Torture Them, Lose Them

I was on a phone call with my cousin. She was telling me about her year-and-a-half-year-old daughter who was unwell. She had fever. They had gone to a pediatrician who recommended her medicinal syrup. My cousin was frustrated that her daughter had started spitting out the medicine as soon as she gave it to her. It was a difficult situation.

I visited this cousin a couple of days later. As we chatted, her daughter played at the other end of the room. Later my cousin interrupted our conversation to give her daughter the medicine. She was tense about what would happen. She walked into the kitchen quietly, came back with a teaspoon and headed to the medicine shelf. Her daughter started cry as she picked up the medicine bottle. And then, I saw an unexpected scene play out before my eyes. As my tensed cousin started pouring the medicine into the spoon, her daughter started to retch. She was about to throw up. Frustrated, my cousin poured the medicine back into the bottle. Her daughter also seemed annoyed and upset.

I was bewildered and curious. How bad could a medicinal syrup taste be? I wanted to find out. After all it was a syrup from a reputed pharma company meant for young children. So I took a tiny sip of syrup. Things became crystal clear to me. The syrup tasted awful. My cousin's daughter who started retching at sight of syrup being poured into a spoon, long before it reached her tase buds was never going to have that medicine again.

What does this story have to do with elearning? Everything. It encapsulates the impact of the faulty way in which the elearning industry currently delivers training.

Learning may be necessary for employees to fix a certain fever that's in some way gnawing at an organization. Training that aims to educate learners to treat that fever is well intentioned. But good intention is not enough; it requires follow up action. Employees, like children, do what they are told. They train mainly in order to keep their jobs so they can keep their kitchen fires and families going.  

Ninety five percent of elearning courses that are being developed are retch worthy. And it's not all our fault. We're still in the dark ages of elearning. We don't have the technology to deliver yet. But even if we did, we know very little about designing engagement. As an industry, we have little to no demands or input for the producers of our development tools. And, producers don't care; not yet at least. Take a basic example of Articulate Rise's second user attempt for Knowlege Check design. This software provides the answer and incorrect feedback before the users's second attempt. We can't sequence it the way we want. Clients asked us to remove the second attempt as it made no sense. We couldn't do even that because the software didn't allow it. Instead we trained the client to accept it.

After over 20 years of e-learning implemention and in the seventh year of Rise's existence, we still cannot do what we did all along and there's no penalty that Rise has to pay for it. Elearning companies are still buying them for Rapid course development. We have applied industrial methods of army operations and software production for the development of training employees in everything. The effect is that users are retching with the quality of the products we put out.

Engagement in the elearning industry continues to be a buzz word that's not implemented beyond the idea of reducing the duration of each unit of learning. I used to work in the television industry where engagement was essential for the survival of a television programme. And we studied and experimented with all the tools and forms available and consulted each other— and we failed more than we succeeded. Yet we never questioned or stopped the pursuit. 

Elearning requires a different kind of engagement; a complex engagement. But we haven't even begun to scratch the surface or develop an attitude to pursue, experiment, or collaborate in its pursuit. The consequences of a lack of engagement with learners is so much more critical in our industries, factories, offices and schools. For many learners, elearning is still a new concept. They hope to engage while learning but don't know what to expect. If you make them retch, you will lose their faith and interest in elearning.   

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Learner's ain't coming back for poor learning experiences.

You cannot expect learners to keep coming back for bad experiences. If the learning audience is not genuinely engaged during training, it is likely they will be lost to training forever.  

AI is going to catch up with us on producing substandard quality of products that we deliver in 3-4 year's time. But it cannot produce engagement. It will reflect what the industry reflects.