eLearning Roadtrip

Culture Gaps, according to Carl Berger

Let me begin by saying that I am a member of the  Carl Berger fan club. Carl's work has been an inspiration since I found myself being drawn into the world of learning objects back in the mid 90s. His involvement with the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, NLII (now ELI), IMS and Sakai has given all of us a foundation for implementing enterprise learning technologies in higher education...one of my favorite examples of sustaining learning technology innovation on the road to broad adoption.

I heard Carl speak at the April 2005 University of Missouri Apple Digital Campus Leadership conference. I'm not even sure what the topic of his speech was anymore. I just remember that there was a point where he compared and contrasted the things that academic institutions and corporate enterprises care about. I knew he was talking directly to me. Carl articulated some of the big value differences I had encountered in my job (at the time I was the Sr. director of global higher ed solutions for Macromedia.)  I scribbled a bunch of notes from his slides - and eventually used his remarks as the basis for some work I was doing at the time. It proved to be a very effective way of explaining some of the differences in how our customers viewed the world to my corporate co-workers, both at Macromedia and later at Adobe Systems.

I have since added a few things to this graphic, and no longer can remember which of this comes from Carl, and what comes from me riffing off Carl's ideas. As he helped catalyze these insights, I am happy to give him all the credit. (If you click on the slide graphic it will launch as a full screen image, so don't even try to squint and read the text.)

Given the past few posts, it seemed like a good way to illustrate a few of the big differences in what is valued in different parts of the elearning value chain. As you can see from the very first comparison on the list, innovation - that is, going forth where nobody has gone before - is highly valued in academic settings. From a perspective of the vendor community, volume is more important than innovation. It is far more important for more people to buy than for fewer people to buy, under any and all circumstances. It also shows the differing interests for using data - from the vendor perspective data supports decision-making, whereas for academics it is more for demonstrating the tenability of a construct.

During that same Apple Digital Campus meeting, then University of Missouri System President Elson Floyd warned us that "culture eats strategy, every time". It's time to figure out how to bridge a few of these culture gaps to see about maximizing the probabilities of our own success.

Products vs. solutions

Another gap that looms large in my world view is the gap between products and solutions. As in, elearning products and elearning solutions.

When I started working in the software industry I learned that there is a big difference between product and solutions. Products give you the tools for undertaking specific production or development tasks. Products emphasize features. Solutions, on the other hand, are products, plus. They are engineered/bundled to solve a (business or learning or productivity or distribution) problem of some kind. Solutions include a product or combination of products and often include some kind of roadmaps, checklists, support, services, and assets along with the products.

eLearning is a perfect market segment for solutions, whether one comes from the corporate side, the government or from education. People who "work in elearning" come from all around the enterprise or the institution. They hold a variety of jobs that may have little in common except that they participate in some part of the elearning value chain. For example, in higher education, the value chain may be anchored by a faculty member teaching an elearning course, with an LMS administrator supporting some of the experience, an instructional designer helping to develop course content, a library specialist providing access to resources, with a student support services professional making sure that students are integrated into academic life. Each one of them is involved in elearning....but odds are that only some of these people are likely to describe themselves as an elearning professional. Rather, they are education professionals who happen to be using elearning methods, strategies and tools to extend the reach of the campus and open the walls of the classroom, making learning more relevant, convenient and accessible.

Similarly, in corporate learning settings, instructional designers and content specialists may engage in authoring, while line-of-business professionals may use web conferencing and social media for collaboration. Training and development professionals create or purchase online courses while marketing professionals assemble media assets to show off what their products can do. Digital marketing assets that are intended to drive awareness can be distributed via the internet may look an awful lot like elearning. And yet none of these business professionals may think of what they are doing as elearning.

Among elearning practitioners, the "e" in elearning is simply used as a way of distinguishing learning experiences distributed via the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web. Doesn't matter if it's a course, an app, an asset, a game, or mobile performance support. These days, elearning being used in one way or another in virtually every company, in every school, in every government agency, in countries all over the world. It is produced using every digital media known to date.

And yet, it is hard for non-practitioners, specifically sales and marketing pros attempting to sell software products, to see the connections among the activities in which digital assets are created to support learning. It's easier to think of elearning as technology, not as a practice to be served by technology. Because, frankly, it is a lot easier to keep track of the number of licenses sold than it is to keep track of the number of customer problems solved.

Good companies DO try to connect solutions to practice problem solving, and try to anticipate where they customers need to go in the future. Good solutions demand that the provider have a solid understanding of the context for problem solving, the needs of the audience dealing with the problems, the range of problems to be encountered and a good understanding of how to align the software included in a solution to the goals and mission of the enterprise.But that may not always be the case. Sadly, a solution may simply be software that has been bundled in a particular way to maximize sales in a given quarter.

One would think that given the size of this market - estimated by some to be in the one-to two TRILLION USD range -  that it would be a no-brainer to get this sorted out. And yet, the fact that this business opportunity is SO broad, and is SO diverse, makes it virtually impossible for business analysts to get their arms around defining this market in a way that reveals its true reach and business impact. Rather than talking about elearning as a comprehensive industry, it's been easier for analysts to talk about the web development part and call that elearning - or to focus on the LMS part, and call that elearning  - or the authoring part of elearning - or the RIA part - or the mobile part. And before you know it, what should be a trillion dollar opportunity has been sliced and diced into such small, niche segments that it may be hard to find the full enterprise value. More to the point, it makes it hard for business analysts to see the enterprise value of elearning when it is tied more to the cost of licenses than it is to showing the impact on business metrics such as profitability and reduction of churn. 

Until we can demonstrate that elearning is a strategy for leveraging technology in the service of business productivity, odds are we will not find ourselves involved in participating in the strategic life of our enterprise. And these days....a cost center without ability to demonstrate direct stratgic benefit may be at risk.

Business vs. Education

From my experience, one of the biggest gaps to be minded on the journey toward sustaining innovation in technology mediated learning is the one found between education and business.

Today, we are as likely to describe learning using terms such as “competitive advantage” and “strategic imperative” as we are by such terms as “cognitive capacity” and “modality preference.” While psychologists, teachers, and trainers continue to view learning as a change in human capability, businesspeople recognize that learning products and solutions represents new commercial opportunity. By actively seeking innovative strategies and tactics for realizing new value from and for learning, the business community has created a new awareness of what learning can mean for individuals, organizations, communities, and societies.

It seems self-evident that academic and business stakeholders would want to collaborate in the process of evaluating theories and principles to provide algorithms and heuristics for creating new commercial value from learning. However, the reality of such collaborations is usually far less satisfying than the expectation. Learning professionals and businesspeople often discover that they hold completely divergent views on the role, purpose, and value of learning. They find that the unique perspective each brings to the conversation can result in very different interpretations of what is actually being said. Despite our best intentions, learning professionals and businesspeople interested in creating new value from learning often find themselves at cross-purposes.

It seems to boil down to a basic difference in what is valued: the role of an academic expert is to explore and research constructs of a discipline with the intention of finding new ideas and contributing new knowledge to the field. In business, the point is to provide value to customers that is important enough for them to give you money for the products, solutions and services to secure access to that value.

Creating tangible, commercial value from learning is a very different proposition than codifying theories and practices of teaching, learning, and human performance improvement to preserve and promote our learning culture. Being responsible for codifying the body of knowledge related to learning
means never questioning the value of learning, because that value is absolute.  The study of learning and the ensuing codification of knowledge represent value in and of themselves. Business opportunities that arise from learning aren’t the point. On the other hand, business stakeholders of learning are more concerned with pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of learning than they are with maintaining the status quo. Furthermore, their intent in pushing those boundaries has everything to do with cultivating new commercial opportunities rather than creating new knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The more that education stakeholders of learning call for methodological rigor, the more resistant and irrelevant they appear to business stakeholders, especially when commercial possibilities seem so obvious. Conversely, business stakeholders’ fascination with determining new ways of leveraging the commercial value of learning smacks of opportunism when viewed through the eyes of academic stakeholders, who have dedicated their careers to learning about learning simply because they believe it is the right thing to do (and because they want to be credited with new ideas that emerge from those explorations.)

Lest you think that I am being a bit melodramatic about this "separate silos" situation, let me offer a concrete example. Let us consider EDUCAUSE, the higher education IT organization. During the past several years when I worked for commercial software companies I was not allowed to submit a presentation proposal for consideration for the annual meeting program. Being a vendor, I couldn't be trusted not to slip in commercial references, or to pitch my wares.  Around the office we used to ruefully laugh about being treated like "vendor slime". On a personal note my relationship with this organization is stellar, but it makes me kind of cranky to know that as a vendor I am a second class citizen in this world.

Unless we appreciate the factors that shape the role and importance of learning from the perspective of each stakeholder group, the value that learning holds for one is increasingly irrelevant to the other. Rather than learning from one another, we work only with those who think as we do. The more we find ourselves inhabiting separate conceptual silos, the greater is the risk that we may stop trying to learn from one another altogether. These days, with resources being cut and with common wisdom underscoring that we will not survive if we continue to do business as usual, we simply can't afford to NOT mind this particular gap.

Innovation vs Implementation

The term innovation refers to a new way of doing something. It may mean incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between Invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation) . In other words, when an invention is applied to solve a problem or to do something completely differently than it has been done before, innovation occurs.

We are all attracted to what is new, different, possible - far more engaging than slogging through the familiar, mundane, routine.  Scholars are rewarded for being among the first wave of creative thinkers to explore new ideas. Businesses strive to be first to market. Of course, there is a huge difference between exploring new possibilities and defining new constructs, and figuring out how to take what is learned from these exploration to establish frameworks for improving practice. 

For so many of today's enterprises and institutions, the current opportunities for achieving excellence comes from not just in the creation of new knowledge but rather in figuring out the healthy balance between new knowledge that bring innovations to institutions and enterprises, and scalable, sustainable solutions that realize the benefits of new knowledge.  That means coming up with a framework that gives innovators enough time and opportunity to test the application of an innovation in a number of practice settings. It means giving implementers a long enough runway for applying the lessons learned from innovators at the point where empirical evidence indicates that the new ideas are likely to have the greatest impact.

Finding common ground between innovators and implementers can be a bit dodgy.  The diagram above, which is a Gartner Hype Cycle meets Everett Rogers'  Diffusion of Innovation mash-up,  shows two distinct kinds of participants in the innovation-to-adoption process. The curve shown on the left, above, shows innovator interest, taking us from the first moments of awareness to the peak of interest known in Gartner circles as the  Peak of Inflated Expectations . It is followed by a deep fall-off in interest, the so-called Trough of Disappointment once the new innovation starts to lose some of its glow, or not live up to expectations, or some combination of both. The Rogers Diffusion of Innovation curve, appearing on the right, is a standard distribution curve that depicts different stages of technology adoption, with the Early Adopters showing up just about the time that innovations start their move toward the Plateau of Productivity with Early and Late Majority adopters coming on board long after the innovations move through their distruptive stage.

Innovators simply can't imagine that people responsible for doing large-scale technology or training roll-outs, or running a profitable business, or managing a high performing team, don't want to try a bunch of new ideas without knowing exactly what the benefits of the changes will be. Immediately. Implementers can't figure out why it is so hard for innovators to stay focused on finding a path that ensures the smooth transition from the old way of doing things to the new. Implementating a innovation into practice requires deliberation, with evaluation based on evidence. The initial burst of interest over a new innovation may attract attention and gain early momentum.  Some innovations simply have have too much associated overhead, or may not be able to scale to scale, or may be too hard for mere mortals to use. 

What's clear is that for Adoption to hit the mainstream it take both - the innovators on the front lines, going forth where nobody has gone before, and the implementers in the back office and IT center, making sure that nobody gets left behind.

Gaps to Mind

I've spent enough time in London these past few years to be comfortable using public transportation. I'm especially enamored of the Underground, the labyrinth of tracks and trains that move hundreds of thousands of people around and under and through the city. Every time I board or disembark, the fem-bot voice telling me to "mind the gap" always makes me deliberately step over the open space between platform and train.  

I used this as a way to illustrate a point during my recent presentation at the ELEARN conference: With more and more of us getting on board the elearning train, we are going to need to exercise the same kind of deliberation moving back and forth between our discipline and practiced-based platforms (since I was with research professors, I talked about epistemological frameworks) that we do when we board trains. 

There are lots of gaps to watch out for. These happen to be the top 5 gaps where I have been know to fall between the metaphorical platform and train, so I do have a bit of emotion about each one. I expect you will have a few to add to the list. Please do.

• Innovation VS Implementation - Innovators want to navigate by the stars. Implementers need to watch for potholes. People who are innovators simply can't imagine that people responsible for doing large-scale technology or training roll-outs, or running a profitable business, or managing a high performing team, don't want to try a bunch of new ideas without knowing exactly what the benefits of the changes will be. Immediately.
• Research VS Practice - Basic research dives deep within a discipline to validate constructs adding to the knowledge base of that discipline. Practice-based research facilitates decision making, and often looks outside a discipline to find new opportunities. Is one better than the other? That depends on what you are trying to do. Sometimes a click-thru rate matters more than a level of significance.
• Corporate VS Academic - One of the glorious things about academic life is the responsibility to explore new ideas without concern for a specific outcome such as driving quarterly results, and being encouraged to go forth where no other scholar has gone before. One of the best things about corporate life is being held accountable for tangible (financial) results and having a campaign-focused point of view where team members must work toward a common goal. Sometimes, comparing these points of view is like comparing apples and...well, zebras.
• Product VS Solution - Companies sell products. Customers buy products to solve problems. If a company can successfully provide a product/products that solve a customer's problem, everyone wins. Companies routinely sell certain products to specific market segment.  What happens when customer segments are "mis-underestimated" and company-designated "solutions" only focus on one or two products and are insufficient for getting the job done?
• Traditional VS Emerging eLearning - How fantastic that eLearning has managed to be around long enough that some of the best known examples of elearning - asynchronous online courses and LMSs - are now being described as "traditional"! This begs the question of what the emerging models of elearning are going to look like. Mobile learning? Immersive simulations and games? Intraverses?

I expect that these will keep me going for a while. Stay tuned.

Minding the Gaps

In my last post I reflected that the eLearning industries seem to be at an interesting crossroads. Finally, there seems to be acceptance of elearning in market segments such as education, government (particularly for the military) and some of the vertical markets such as telecom, pharmaceuticals, finance, securities and insurance, media and publishing. And yet I also noted that there continues to be a strange malaise in the industries, as if everyone knows they needs to change, it's time to change, and nobody is quite sure what to do first. Hard to believe, but there continue to be big and influential companies out there asking if there really is a market for this thing called elearning.

Let's be clear, there is a lot to celebrate. Consider recent news from the world of U.S. higher education. The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning reveals that online enrollments have been growing by double digits, far in excess of traditional campus enrollments:

• Over 3.9 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2007 term; a 12 percent increase over the number reported the previous year.
• The 12.9 percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 1.2 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.
• Over  twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one  online course in the fall of 2007. (Sloan-C, Staying the Course, 2008.)

So what's the problem with that? Nothing, really...It's just that, even after 13 years of being THE most obvious, self evident way to extend reach, reallocate resources and leverage better distribution and tracking mechanisms...eLearning still doesn't seem to get much respect. This is especially notable given the adoption rates of consumer technologies in the rest of our lives.

To date, elearning implementations tend to be most notable for the repeatable, reliable and scalable distribution of high demand courses using the Web. That's very good. eLearning is typically NOT notable for the creative ways that students are motivated and engaged - or not. That's definitely a problem. Especially at a time when some of the emerging model of what will very likely be the elearning of the future are coming from sectors that hae a lot more to do with games and entertainment than they have to do with pedagogy.

With looming cutbacks in travel, layoffs and job reductions, increased awareness of green alternatives, and an ever-increasing comfort with consumer technologies used in the service of learning and teaching, eLearning is going to be an increasingly important strategic consideration for enterprises of all sizes in the months and years ahead.

During my recent presentation at the ELEARN conference I asked people to consider some of the gaps likely to be encountered when working toward sustaining eLearning innovation in their organizations. (You can download this preso by clicking on ELEARN under the Presentation tab.) I suggested that we start with 5. I'm fairly certain we can come up come up with a lot more, but let's begin the next post by taking a look at the gaps between following sets of examples:

• Innovation VS Implementation
• Research VS Practice
• Corporate VS Academic
• Product VS Solution
• Traditional VS Emerging eLearning

On the road

Welcome to my inaugural blog posting for eLearning Roadtrip. 

I finally abandoned my long-standing resistance to blogging after reading an ELEARN conference tweet from Professor Dr. Erik Duval commenting on something he had just heard Professor Dr. George Siemens say in a presentation. The gist was that using Web 2.0 technologies was a lot like sex, where reading and writing about about it is very different than simply doing it. I realized that George was absolutely right.

So let us simply do.

The idea for the eLearning Roadtrip had emerged several years before, thanks to an actual road trip I took with Dr. Darcy Hardy and Rob Robinson of the University of Texas System TeleCampus. Just before we started driving north to Orange County from San Diego, Rob pulled over to fill the gas tank for the drive. When he came back from the cashier he held up a medium-sized paper bag. "Beef jerky and beer nuts" he announced when he climbed back in the driver's seat. "It's not a roadtrip without snacks". We headed north after Rob activated his PDA GPS System, which talked us back on to the freeway. We continued through Camp Pendleton, scorched by huge fires just a few days before. We stared out the windows, passed around the beef jerky and talked about fires and floods and earthquakes and natural disasters in CA and TX. A few beer nuts later, Rob was pulling the car up to my hotel's curb. I'd been so engaged in the conversation and camaraderie I'd lost track of time. The miles had passed in an instant.

I always have a strong positive connection with roadtrips. A sense of purpose and direction. Seeing new things. Spending time sharing ideas with friends. Snacks.

This eLearning Roadtrip blog has been developed with an eye toward cultivating that same sense of engagement. Purpose and direction -- a look at some new idea from other industries, a place for you to spend time with people who care about some of the same ideas that you do. Sharing bite-sized, snackable content bits that can be consumed without feeling overwhelmed. Or guilty.

The eLearning industries are at an interesting crossroads. Consumers no longer look at technology mediated learning as one step removed from bad science fiction. In fact, these days, technology-mediated learning covers a wide range of applications, tools, devices, programs and platforms, as well as practices. Lots of acceptance in a variety of market segments. And yet there continues to be a strange malaise in the industries, as if everyone knows it needs to change, it's time to change, and nobody is quite sure what to do first.

Economic conditions are right to push eLearning into a new period of growth, although it is likely that eLearning 2.0 is not going to look a lot like the eLearning 1.0 experiences we have come to know and accept over the past 13 years. That is going to present a lot of people like us with a lot of great new opportunities. But it is also going mean we have a lot of challenges to face. Our industry is morphing and changing as we speak. Will we recognize the future of eLearning when we see it?

Sounds like a perfect time for a roadtrip.

Hopefully you will pardon my occasional use of hokey road, driving and travel cliches. As much as I have been trying to resist, there will certainly some that will be too good to pass by.