My Perspectives on Digital Learning
Electronic brain
During my tenure at a major telecom company, a few instructional designers had the opportunity to pursue our White, Yellow, and Green Belt Six Sigma certifications via what was considered “eLearing”, or “digital learning”. This was 10 years ago, when Six Sigma was more en vogue than today. However, the training seemed to be from the early 80s. The training consisted of green letters on a black background. We’re talking about MS-DOS-level presentation of information. There are no graphics, charts, graphs, or visuals at all, but lines of text after text. From my perspective, the information contained in this training seemed to have been written by an SME who was a Master Black Belt and could not be bothered by plebeians such as myself. The content was not organized in any logical order and seemed to skip parts like stones skipping off a body of water. Then, at random intervals, the training would harken back to what was omitted earlier. This was virtually impossible to follow as there were no page numbers or table of contents; just miles and miles of lines of green text. This was by far my most negative “eLearning” experience.
My colleagues who had opted into the training reported the same overwhelming dread. We all spent days getting through the White Belt training, taking pages of notes, only to find that the test was taken verbatim from the context itself. If you answered a question incorrectly, you could hit Backspace and try again. Most of us repeated this until we found the right answer. We all passed with flying colors. The process was repeated for our Yellow Belt certifications. However, this time, the content assumed that we had learned from the previous White Belt training- a massive logical leap. The Green Belt certification followed the same formula. I learned what not to do when designing and developing a course or assessing the knowledge presented in it. Only after we were expected to put this “knowledge” into practice did we inform leadership what the training actually entailed.
Rather than providing feedback at the end of all the courses, we should have taken a more active role in our own learning. It was incumbent on us as learners to help make the content more relatable and potentially personalized. We should have been much more vocal about the quality of instruction much earlier. The irony was that we were learning how to reduce wasted time by wasting time. The silver lining was that a few of us “accidental designers” were given the bandwidth to rewrite the White and Yellow Belt courses using proven design practices we’d learned via short instruction-led training by professional designers.
A much better (while still not great) eLearning experience involved being cross-trained as a national telecom network engineer as part of strike preparedness (if hourly paid union members were to strike, we in management were to fill those shoes and keep the business afloat). A design professional somewhat wrote the training, and the information proved to be digestible, relatable, and pertinent. It followed the major design principles as I knew them to be as an accidental designer. After completing the training, some of us were allowed to travel and perform the duties for which we’d been trained. I felt prepared and ready if I was needed. Fortunately, a strike never occurred.
I believe both sets of courses would have benefited from situational principles and should have provided the experience of performing the job. This would have provided a contextual approach helping the learners understand how their learning relates to real-world situations, see the practical applications and relevance of what they're learning, and develop more meaningful and lasting connections to the material. In my case, cross-training as a network engineer, situated learning emphasized the social nature of knowledge acquisition. It allowed me the opportunity for peer learning and knowledge acquisition from an SME. Unfortunately, not all were able to have this hands-on experience.
The Six Sigma training was a clear example of how not to build a course. I learned that the experience would have been much better if we had been paired with a mentor and shown how and why the Six Sigma practices were used. We would have benefited from seeing a senior practitioner improve processes, reducing waste, and lowering costs. We would have seen the tangible effects of better meeting customer needs and expectations, as well as improved product and service quality, resulting in increased customer loyalty. I learned that the training experience would have benefited me by adding a social component to the course.
In the Six Sigma courses, I did not feel that I had learned anything beyond the fact that the text and presentation were difficult for my color-blind eyes. Actual learning started after a few of us designers were tasked with rewriting the course. We employed an Agile project management style to enable consistent feedback and continuous, iterative improvements to our materials. That experience truly allowed me to connect with the material and grasp how and why the training helped to relate to the company’s strategic goals.
My takeaway from the network cross-training made evident that by learning in authentic contexts, I was better able to transfer the knowledge and skills to real-world situations. I was more effective in applying learning outside the classroom, gained an increased ability to adapt knowledge to new contexts, and was better prepared for strike scenarios. While I was able to travel and practice the situations we might find ourselves in, not all learners were fortunate enough to share that experience. My unique circumstance instilled in me that learning by doing goes a long way in retaining new knowledge.
I am still awaiting my best eLearning experience.
