Anita Rosen - Using eLearning to increase the efficiency and impact of training programs

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Anita Rosen, who is the president of ReadyGo Incorporated, a company that specializes in online learning, and Anita recently wrote a book called “eLearning 2.0: proven practices and emerging technologies to achieve results”. Anita shares some really interesting observations about the use of online training techniques, what works, what doesn’t, when should you use it, how long should they be, the struggles of balancing, making it informative versus turning it into an online game, and she’s actually done quite a bit of research with some large organizations to really take an empirical look at what works and what doesn’t work around online learning, so if you’ve ever taken an online learning course, or thinking of using online learning, this is a great and very informative interview with a lot of very specific suggestions, ideas and observations, so let’s listen to Anita Rosen this week on People Performance Radio.

Hi, this is People Performance Radio, this is Steve Hunt, and today we’re talking with Anita Rosen, who is the president of ReadyGo, which is an elearning software company, and Anita has just recently published a book called “eLearning 2.0: proven practices and emerging technologies to achieve results”, and so Anita, thank you very much for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Anita

My pleasure.

Steve

So maybe you can start by just telling us a little bit about your background, what you’ve done in elearning, what exactly elearning is?

Anita

Well my background is, I’ve spent over 25 years in the software industry, and the last ten of which specifically in the elearning business, so about ten years ago I got involved in elearning, and I have spent the last ten years really focused on elearning. Before that, in the late ‘90s, I was still in Silicon Valley, and I was working with companies that moved then from business to ebusiness, and looking at businesses and thinking of how you need to restructure a business so that you could put it on the web, because it’s not necessarily intuitively obvious, you can’t completely take a business and just do the exact same things on the web, and then I added to the elearning niche of the web, which is moving your training to the web, and very similarly a lot of those skills of looking at a business, and how do you move business and business practices to the web, I have spent a lot of time thinking and applying the same elements to elearning – how do you take training, which has traditionally been a classroom event in most situations and most company situations, and move it from a classroom event into an online event – what are the similarities and what are the differences? And then what changes is technology, so over the last ten years we had the early web, and now we have had had a lot of changes, new technologies, new applications, faster speeds, different things have happened, and how do we apply these new technologies to how we train people on the web.

Steve

Well that’s fascinating, so maybe just starting out with, and we’ll start with the basics and get to the more advanced things, when you talk about taking training materials, books, whether classroom or paper and pencil, and putting them on the web, what are the fundamental differences? – if you’re an organization thinking of doing this, saying, OK, let’s see if we can go from a classroom training to an ebase training, what are the fundamental things you need to think about, right out of the bat, to make that successful?

Anita

Well, how about we just focus on the classroom, but I think it would be too big to talk about handing people books and materials and saying, learn, we’ll just focus on the classroom piece of it. The classroom piece of it, when you move a classroom on the web, the biggest fundamental thing that you have done is you’ve taken people out of it, the equation, so instead of having it a live instructor front of a classroom, who, if they’re a decent instructor is aware of what’s happening in the classroom, can answer questions, can bring material alive, can give anecdotes – you’ve now taken this person out of the equation, and now you just have the material, and what you don’t want to have is, you don’t want to go back to just the booklet.

Steve

So how do you keep that human element in the training?

Anita

But that’s the big thing, is what I see is, people say, “Oh well, since I can now have audio, I'm going to try keeping this human element in?”, and what I say is, you don’t have the human element in. There’s two types of elearning, one is called synchronous and the other is asynchronous, and synchronous is like what you have in WebEx where you have, what it is is an online session, so you pick up the phone and you’re talking to someone, and they’re showing you their PowerPoint slides, and that would be synchronous. So that is considered elearning.

The other piece of it, which I would say is a bigger piece of it, or should be a bigger piece of it in most companies, it’s for a group called asynchronous training, which is standalone training, which is, there’s a real benefit to this, this standalone training, there’s a lot of cost benefits, a lot of training. I’m first going to hit with the benefits are, and then I will answer your question on taking the person out of it.

So there’s a lot of reasons companies want to be moving there, there’s the cost benefit of not having to have people all being in a room, which is very expensive; there’s the time element of it, if you have people located across the country or around the world, you can now give 24/7 access to training, so people don’t have to show up for the class when the class is given, they can show up for the class when it works with their schedule, and that’s really helpful if you have employees who are on the road, if you have employees, I deal with a lot of hospitals, and they have 24/7s where they’ll have three shifts, and there’s a lot of other businesses that have multiple shifts, so getting people off of their shift for training, you have people that have jobs that are very difficult for them to be pulled away from their desk, there’s other people that have to cover for them, so in those circumstances it’s really nice to be able to have training available when the person that needs to be trained wants to be trained, not when the training is given.

Also for sales training, you have new salespeople joining whenever, and you give sales training classes once or twice a year, so you can have someone that’s working for you for six months and they haven’t had basic sales training.

Steve

I do have a quick question the differences, to make sure I’m understanding it, because this makes a lot of sense, this idea of saying look, really you’re talking about training that’s available when people need it, not when you want to give it, which is a huge advantage. So, but we’re talking about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous training, so synchronous training, which is the classic, I’m basically just giving a presentation over the web. Is asynchronous just a recorded version of that?

Anita

That’s the biggest mistake, and that gets back to, I first wanted to give the benefits and the differences between why you’d want to move to elearning. The biggest mistake that I see people make is they say, “Oh, this is what we did in the classroom, let’s put it on the web”, or “Oh, we’ll just give this synchronous training, there’s WebEX or whatever technology you use, let’s just leave it on the web for people, because now we can keep the human element in”, and what I find is that’s not effective, that becomes, there is much more effective ways of getting training to people than trying, you sort of tuck the person in, but you really haven’t, because the person is not live, it’s a recording, so I’ve worked for big companies, I worked for IBM, and when I was at IBM they would send us out these videos that we’d have to watch of someone giving a presentation, and they weren’t the most exciting person live, and I’ll tell you in the video, it was less exciting, because you don’t have the people around you, you’re not in the room, so all of a sudden you put the video on, and it was really hard to pay attention, and they were really boring, because by just having someone read to you doesn’t make it, you think you’re keeping the person in, it doesn’t make it live, it doesn’t make it interesting. If you’re not going to be in a room with the other people, and the studies I’ve done, I’ve done a lot of studies, I have a company called ReadyGo, and we’re a software company, and we produce an offering tool, and a collection engine for asynchronous elearning.

One of my customers is Telefonica, which is the second largest telecommunications company in the world, they have about 100,000 employees, and they brought us in, they brought my company in to do consulting, because they wanted to know where they should move next with elearning, so we had the opportunity, because we had the budget, they had about 100 people in what would become the elearning group, so we had a large enough mass of people, and we had a large enough budget, and we had a large enough employees, with 100,000 employees, that we could really test out a bunch of different theories that we had, some of which, that we tested out is, we brought in a PowerPoint, what’s very popular, because it’s easy, it’s taking PowerPoint, saving it as Flash and putting in an audio track, which is very similar to recording someone on a phone giving a presentation, there’s not that much difference, and then we created a good asynchronous course, and I can get into a good asynchronous course in a minute, so what we said is, let’s take the exact same material, the same PowerPoint, and one of us put on the audio track with a test at the end, and the other, let’s do some real good, what we think are good principles, and then let’s find out what happens at the end, let’s see their grades, or see if there’s a difference in grades, and we asked questions that people wouldn’t necessarily know unless they took the course, so they were very context-sensitive, so that we would know whether or not they just knew the answer, or whether that they actually took the course and learned something, and then we also ask them survey questions, and we asked good survey questions, a bad survey question is, “Would you rather take this course in classroom setting or elearning?” Well, for some people, taking it in a classroom means that they have to leave the field and come in on a Saturday, and in elearning they can take it 15, 20 minutes between doing something at their desk, at home or wherever they happen to work in the field, so we’re not asking a good question. A better question is to ask someone, “Is compared to a class, if this material was given in classroom form, how well does this course compare?” So we could have the two different courses, and we were asking people to compare to theoretically what they were thinking, the same material provided with an instructor in a classroom would be. We got 30% higher grades and 40% higher scores in the asynchronous course that was provided in what we thought was good instructional design, compared to the PowerPoint to Flash, 30% higher grades, 40% higher scores.

Steve

Can you talk a little bit about, you said that the key there is good instructionable design, because I agree with you that just recording a webinar, there’s something about recording a voice, that if it was boring initially, it’s five times more boring when it’s recorded for some reason?

Anita

Exactly.

Steve

So think about the recording process?

Anita

Yes.

Steve

Which is kind of terrifying as a podcast host! – realizing that this we’re doing this recorded, but hopefully this is fascinating for everyone else, I’m certainly finding it interesting, so you said one thing which was good instructionable design, so what makes an asynchronous course good?

Anita

There is a few elements that you really need to do. First of all, a PowerPoint typically has two to three words, you want to have full sentences. The other thing is, if your people are literate that are taking the course, don’t read to them, we speak a half to a third slower than we read, so people find that really frustrating, they could be done with it, if you were to ask someone, do you want to take a course that’s going to take 45 minutes or the same material, 15 to 20 minutes? No-one’s going to say, I want to take the 45 minute version, they’re all going to say they want the 15 to 20 minute version, so don’t read to them if they know how to read. The only one I have talking heads and reading, if it was for some special reason. Too many comms people do it just because that’s easier than anything else, that’s what they know, so we'll record this because that’s what’s easy to me, not what’s good for the learner. You can have talking heads in videos, but there has to be a reason for it, there’s an expert and you want to show a little video of them talking or them telling something, that’s fine to put a video in there, a video that explains something you’re talking about, that works. What we found with videos that works well is, you want to have a page setting off the video, this is what we’re going to talk to you about, have the video, and then have a page, what you just told them about the video, so that you’re reinforcing what they’re reading, and with them seeing, and then you want to put a test question after that, because it also, instead of everything being passive, it’s a little bit more, really passive is reading to someone, audio. It’s a little more active if you have a talking head, because there’s something going on on the screen. It’s a little bit more active than that, I would say, about halfway, having someone read, because what we find is, if you have someone read to you, we found within five to eight seconds of turning on audio, people’s eyes leave the screen, and they go into their inbasket. Well, if you’re going to read to me? – their attitude is, if you’re going to read to me, then I don’t have to pay attention any more, so what we find it, it’s much better to make them read, because 100% of their attention is reading, as opposed to what? – five or ten percent if you’re reading to them, so then even a little bit more active than that is having them do an exercise, the most active thing you can ask someone to do on line is give them a test question, so we recommend lots of test questions, a pre-test, so it stimulates someone. If you ask them five questions, and they answer them all wrong, well shoot, they’re going to learn an awful lot in this course, if at the end the know the answer.

Steve

So there’s two themes coming out, if I might as a person try actively listening: one is, make sure that you’re doing something that requires active attention and engagement in their brain, so it’s definitely, it goes from order of magnitude where listening is the most passive, we can have background music, we can have background voices, we can’t really have background reading, and then as you get the questions, you actually have to be involved, and then the second thing that I thought was great what you were saying, if you have something like a voice, have a reason for it, it’s like animation in a PowerPoint slide, don’t put in animation just because you can, use it if it actually communicates something.

Anita

Exactly.

Steve

As you were talking, I was wondering if I could apply some of these tools with my children? Clearly when I talk to them, they just seem to immediately go to their iPod or whatever!

Anita

Well, one of the things that you can apply to your kids, the other thing that we have learned with the videos – never make them longer than two minutes, so when you have these PowerPoint to Flash, what happens is, people will pay attention, because anything that’s moving, you can see people engaged for about two minutes, even if it’s boring, people will stay engaged for about two minutes, and we did study, and a recent study that we did at Telefonica, because they had videos, and what we did, we asked specific questions pertaining that you only know if you watched the video, and we wanted to see when people tailed off, and we found that at about two minutes, people tailed off, that they stopped paying attention to the video, so that their answers became progressively worse the longer the video went. So what we found is, we could keep it up, if we gave them five two minutes videos, we’d give them exactly how I talked about doing the videos, a little bit of information, the video, a little bit more information, a couple of test questions on what they just saw, so multiple ways of making them think about the material, and then doing that again five times, what we found is the grade stayed really high. If we just gave them a ten minute video, after about two minutes the grade got really low, and we asked specific questions that you’d only know if you watched the video, that you wouldn’t know just by common knowledge.

Steve

Right, that makes a lot of sense, and I think, when you look at elearning, what do you think is the maximum length, so talking about the way that two minute videos – how long do you think an elearning course can realistically be, is there a certain limit? – it’s like look, you just can’t do this?

Anita

Yes, what we recommend is 15 to 20 minute segments, so either break your course into, it’s a 15 minute long course, or what we recommend is breaking it into five 15 minute courses, and then if you’re saying well, it’s really big, well then break it into multiple course, course section one, course section two, course section three, course section four, so you’re breaking it in. The reason we say we do this is because people will have, at lunchtime they’ll say, OK, I’ll take this course at lunch, 15 minutes, or a break, 15 minutes, and they’ll schedule out their day, and if you have five 15 minute sessions, well during the work week, they’ll say, oh every day, I start off my day doing my 15 minute course, and at the end of the month I’ll be done with this whole series, and we find that people about how much time people have between tasks, about 15 minutes – oh, I’ve got that meeting, what am I going to do? – I only have 15, 20 minutes. Oh, I can take the course.

Steve

Well I think in addition too, to that fitting with how people’s schedules really are, there’s actually, my background is psychology that does a lot of research, what you’re doing is distributed learning, so they’re going to retain it a lot better than one long course anyhow, so you see multiple benefits from breaking it up that way.

What about courses where you’re trying to do interaction and role playing? – if you’ve designed a good on site course, you’re getting people out of their chairs, you’re moving them around, interaction, role playing – are there ways to capture that concept in elearning?

Anita

There are, but there’s a comment that I want to make – just because you have it, doesn’t mean you need to use it, and when I consult a company, what we do is we look at the different courses that are coming along, and we break them – which are the courses that really you should have in the classroom, because they really need to have the people? If you’re really going to be doing interaction, it makes a real big difference if you have people interacting.

Those courses, elearning is not doing away with classroom training, what it is is there’s an awful lot of training that you don’t need to have that interaction, in some organizations every single year, every single person needs to take an emotional awareness course – do they need to be marched into a room every year to take that hand washing awareness course, or can they take it online? Every hospital has to take a course in handwashing, they can’t do that, they have to march people into a room, or can they do that online? You might have an initial course for new managers, where you teach them how to give a valuation – that’s fine, because you want to be able to do that role playing and have someone watch them and be able to do all of that. Follow up every single year after that – do you need to bring them in a room, or can you do follow ups on line, and the benefit of online is it’s just in time, you can take it when you need it, as opposed to when the company gives it, so, oh, my evaluations are due tomorrow, you go online, take the evaluation course, and then you can do your evaluations.

But then there are ways that you can make things interactive.

Steve

Just to summarize, it sounds like very often with especially major things you’re trying to get across in training, the best strategy is probably, you might start with an interactive on site course, but almost always, if it’s worth learning, it’s worth having some sort of follow-up on line course?

Anita

Right.

Steve

The last thing I’d like to cover, I’m just sensitive to the time, and you started to touch on it, is the 2.0 version, which it sounds like the technology is now getting to the point that maybe some of the things that used to be reserved for face-to-face training, actually the technology may be getting to a point where we can do more of this interactive stuff on line, and could you expand on some of that? What are you seeing in some of these 2.0 innovations in elearning?

Anita

Well, some of it’s good and some of it isn’t. One of the big things is, when you’re talking about software as a service, I don’t people realize that elearning is a service, so the difference for most trainers who are creating elearning is they’re used to being the end user, and what they don’t realize is they are now in fact delivering software as a service, because they are now the creator and the deliverer, and the end user who is receiving software as a service is the student, the learner, so it really, all elearning really is, a 2.0 capability if you’re talking about software as a service being one of the bigger 2.0 features.

And then you get into some of the podcasts, and my comment on podcasts is, if you delivered it 15 years ago, it would have been on someone’s Walkman, on a cassette player, and it’s just as boring delivering on a Walkman as it is on an iPod, so you can’t just think about the delivering mechanism, that wow, isn’t this great? – we can now put it on an iPod, and aren’t iPods hip, so now my training is hip? – no, if it’s boring, it’s going to be boring, no matter what media it’s on, so you’ve got to really think about also who’s delivering it, you’re going to have some guy with a boring monotone deliver something on an iPod, it’s really not going to move your business ahead.

Steve

Anita, you’re totally freaking me out here as a podcast host, but I think you’re right!

Anita

But I don’t think this is totally boring! And I love the radio, and I listen to NPR all day long, so it’s not that I have a problem with voice radio, but it has to be interesting, and you probably wouldn’t have this show if it wasn’t interesting, and you’re asking dynamic questions and you’re having dynamic people on, but there’s a lot of things that happen within companies, and there’s a lot of people that speak about products within companies that are not dynamic or interesting, so someone wouldn’t listen to it.

Steve

So you still need good service content, regardless of the technology, you can’t get away from that?

Anita

Exactly, and that’s the big thing, I think people think, oh we’re really hip, we delivered everything, we podcasted it all, and then you listen to this, and it’s like, OK, no you’re not, just because you used a new technology doesn’t make what you’re delivering interesting.

Steve

I guess the last question that I’d like to ask around the technology, that it really is a big change is, and I’m sure people wonder about, what about all this virtual sims, avatars – is that actually being used for training, and if so, does it work?

Anita

You know what, anything done well will work, and so I say that there’s two things: one, you have to look at your market, and the other one, you have to look at how well you can do it. A lot of companies just don’t have the money or the time, the budget, the money, the time, to be able to do it well, so what I say is, don’t do something crappy, and say, you see, but we did it – if you can’t do it well, don’t go there, if you can do it well, again I can use Telefonica, they did a lot of sims, they have, where there’s cool products because they’re a telephone company and they have the equivalent of iPod and text messaging and all of these other types of services that 15 to 25 year olds love, and they have delivered those services with training that is all done with simulations and all of this really really cool kind of stuff that networks real well, and that’s how you’re able to look at your market, if your market is 15 to 25 year olds, you want to be getting in there, and you want to be delivering it. If your market is older than that, and most businesses are not in that 15 to 25 year old market, and what I find is, and even if they’re in that market, it doesn’t necessarily work well for them, so what you have to do is, you don’t want to just do games for the sake of games – two comments: one is, you don’t want to do games for the sake of games because it really annoys professionals, you’re a 45 year old business person, you’re trying to do your job, there’s a class that you have to take so that you can continue doing your job, and you get in there and they’re having simulations and games, and you’re like, don’t waste my time – give me the material, let’s make sure I know it and let me get out of here, because my goal isn’t to take your course, my goal is to get through this so that I can continue to do my job.

Steve

It’s like that period where very website for a while had an annoying Flash entrance!

Anita

And it annoyed everyone, they’re like, OK, I just want to get into your website – leave me alone! – exactly, so you have to think about it, and then you say, OK, well our target market is 15 to 25 year olds, Duncan Donuts is a great case study of this, because what they’ve said, is most of the people working in our stores are 15 to 25, let’s create a series of games to see, to train them on how to better manage each of the stores, because there’s a bunch of skills that they all have to have, cleaning machines, whatever it is, so they created a series of games, and they brought it out to the field, because every store has a computer, and we can train people, and what they found is training went way up, and conversely productivity went way down in the stores, and what they found is, the young people really loved the games, but they were playing the games and they weren’t doing their job!

Steve

So I think what I’m hearing is, the goal of training, you need to make it, the goal is to convey information and knowledge to people, and you need to engage them and make it interesting enough that you capture their attention to get that information, but don’t go too far, and just make it engaging so they just play for fun. Well Anita, I think you’ve shared some great observations and some really useful and practical ideas around training, I particularly like, don’t put crappy stuff online, it won’t make it better! So I just wanted to thank you very much for appearing on our podcast, and as well as giving advice to our listeners, also some advice to myself, as I think about what we’re doing, and again I want to just follow up with a book that you’ve come out, which is called:

Anita

“Elearning 2.0 – proven practices and emerging technologies to achieve real results”, Elearning 2.0, my publisher is Amacom, it’s available on Amazon.

Steve

And it’s Anita Rosen. Well Anita, thank you so much for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Anita

My pleasure.

Speaker

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