The Enemy Within-Is Your Organisation Sabotaging Your E-Learning Initiatives?

“We have met the enemy, and they are us”
Walt Kelly in Pogo

It’s unfortunate, but true. Across many organisations, e-learning initiatives are being dogged by high mortality rates — and one doesn’t have to look very far to find the underlying reasons. The truth is closer to home than one might think, and that’s why it has so many managers and trainers squirming in discomfiture. Yes, the enemy is within… and most of them know it.

Strange as it may sound, the failure of many e-learning initiatives is traceable to ‘internal’ factors. If you want to set things right, here are some of the culprits you should watch out for:

The Learners Themselves
In most cases, it isn’t the learning that encounters resistance, it’s that little ‘e’ before it. Many organisations implement e-learning programmes without gaining insights into the learners’ comfort levels with computers and the Internet. The situation is aggravated by the fact that the learners feel that too much pressure is being put on them — “they want us to work, and they want us to undergo training, and now they want us to learn to use computers too!”
The only way to overcome this resistance, is to get a buy-in from the learners by offering the assurance that the organisation will take the responsibility of turning them into computer whizzes, thereby adding a valuable skill-set to their job profiles. Everyone knows the advantages offered by computer skills and nobody minds learning them — particularly when they know it’s for free.

A good example of this lies in an e-learning project handled by i-Strat for a global pharmaceutical major. To get its field force to use the new web-based learning and reporting system, the company put each employee through a crash course on Internet usage, conducted by a leader in the IT training space. Thereafter, every employee was given a cyber café membership with a daily quota of one hour. The actual reporting/learning took barely 15-20 minutes on a daily basis. The employees could use the rest of the time for checking their personal email, chatting, browsing, etc. At the end of a 12-month period, employees were polled on whether they would prefer to return to the old (manual) system. Not unexpectedly, they voted overwhelmingly in favour of the online system.

The Trainers Themselves
Well, not all trainers, to be fair — but it is now a proven fact that trainers of the old school of thought felt threatened by new media. Like so many before them, they thought their job function would be usurped by computers. Because of this, they thwarted the implementation of e-learning systems in many ways.

Sometimes it took the form of outright rejection, but most of the time it was a sort of silent resistance. Either way, the ultimate intention was the same — to be able to tell the management: “Hey! This new stuff isn’t working, you know. Let’s go back to the good old way of doing things.”

It’s a fairly common story, but one really can’t blame the trainers. The problem is actually attributable to a systemic failure. Once again, it’s about not getting a buy-in from the designated implementers of the e-learning system. The right way to go about this would be to initiate a ‘Train The Trainer’ programme that seeks to re-skill the trainers, thereby empowering them to drive the new computer/web-based training programmes with greater effectiveness.

So if your e-learning initiatives are running into rough weather, it’s perhaps a good idea to look inwards to uncover the underlying causes. And if you do happen to spot the enemy within, a few simple corrective measures are all that it takes to transform the erstwhile foe in a powerful ally.

Ref:-http://www.istrat-india.com