Causes for panic

Come to think of it, the old truth that applications lag well behind technology is not as convincing as it used to be. A healthy dose of bureaucracy and general bloody-mindedness used to slow most changes down to a snail’s pace. But somehow the barriers seem to have come down. Change is frighteningly fast. The World Wide Web was only launched in 1992, yet already hundreds of millions are online. And even your granny now wants her own mobile, so she can ‘phone you to come and collect her from the bingo.

Other factors tend to suggest that e-learning will have more than a peripheral part to play in IT training. First of all, it is not such a leap of faith to believe that you can use a computer to learn about computers. After all, as enlightened trainers, you would agree that we learn best by doing, by getting actively involved. And you don’t need to go to a classroom to find a computer to do that doing. It’s probably sitting there right in front of you. Anyway, this idea that the classroom is the natural place for learning doesn’t stand up to analysis. Ask yourself, how did people learn before schooling became available to all? How much of what you now know and can do did you really learn in formal education? What about trial-and-error, personal reflection, reading, one-to-one coaching, learning on-job, learning by observation? Back in medieval days, the classroom developed as the predominant method for formalised learning, not because it was the most effective, but because it was the most convenient and the most practical given available technology. As, no doubt, was the horse and cart.

Unlike soft skills training, IT training lends itself rather well to e-learning. Not only can the medium become the message, but the majority of the learning required is in the cognitive domain and therefore well suited to self-study. Not surprisingly, even prior to the online revolution, the suitability of IT as a subject encouraged the development of self-study materials and publishers such as NETg, SmartForce (now SkillSoft) and DigitalThink already have extensive libraries of IT training courses converted from CD-ROM to online delivery. So there will not be a shortage of content to slow down the growth of e-learning.