Soon after the Alberta government announced more than $5 million in grants to bolster e-learning programs, experts urged caution in relying too much on technology-based learning.
The biggest winner in the recent Access Fund competition was Athabasca University, which received $1.5 million to redevelop 150 of its most popular undergraduate courses for online delivery.
“The funding to Athabasca may well be appropriate,” said Kenneth Fung, program director in the faculty of continuing education at the University of Calgary, “but we’re finding that e-learning is not a panacea for adult learners. We should definitely be looking at other ideas, too.”
Fung presented a keynote address last week in Edmonton at the annual What Works – Alberta conference, sponsored mainly by the human resource ministries of the federal and provincial governments.
His message, for both large and small companies, was to “keep it simple” when applying e-learning technology.
“Don’t get hung up on the technology,” he said. “A lot can be accomplished with simple tools such as e-mail and online chat.”
Fung also introduced the idea of virtual communities of practice, which he defined as “an informal group of practitioners that shares knowledge on common development problems while pursuing joint solutions.”
He added that these communities can be highly motivating ways to learn, and that “people start to enjoy them so much that they become passionate about them.”
To prevent inappropriate sharing of company secrets with outsiders, all participants should be aware of the ground rules for online interaction.
Several divisions of IBM have adopted the communities of practice model to share knowledge globally.
According to an IBM-sponsored paper, “By the end of the year 2000, over 76,000 professionals had access to the ICM (intellectual capital management) AssetWeb application and about 20,000 participated in some form of community activity.”
Fung says that these communities often start out with just a handful of committed users, but once they reach critical mass, others are motivated to start sharing their knowledge.
“They start to feel safe and begin to express emotions online.”
Fung, who organizes both online and face-to-face programs, says that businesses often overestimate what e-learning can accomplish. “People are social learners,” he said, “and they like to learn in groups.” He cited the example of UCLA’s school of dentistry, which invested five years and $750,000 in e-learning only to find that students preferred a low-tech, personal approach. He also cautioned against believing that e-learning is automatically a cheaper alternative to face-to-face instruction.
“Developing good content is expensive,” he said, “and there’s also the cost of infrastructure, installation, bandwidth, systems integration and marketing.”
One key focus at the What Works – Alberta conference was recruiting and retaining great employees.
Stephen Quesnelle, vice-president of tax software maker Intuit Canada, said this is a daily concern for him. “It’s tough to find the high-skilled workers, and the thing that frightens me the most about this industry is that every night our key assets walk out the front door on two legs.”
Providing educational opportunities is an important tool to keep them. It may even be more effective than money. Ed Davies, vice-president of DBM Canada, noted that most employers think dissatisfaction with pay is the prime reason why top-performing employees leave a company. In reality, that factor ranks third, after inadequate opportunities for promotion and dissatisfaction with company management.
What can you do to hire and keep top performers?
Susan Cassidy, vice-president of human resources for Calgary Laboratory Services, said providing education is a key factor in her strategy. Her company partners with educational institutions and pays 60 per cent of its employees’ tuition bills.
Intuit Canada’s Quesnelle ups the workplace perk ante even higher. He offers his geeks everything from individually controlled climates in their cubicles to a company nap room.
A final message emerging from the What Works – Alberta conference was to “not go it alone” in e-learning. Why develop your own course if somebody else has done the work already?
Boosted by $900,000 of provincial funding, Alberta’s colleges and technical institutes are trying to work together. They recently launched eCampus, a “one-stop shop” for online courses. It’s still in the building stages, but you can already find learning opportunities ranging from Bookkeeping for Home Business (Red Deer College) to Financial Math (Grant MacEwan College.)
In keeping with Fung’s advice, many of these courses involve online interaction with other students, so they have definite start and end dates. There are other learning portals too, such as Campus Canada, which lists more than 2,700 college and university courses from across the country.
There’s no question that Canada’s need for educated workers is growing rapidly. At the conference, Chris Bates of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada showed that a significant percentage of Canadians are at Levels 1 and 2 on the five-level International Adult Literary Survey scale. This means they probably can’t read the directions to assemble their kid’s bike, or work as a cashier in a convenience store. With more and more jobs demanding Levels 3, 4 and 5 skills, everybody agreed we have lots of work to do.
E-learning will be a tool to help get this job done . . . but certainly not the only one.
Web watch:
www.learning.gov.ab.ca/college/AccessFund
www3.gov.ab.ca/hre/whatworksalberta
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
