"Online trainings not so successful" - lively debate on LinkedIn

Apparently, the log might be the most effective learning technology ever invented. Read on to find out why...

There is a discussion in the group Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group on Linkedin which appears to have taken on a life of its own. With nearly 600 posts, it represents an interesting cross section of what can be quite polarised views on the success (or otherwise) of learning technology as compared to classroom methods.

Some interesting points have been made on the way, and I've also weighed in with some views along the way. Given that you have to be on Linkedin and a member of this particular group to see it, I thought I'd share my last response to a comment posted that said:

No matter how hi-tech we are or how good the CBT/Online Training is, nothing replaces the "real time" of a live instructor who interacts with the student. The relationships fostered in the classroom training session for exceeds the few dollars saved by not contracting with a live person. In the 90's, at Lifeway Resources, we spent millions on then hi-tech video training through satellite transmission. In the end, all we did was spend millions on no training. 

In the words of a great Greek teacher, "the best classroom is me seating on one side of the log with you siting on the other exchanging ideas".

Here's my response:

One-to-one tutoring and support can be highly effective. But it doesn't scale very easily. With new technologies that enable wider interactive access to expertise it is feasible for one good teacher to effectively reach a wider audience than "one". As soon as the numbers of students rise, a teacher/trainer has to juggle attention and that leads to compromise - mainly in depersonalising the learning experience.

As a result a great deal of classroom teaching/training is simply ineffective even with a good quality instructor. Unfortunately there is a shortage of good instructors, so many students' experience is reduced to just making it through the session either in a state of boredom, confusion or anxiety. That can't be right.

With the technology now at hand to many (but by no means all) of us in the world, we can reach more people with a consistent learning experience, even if it lacks some level of personalisation. That too though is changing. A well designed CBT/e-learning experience can be highly engaging, impactful and result in behavioural change, just like a well designed face to face lesson. The key is the quality of the design, not the technology or medium used.

So, yes, it is easy to waste millions on technology when the case for deployment has failed to be made. But we waste billions on a now outdated model of education/training that is hugely inefficient, de-personalises the learning experience and results in unintended behaviour changes that are of suboptimal worth to employers and society as a whole.

We can - and should - think more deeply about how we change. As change we must if learning and development professionals (and educators for that matter) are to remain relevant in the future.

While a log would do for the Greeks centuries ago, I'd say the internet - and all the great array of interaction and collaboration it brings us - is the long overdue upgrade. Indeed the great teacher of the future might say:

"the best classroom is me sitting on one side of the blog with you sitting on the other exchanging ideas. In fact, why sit? We can exchange ideas any time, any where."

Actually, they probably wouldn't even use the word classroom at all...

What do you think?

Smarter, Faster - research breakthroughs

We really do live in exciting times. What with global geopolitical and economic power shifts and increasingly evident environmental concerns it's easy to feel uneasy. Yet there are plenty of reasons to remain optimistic about our ability to learn new ways to manage and cope through what will inevitably be a long rollercoaster ride over the next few decades. The pace of innovation in many fields is accelerating as the collaborative power of the internet widens its influence across the world. One of these is the world of neuroscience which focuses on the human organ at the root of it all - the brain.

What we are finding out about how our brain interacts with the outside environment, processes and stores information is poised to have a truly fundamental impact. The current institutional inertia within education and training is beginning to look like the proverbial leaky dam. -It's going to take more than a few fingers in holes to stop the whole thing tumbling down in the face of a flood of evidence, yes real evidence, that reveals how we really learn - not only that, how we can optimise that process.

Here's one study that particularly caught my eye:

Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory

As reported by Wired:

Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as "smarts."

Fluid intelligence was previously thought to be genetically hard-wired, but the finding suggests that with about 25 minutes of rigorous mental training a day, healthy adults could improve their mental capacities.

Fluid intelligence measures how people adapt to new situations and solve problems they've never seen before. Fluid intelligence differs from crystallized intelligence, which takes into account skills and knowledge that have been acquired -- like vocabulary, grammar and math.

Subjects trained on a complex version of the so-called "n-back task" -- a difficult visual/auditory memory test -- improved their scores on a set of IQ questions drawn from a German intelligence measure called the Bochumer Matrizen-Test. (The Bochumer Matrizen-Test is a harder version of the well-known Ravens Progressive Matrices).

Initially, the test subjects scored an average of 10 questions correctly on the IQ test. But after the group trained on the n-back task for 25 minutes a day for 19 days, they averaged 14.7 correct answers, an increase of more than 40 percent. (A control group that was not trained showed only a very slight performance increase.)

Transfer of learning - or as I have discussed before the lack of transfer - is the elephant in the room. Most learning activities fail due to an inability to equip people with the "smarts" to apply what they know in one context into a new, even slightly different one. Given that the world we are entering is one of constant and increasing change, this is more than a worry. So, while it is still early days, reports that we are finding ways to develop models and tools that tackle this central pillar of intelligence is fantastic news.

Laboured Lectures Lack Lasting Impact

I have an enthusiastic interest in memory and how our brains learn. So I thought I'd try and learn some more from the experts using some of the openly available material from MIT. I came across something that looked interesting (well to me anyway):

Neurobiology of Memory: How Do We Acquire, Consolidate and Recall Memory

Speaker: Susumu Tonegawa, Director, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory

Tonegawa experiments on mice by playing with their genes and observing the resultant effect on their brains and subsequent ability to acquire and recall information about their surroundings. In doing so, he's exploring how memory and learning works at the cellular and biochemical level.

Now what was interesting about watching the video of this was how hard it was to get the value from his presentation. At least with the video being captured they had the opportunity to refer back. Not only that, a wider audience such as myself could benefit - even if only to a limited extent. To be fair, I did pick up an interesting snippet. Apparently Gabriel Garcia Marquez in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" predicted that sleep helps consolidate memory. Neuroscience is now proving this, and indeed I picked up on this just recently in my Snooze and Learn Faster post (which also caught Clive Shepherd's imagination).

However, as Donald Clark and others have remarked, many lectures are delivered without any form of information capture that students can refer back on (outside of their own notes, which perhaps aren't as comprehensive as they should be). It also begs the question that lecturers should first and foremost consider how they deliver their message in a more coherent fashion designed for students to interact with outside of the lecture theatre. Indeed wouldn't it be better to record the main presentation as video/annotated powerpoint, even with some level of useful interaction/visualization, and then arrange for students to attend a Q/A style session either physically or virtually? Surely the discourse and level of useful knowledge transfer would be a lot greater?

Granted, you still hear the argument that students will just not bother to turn up to lectures at all and not prepare for Q/A sessions, but I don't buy that. I was fortunate to be an educational guinea pig for my first degree in Information Technology at Salford University, near Manchester in the UK. This course was deliberately structured so that lecture session notes were provided for you, that attendance was for questioning and discussion, rather than a one way attempt at brain dumping. Interesting phrase that - "brain dumping". It suggests that what is dumped stays in one place, whereas we know we forget most of it almost instantly, especially without sufficient time for assimilation. Perhaps we should call it "fly-tipping of the mind" instead.

Transfer of Learning - missing in action?

After a short break skiing in the Swiss/French Alps (the break fortunately not involving any bones), I found myself thinking further about how much (most?) training activity across the planet fails to transfer into any lasting learning.

When I learned to ski some 20 odd years ago, I started out on a dry slope which, back then, was more like skiing on a thick, plastic carpet with the consistency of lumpy porridge. However, this "simulated" environment allowed me to practice basic techniques, such as when and where to shift weight from one leg to another, position of skis in relation to the line of the slope, controlling speed (although on the slope I learned on I'm sure the top speed achievable was no more than 10 km/hour!).

When I subsequently arrived at the Alpine resort and nervously snapped into my skis at the top of a real slope with real snow, I was delighted to find it was a far easier, smoother and exciting experience - from there I was hooked. The techniques I learned did manage to transfer and I dramatically improved from that point on. In this case then, an opportunity to practice, even if a pale imitation of the real environment, can lead to better performance standards reached in less time.

So what happens when the simulated environment starts to approximate the real time experience itself? Surely this will lead to an even faster way to acquire experience that can be directly applied?

Well, for years the aviation and defence industries have recognised the power of simulation in training how to use equipment (itself often worth $millions) in stressful, life and death situations. Big budgets were (and still are) available to spend on highly innovative technology and this continues to be the case. However this visualisation and real-time interaction is going mainstream now that gaming are firmly in our living rooms and pockets.

Here's a great (if un-scientific) example of how simulation can transfer to the real environment. Wired reported:

A North Carolina man who saw an SUV flip and roll on a highway last November was able to provide medical aid to the victims with skills he learned from the America's Army, say the videogame's makers. Paxton Galvanek pulled one of the passengers out of the smoking car, then found another bleeding heavily from his hand where his fingers had been lost during the crash.

"I used a towel as a dressing and asked the man to hold the towel on his wound and to raise his hand above his head to lessen the blood flow which allowed me to evaluate his other injuries which included a cut on his head," Galvanek said in a letter to the America's Army design team. Galvanek said he learned about controlling bleeding from playing section two of the "medic" class training in America's Army, a game developed by the Army as a recruitment tool.

"I have received no prior medical training and can honestly say that because of the training and presentations within America's Army, I was able to help and possibly save the injured men," Galvanek said.

Now many may say that the knowledge applied is basic common sense, however as this great comment on the article states:

You'd be surprised how little most people know about first aid. In the Army we say "common sense is not so common". The truth is any of the supposed "common sense" things need to be learned. Just to have an order of things to check for can save lives, because the brain goes back to the training when in panic, while your "common sense" (aka. cognitive thinking) c***s its pants. Just remember this mantra:

"Really Big Boobs Should Fit Both Hands" = "Responsiveness - Breathing - Bleeding - Shock - Fractures - Burns - Head injury".

Now that's memorable (though I doubt this would get past the HR discrimination policymakers - even in the armed forces these days)!

Repetitive practice and simulation is at the heart of effective training. But this seems to only be present where the consequences can mean the difference between life and death. Too often corporate training programmes render themselves impotent and totally ineffective by failing to consider the transfer process. We should not be surprised when staff behaviour does not change.

I'll be looking at techniques that promote the transfer of learning in more depth.