Author Archive

John Helmer reviews the latest report from Towards Maturity.

‘E-learning is not a panacea’: how many times have we seen these words in print? The statement has become a cliché. However, you will find it almost impossible to read the latest report from the benchmarking practice Towards Maturity without it popping into your head.

Because the evidence from the workface presented here, gathered over the past eight years and reflecting the experience of more than 1,800 learning professionals, shows that when it comes to technology-enabled learning, it ain’t what you do (to invoke another rather hoary old cliché) it’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results.

Technology really can help you get better bottom-line benefits for the business from your learning and development activities, but it takes a bit of work to get there.

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The annual LINE survey is always a great chance to see what the Learning & Development community has on its mind. This year, according to our research, it is clearly thinking quite hard about mobile learning – unsurprisingly, perhaps – but also about learning architectures. And while practitioners value the expertise and original thinking they get from their supplier community, they clearly have a problem with those who fail to understand their business and brand.

Here are some highlights from the research…
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The purpose of this event, held at London’s historic Royal Institution, was:

1. To share and validate our work on Learning Architectures with practitioners from many different business sectors – the learning architects of their organisations.
2. To advance our mutual understanding of the Learning Architectures concept through group work in a series of structured workshops.

The day was a great success, both from LINE’s point of view and also, to judge by the many positive comments that were received, from that of the participating learning architects.

We found a great deal of support for our belief in the importance of thinking architecturally, and also learned more abut the importance of learning culture to nurturing this approach.
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At this year’s World of Learning Conference & Exhibition LINE chose to focus on the topic of mobile learning.

A poll taken among the conference delegates at Piers Lea and Tim Drewitt’s presentation showed that this focus was well justified. Asked when they were intending to implement m-learning, 23% said within 6 months, 37% within a year, 33% within two years and 7% within three years.

Along with a well-attended exhibition stand appearance, LINE gave talks at the conference and on the main exhibition floor around the theme of mobile and cross-platform learning. At the core of both these presentations were three views of a multi-platform world which, taken as a series, and illustrated by copious practical examples drawn from LINE’s work with clients, show how the learning community is maturing in its use of mobile devices for learning and communications.

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As organisations mature in their use of learning innovation, they tend to embrace a more architectural, joined-up approach informed by the 70/20/10 model. It is now clear that mature organisations are achieving some impressive results through these methods. However, with this maturity comes some grown-up issues. Looking at learning this way brings L&D into interaction with the business in new ways. In particular, with middle management.

These are findings that arose from the latest of LINE’s forum lunches, when senior learning and development professionals from corporate and public sector organisations met together in London recently to discuss the question of learning maturity.
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‘Kill the courses, shut down the training department’: has that really been the response of organisations to the advent of informal learning? John Helmer, senior consultant with LINE communications, charts its rise and describes how the 70/20/10 model is being practically applied within organisations.

Over the last decade, there has been a ferment of debate and discussion about what learning should look like in the 21st Century. Much of the energy in that debate, as far as e-learning is concerned, has gone into questioning the academic and theoretical underpinnings of instructional techniques, and incorporating new insights from the field of brain science. This focus on design has surely led to a quality improvement in the effectiveness of online learning. However, at a higher level of granularity, there has also been a growing interest in the role of informal learning, and a sense that rooting our enquiry too narrowly in how best to structure self-paced online courses risks overlooking the greater value that technology innovation can bring to the business of educating and developing people, looked at in the round.

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Analysing two reports, John Helmer gives a retrospective view of e-learning in 2010.

Accelerating Performance: Towards Maturity 2010-11 Benchmark Full report
Laura Overton, Howard Hills, Genny Dixon; Towards Maturity

The UK e-learning market 2010
David Patterson, Glynn Jung, Gill Broadhead, Renate Halton; Learning Light

As we brace ourselves for the choppy and somewhat chill economic waters of 2011, e-learning is looking to be a fairly shipshape vessel with a bright future ahead of it – according to these two reports, at least. General training budgets may be contracting, causing uncertainty and a deal of localised pain, but at the same time an increasing amount of spend appears to be moving online, as organisations look to ‘e’ to help them in delivering more for less.

Adoption is pretty much mainstream: the CIPD revealed this year (when pressed) that 85% of respondents to its annual Learning and Development survey are now making some use of e-learning*. And the industry can point to some solid successes at last. Mature users of technology-enabled learning are achieving cost efficiencies, reduced time to competence and wider access to learning within their organisations.

But there are some worrying indicators too. Is the practitioner community in danger of making a knee-jerk reaction to recession; adopting an outdated model of e-learning which is unlikely to produce results and can only lead to more of the negative perceptions that have dogged e-learning in its short history?

At the same time, is the supplier industry in tune with the real needs of its clients? Is it merely supplying what those clients ask for, or forging partnership relationships to provide appropriate support and guidance in meeting business objectives with the help of learning innovation?
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John Helmer, reviews the 70/20/10 model and highlights its adoption within organisations.

McCall, Eichinger and Lombard’s 70/20/10 model has been highly influential in spreading awareness of the importance of informal learning, and is now becoming something of a touchstone for organisational development. But have some people got a bit carried away with it? Has what started out as a useful observation about how people learn been deployed too proscriptively in some quarters, leading to its use as a strategy in itself?

Last month, senior learning and development professionals from a number of corporate and public sector organisations met together at the LINE London Forum to discuss this and other issues in Learning Design. In an age where we recognise that 90% of learning is informal, what is the proper role for Learning Design?
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John Helmer points out some common misconceptions about serious games and highlights a range of case studies where they are generating real results for organisations.

Serious games have a serious image problem in some quarters. But there is a growing body of evidence that game-based learning can be highly successful in driving business results, and a variety of drivers are making it harder and harder to ignore as a candidate medium where deep and immersive learning needs to be delivered online. So should you be taking serious games more seriously?
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John Helmer documents the key events of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) AGM

As an industry, it has to be said that we don’t always communicate well with business leaders and policy-makers outside our own special interest ‘pool’.

We speak a strange, arcane language, impenetrable to outsiders. We engage in fiercely contested debates about subjects close to our hearts – but clearly less close to those of baffled onlookers, for whom they must seem about as relevant to what’s happening at the contemporary workface, sometimes, as the War of Jenkin’s Ear. We suffer from an addiction to buzzwords – and currently have a dangerous tendency to retail a particular species of pop/bad science that is coming to be known in scientific circles as ‘neurotrash’.

So it’s with a certain amount of relief that one turns to a networking forum where a lot of the talk is instead about actual business results – and getting across the real value of what technology can do in supporting learning and communications to those external parties who govern and influence the context within which we all live and work.
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John Helmer assesses the latest technology supported learning and communications trends in the wake of a recent survey prepared by LINE.

Organisations value highly, it seems, the specialised expertise they get from providers of technology-supported learning and communications, and the external perspective such companies bring on learning and communications problems. Such was the finding of recent LINE research. However, the research also indicated that suppliers sometimes fail to understand the sector, brand, values, culture, process, and project objectives of their clients.
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John Helmer reviews the state of the technology supported learning market in reaction to the British Computer Society’s annual league table.

I was surprised, recently, to hear one of LINE’s clients tell me that the company isn’t seen, within his organisation at least, as an e-learning supplier. This is probably because LINE’s initial involvement with this particular client had been as part of a high-level consultancy effort looking at people development challenges in a holistic, strategic way – taking a helicopter view that was firmly delivery-method-agnostic.

His comment undoubtedly reflects the highly varied nature of LINE’s work, and the breadth of expertise and resources the company can deploy. Nevertheless, it is highly gratifying for LINE to be officially recognised, for the second consecutive year, as the UK market leader in bespoke e-learning content development by the BCS.

As well as consolidating LINE’s market leadership in this area, however, the BCS e-learning top tables, published in IT Training Magazine, also have interesting things to tell us about the state of the industry in general.
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John Helmer reports on LINE’s contribution to the second annual Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) Training Transformation Symposium

A great deal of interest has been generated within the defence sector by the UK Army’s recent unveiling of a LINE-developed learning app for iPad (see British Army takes the lead with new application for Apple iPad). A recent defence conference provided an opportunity for LINE, together with two members of the Royal Artillery Training Development Team who commissioned the piece, to show more of this innovative learning programme – and to place it within the context of LINE’s wider work with Defence colleges in training transformation.
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John Helmer describes how LINE Communications helped the Dealer Training team at Jaguar Land Rover to grow towards maturity in technology-supported learning and communications.

With responsibility for 60,000 people throughout the world in 160 countries, the Jaguar Land Rover Dealer Training team has some formidable challenges on its hands.

Jaguar and Land Rover are both, individually, very special brands. Each has a proud heritage well known to car enthusiasts. On a very basic level, a potential purchaser walking into a showroom will want to talk to someone who knows at least as much as she does about the cars – preferably more. There’s a lot to know, and product cycles move increasingly swiftly.
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John Helmer reviews the CIPD Learning and Development surveys 2007-2010 to see what they have to say about technology and learning

‘E-learning is the learning and talent development practice that has increased the most, with six in ten (62%) organisations saying they use it more than in 2009.’

The CIPD Learning and Development survey has been an annual event for the past twelve years. I’ve been reading it fairly closely for the last four of those, chiefly with an eye to what it might have to say about technology-supported learning.

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This year’s Learning Technologies exhibition and conference at Olympia was busier than ever, with the organiser reporting an estimated 50% increase in pre-registrations on last year’s show. Certainly the aisles seemed rammed (particularly around the LINE stand, gratifyingly). The exhibition has grown in size, of course, with the addition of the new Learning & Skills event co-located on the floor below, adding extra visitors, exhibitors and floor seminars.

So what does this obviously thriving event have to tell us about the state of the industry? Read more…

Drawing inspiration from the world of classic rock, we bring you the e-learning trends for 2010: what up, what’s down – and what’s coming back for a second time around.

This isn’t completely a matter of personal prejudice.

We’ve taken as a starting point the Gartner hype curve, which charts emerging technologies as they ascend the Peak of Inflated Expectations, plunge into the Trough of Disillusionment, then haul their way painfully back up the Slope of Enlightenment – finally reaching the Plateau of Productivity. We’ve simply selected the technologies most relevant to e-learning, and added a few others based on our own experience (and personal prejudices!).

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Viewpoint by John Helmer

If you were to judge solely from the blogs, tweets and webinars of learning gurus, from the articles in trade magazines and from talks at conferences, you might believe that the mould has been broken in training. Surely we are now in a new world where learning is all technology-enabled, informal, networked, Web 2.0 literate, blended.
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