The Lean IT applied to the e-learning.

The Social Learning is based on the sharing of knowledge between each individual people. Everyone can bring something into the knowledge pool of its colleagues. The fixed roles of trainers and learners are slowly fading now that most people regularly have to train some new co-worker or some subordinate.

May it be through direct contact (tutoring, mentoring...) or through a company’s social network, most of today’s employees can continuously learn from mentors, ask them questions, seek their advises. Those informal talks can help solving complex problems way more quickly, and have the advantage of improving the employees’ qualification without stopping the flow of everyday’s work. That is why many consider them crucial in the transfer of the “know-how” of a company.

But this informal learning is often opposed to, and separated from, the formal training sessions (may they be done in person or through e-learning).

But if the e-learning massively seduces the heads of HR training departments, it is because it is rigorously formalized: sessions have a predetermined length, some clear pre-requisites, a well-defined goal, etc. The efficiency of the training can be measured, the strengths and the weaknesses of the trainees are complied and the needs of the teams can be deduced from it. Those benefits are priceless assets in any business environment.

Instead of always opposing formal and informal, shouldn’t it be possible to design a professional learning that would be both social and formal, both collaborative and with controllable objectives? Isn’t there far better to do than just adding a forum to a LMS before saying that the 2.0 won’t revolutionize the e-learning?

For this, the right questions must be asked:

How can the learner really take an active part in the learning process? What does collaboration means for the very special field of professional training?

The Serious Games can bring some answers because the trainee is active there. But the choices he can make are often very limited there. There may be different scenarios, but the learner never really builds his own training course. He is the main actor of a predefined script. He doesn’t collaborate.

The new e-learning, self-proclaimed 2.0 because it possesses some forum or wiki, doesn’t bring any true collaboration for the employees. It doesn’t allow the business companies to really benefit from the new practices. But it’s not because it can’t, it’s only because the right answers, the right solutions and the right ideas from the 2.0 success haven’t yet been transposed to the e-learning. And given what’s at stake here for all the companies of the world, those right answers, those innovations, must and will appear soon.

Now that the benefits from collaboration, openness and co-creation are acclaimed everywhere, how can we give to every learner a real power to improve the training he receives? For instance, could every salesperson bring his own experience into the company’s marketing speech at the same time he is being trained ?

Let’s follow another path: Lean IT is defined by regular iterations in the production process. This methodology is widely used by the 2.0 web industry. The main goal is to continuously improve a web application or site by using the constant feedback of the users, taking advantage of the really short time needed to make all the users use the new product (sometime just a server update suffices, without the users having to do anything). The best thing is that feedback can even be acquired automatically: usage statistics, where the user clicks, what he does on the website, etc, all this data is accessible to the product manager. This completely changes the product design from the traditional industry where a product life-cycle can need months or even years from a design decision to a feature of a product being in the hands of the users.

Big companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter use those techniques intensively, rigorously and with great success. A-B tests and other user-feedback based designing methods are compulsory in many IT firm. And every good web entrepreneur almost instinctively does the same for even the smallest website.

The thing is, an e-learning module is literally a web application. When someone claimed that the learner can be “actor of his own training”, shouldn’t it mean that the learner can consciously change this web application? Like pointing out errors, suggesting improvements, adding bits of knowledge and inserting new questions? The 2.0, and more precisely the collaboration, should allow employees to collaborate on the design, the conception and the realization of the training course.

I would like to know your thoughts on the following questions:

How does collaboration change the learning process in the e-learning and boosts the efficiency of the training sessions? How can e-learning modules benefit the most from it?

What is the impact on the created contents? Is there different type of contents that should be impacted in different ways? Those practices may not bring the same results on a foreign language course with rather unmoving knowledge, and on a technical course over some product just created by the trainee’s company; what shall be done about it?