What are the trade offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?There's a lot involved in this question and I plan to revisit it several times during the month. I'm hoping to see some contributions that will help thinking.
Let me start with some important words of wisdom that I like to use at meetings:
You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.Props to the first person to leave a comment that identifies the source of this quote.
Only slightly more seriously, consider the following graph that I often use in presentations to illustrate a point:
Expenditure on training has a limit on the performance gains you can achieve. After a certain point, the cost of the Training exceeds the value of the performance gains. And often there's an minimum level that you can do where anything below that level would cause too many problems. This graph is completely over-simplified to make a point. In reality, there are many different ways we could make our expenditure and each one would have a different cost and effect on performance.
So, the real challenge posed by the Big Question is knowing when its really worth it to spend dollars on what we might consider a higher quality solution than providing something simpler that we know won't be as effective at improving performance.
And this isn't a theoretical question - it's something we face all the time. We are pretty sure that people will learn less from a rapid eLearning piece that's basically just a PowerPoint + Audio as compared to an hours worth of fun, interactive courseware. But, if the cost is significantly higher, is it really worth it? In what cases?
And it's not just an ROI question. Often, there's a lot more to What Clients Really Want than business outcomes that can be quantified into dollars.
In my mind, there's clearly no easy answer to this question. I'll be curious to see some of the ways that people attack this over the next few days.
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