More on eLearning

I attended today a session on business cases and ROI for online learning initiatives run by the AHRI Learning & Development SIG. The SIG had sourced a couple of interesting speakers, the first from Deloitte and the second from Roche Products.

The first session was very interesting in providing an insight into how Deloitte's goes about building a business case for online learning initiatives. They use some interesting methods for linking learning to business strategy, or "top-down" and then they build specific plans and items around the learning activity, "bottom up".

I had two big takeaway's from the session, firstly was how few eLearning programs they believe provide a return on investment, less than 25%! The second takeaway is related on how few organisations still do not conduct a benefits realisation process to ensure they are realising all of the possible benefits. Quite possibly if the second items was done the there would be more successful projects.

There were discussions on how even Gen-Y's were not adapting to eLearning. I wonder could it be that we are trying to provide a learning paradigm from the wrong generation?

The second session was more practical case study of what has been happening at Roche. It was fantastic to hear such a practical and complete case study on the benefits of eLearning. Roche take a blended approach to learning, that is a mixture of both offline and online delivery depending on the requirements of the course. Alison Bickford showed us all she is very passionate about eLearning but at the same time she seems very pragmatic about things. At times Alison was talking about personalised learning which covered a number of different areas for learning. She has a vision of providing learners with a very flexible collaborative approach to learning. I felt there were similarities to Bryan Alexander's discussions on mLearning. How timely!

Alison seems very switched on, after the People in Business conference it is good to hear an HR professional in Australia who is pushing the envelope. She even mentioned blogs, wikis in the presentation and refers to both in her references. Wikipeida as an example of a Wiki (I wonder if there is an example wiki for eLearning out there), and Scott Aldred's blog.

An interesting side note is Roche are installing broadband connections into the homes of employees who are being targeted for the eLearning programs. This is very interesting as I spent a bit of time talking with Tim Dean from NSW TAFE about the online learning programs they have been doing. We spoke about the potential for real time video streaming and podcasting (although I did not call it podcasting). A big barrier he has found is the lack of bandwidth within TAFE and where they do have bandwidth the high cost of it. Tim mentioned he is going to give audio/video streaming a try and see how it is accepted.

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