E-Learning Articles

Article Overview:
This guide is for anyone considering implementing e-learning within their organisation. It considers the importance of a blended learning solution and highlights some of the advantages and disadvantages of both classroom and technology based learning.

Opening Words:
Many organisations have clear strategies when it comes to classroom-based learning. They may even have developed a series of generic courses covering specific phases of development - for example middle management or first time leadership. Very often classroom based training is delivered through a combination of internal resource and external suppliers.

When it comes to e-learning, fewer organisations have such a clear strategy. Some may have discarded it as an option, preferring to stick to solutions that have worked in the past. Others may have attempted to replace classroom based solutions with 'e-learning' without fully considering the implications of such a strategy for the individual learner and the organisation as a whole.

Useful Reading For:
This guide is for anyone considering implementing e-learning within their organisation.

Article Overview:
This article from Peter Honey was first published in 2001, but it remains pertinent today. For anyone involved in implementing an e-learning solution, it will help you identify some of the questions you should be asking of your potential suppliers.

Opening Words:
E-learning, in its current form, has been with us now for two or three years (preceded by CBT) and enthusiasm from government, organisations and providers shows no signs of abating. The hype is such that we could all be forgiven for thinking that e-learning is the equivalent of manna from heaven – a timely, life-saving miracle for which we should all be deferentially grateful. The claims made for the effectiveness of e-learning, in particular the sheer convenience of delivering it to where people are (as opposed to expecting them to come to it), make e-learning sound as if it is The Answer with other forms of learning suddenly being ridiculed as clumsy, old fashioned and expensive.

Useful Reading For:
Anyone involved in, or interested in E-learning.

Article Overview:
In this article Bill Lucas looks at the merits of 'learning fads' like blended learning, brain-based learning, kinaesthetic training and emotional intelligence, and briefly considers the evidence that supports these.

Opening Words:
Once upon a time we thought learners were all “blank slates” just waiting to be written on. Consequently teachers and trainers spent much time filling their pupil’s heads with facts. Then, during the last century we “discovered” psychology and began to explore the role of personal experience in learning. And in the1980s and 90s, at the same time as rapid advances in neuroscience, especially safe brain-scanning, whole new horizons of possibility opened up as we began to understand the true complexity of the mind’s operating systems.

Disillusioned with classroom training, many in HR have recently turned to the burgeoning hordes of providers offering solutions which promise to be more effective than the old, largely discredited techniques. Offering “accelerated learning”, “brain-based learning”, “kinaesthetic training”, alternatives to IQ like “emotional intelligence”, and, in the last few years, “bite-sized” and “blended” learning, many have played fast and loose with their evidence base. But the training world has largely swallowed their marketing hype and not bothered to check out the science on which is based.

Useful Reading For:
All trainers.