use YouTube. There are lessons in that.
Karen Wade – Tonight my big goal was to start a conversation. At ASTD, we have a LinkedIn group, a Yahoo group and we communicate on Twitter. This is our last eLearning SIG for 2011 but we have a great line up for 2012 that you can access on the Austin ASTD events calendar.
Suzette Conway – Use the Twitter hashtag #el2012 to continue this topic. Clay Leben will be editing the video he recorded of tonight’s talk and we’ll be posting it on YouTube.
PS: Taken by Tracy Jones during the event. Not a verbatim transcript.
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