A lot of elearning misses the mark. Money wasted. How can you avoid that?

There's two kinds of elearning out there (don't you love this kind of statement?):

• elearning driven by budgets
• elearning driven by results

Though I'm sure there are exceptions, offhand I'd say everything in the first category misses the mark. If you're not dead-focused on either adding to the top-line or bottom-line, your elearning isn't being driven by results. So let's cut through the crap and talk about 5 concepts that will get you results with your elearning. Some are obvious; some not so much. You could write a book on most of these, but I'll keep it short:

1. eLearning should be an extension of your brand.
2. It's not what you want learners to know, but what behaviors you want to change.
3. People are ready to learn only when they are emotionally engaged.
4. When you live it, you'll learn it.
5. Go to your learners; don't make them come to you.

eLearning should be an extension of your brand.

Your business is your brand. If your elearning isn't connected to what you stand for, you water down your brand and miss the opportunity to build your business. Whether you're audience is internal or external, your elearning should help to create brand evangelists. People who, because of your training, help move the company forward like a train on the tracks.

It's not what you want learners to know, but what behaviors you want to change.

The right beliefs, decisions and behaviors support your strategic objectives. They also produce satisfied, fulfilled employees. Training needs, almost by definition, dictate behavior change. Working backwards: use elearning to change beliefs, causing different decisions, and new behaviors. elearning isn't about what you want people to learn, but the behaviors to change.

People are ready to learn only when they are emotionally engaged.

Elearning isn't something you do to people. It's something you do for people. It should be a gift. And people aren't ready to learn until you have them interested. Well, more than interested--emotionally engaged. And you get there by being genuine and helping them solve their problems. That means you have to find the way to align your outcomes with your learners' outcomes. Win/win.

When you live it, you'll learn it.

When the copy and the videos just get to be blah, blah, blah--you've lost your learner. Pare down your content to just the essential information. Let learners' explore it at their own pace and on their own path (no next and back arrows) and then get them into simulations to practice what they are trying to learn. Give them experience through their decisions. Let them learn by making mistakes and getting the proper feedback. People never learn better than when the actually experience applying knowledge and live with the consequences.

Go to your learners; don't make them come to you.

We're entering the post-PC era when tablets and smartphones make more and more difference every day. Sales for smartphones were up 50% in 2011, and iPad sales literally soared. These are the information devices of choice for you learners, so that's where you should be putting your elearning. Take the learning to them. Let them access it exactly how and when the want and need it. 

Allow me to close by saying there are two kinds of elearning out there:

• elearning that's nothing more than electronic presentation of information
• elearning that immerses, engages, motivates and changes behaviors

eLearning is at a crossroad because of emerging technologies.

And it starts with the hardware, oddly enough. The push has come from both smartphones and tablets--led, of course, by the iPhone and iPad. Underneath these various mobile devices is one would-be constant: the WebKit browser standards. Theoretically, all of these touch devices should respond identically to a developer's programming.

Tablets

That all sounds good, right? And it does work that way with Apple devices, because Apple controls both the hardware and the software (which has been a large part of their success in the past 5 to 10 years). And since something like 97% of web traffic from tablets comes from the iPad, design for tablets is still pretty simple.

Smartphones

Phones are different. As Android phones began to hit the market, Apple's share of smartphone web traffic fell to just 50% last year. Now, it's back up to 69%--a healthy jump! Just theorizing here, but one of the factors involved in this increase could be that there are now many flavors of WebKit "standards" in the Android market. Some devices can be upgraded to the latest operating platforms, and some can't. Some play one kind of video, while others demand a different version. That makes what's supposed to be easy for developers, very difficult. It can make the user experience frustrating, too.

Back To eLearning

The whole Flash vs. HTML5 thing wouldn't be an issue for elearning if we just stayed on the desktop. But mobile device sales are exploding and there's a huge benefit in liberating elearning from the desktop and taking it to where our learners are. Since mobile devices are going to have to survive without Flash, one of the main role of HTML5 is to re-create some of what Flash does, but using an open standard. That should be a good thing for everyone. But as I noted above, the standard has been fractured within the Android market.

So the uptake is this: if you want to get your elearning to your learners--when and where it has the most impact--you're going to have to begin to ignore Flash and embrace HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. OR--you're going to have to use tools that translate your PowerPoints into HTML5. That's a surefire fix for some, but like most rapid elearning tools, the results are far from what can be accomplished with a custom development approach.

It's funny. Having recently returned from exhibiting at Training 2012, I have to say I'm very surprised at how many times I had to explain what "custom" elearning was. "So what tool do you use?" was the persistent question. Just Flash, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript was always the answer. More than one person left with a confused look...

Computerworld - "Chrome for Android will not run Flash Player, the popular software that Apple has famously banned, Adobe confirmed yesterday.

The acknowledgment was no surprise: Last November, Adobe announced it was abandoning development of Flash for mobile browsers. In other words, Google missed the Flash boat by several months.

"Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content," said Bill Howard, a group product manager on the Flash team, in an Adobe blogTuesday.

The stock Android browser included with the operating system does support Flash, noted Howard."

Notice that the text above comes from Computerworld and the full story is at: http://bit.ly/wYYPxs

Those of us in elearning have been watching this development for quite awhile. Some of us have predicted it for a long time. Steve Jobs knew it all along. Flash is great on the desktop, but unstable and a resource hog when it comes to mobile devices. As they say: "Stick a fork in it, it's done!

"But what will we do for all the pizazz and animation without Flash?" some of you are still wondering?

Not to worry! HTML5, CSS and JavaScript make for great development tools--and there will be higher-level products coming (some are already here, like Hype and Adobe Edge) that leverage these tools, for non-programmers. But to really put your elearning minds at ease take a look at this course on your desktop computer: http://bit.ly/yGTl5r

...and now the same course on your iPad or other tablet: http://bit.ly/vTNRj8 Yeah, there were a couple of things left off this early proof of concept, but you can see all the power is certainly there.

Since the sample above, we've gone on to do many SCORM compliant tablet courses, with all the usual bells and whistles of our Flash courses. Not only is the tablet changing programming--it's changing everything! We're truly entering into the post-PC era you've heard about!

You've heard me call the iPad a game changer for elearning. And I've talked about the post PC era that the iPad has created.

Now Apple has released the new iBook app, aimed at K-12 and post secondary education. How does that effect the future of corporate learning? And notice that I've dropped the "e" from e-learning. The "e"could be considered fairly redundant by now.

The Apple video above is well worth watching. If you haven't seen it yet, it will set your mind spinning with future possibilities.

To be sure, iBooks isn't yet poised to take over corporate learning. Results have to be acquired through iTunes and have to be played on an iPad. Not such bad things, but by far more corporate content is private than not. Unless Apple comes up with conditional download from iTunes, we won't be rushing to doing our courses there in the near future.

But will the iPad become a standard. From an analysts view, it seems likely. Let me show you why in this graph below, which I found in a CNN Money story on the web.

You can see that, for longer or shorter periods of time, all PC sales except for Apple's have been declining. But through the steepest declines, look what happens (the circled area) when you add iPads into the mix. This is very graphic proof that we are entering the post PC era. (click on the graph and you'll open a window with the article)

I'm on the plane, just leaving Las Vegas and the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

From an elearning perspective I can sum up the show in one word: MOBILE! Now, of course, by mobile I'm talking both tablets and smartphones, which both offer their own special advantages (tablets offer enough real estate to do full-blown courses--while smartphone screen sizes lend themselves more to rapid reference tools and quick drill-downs of full courses).

This is in stark contrast to CES last year, where most of the Android tablets didn't even work. This year, you can play console quality multi-player games that look just like my son's X-Box games. And here, I can let you in on a small secret. The huge change isn't just Android, but the new Snapdragon integrated-processor from Qualcomm. They're the first chip manufacturer to put the CPU, GPU, 3G/4G, camera and about 8 other things on a single, low-power chip. As manufacturers like Intel and NVIDIA begin to catch up, you'll likely see a kind of processor wars taking place. 

But let's get back to mobile devices for elearning! wslash recently did a survey of nearly 1,200 learners, asking them about mobile devices.

You can see from the image above that 78% of participants agree or strongly agree that they would use an iPad or other tablet as a sales tool in the retail environment. Likewise, 67% of them would use a smartphone to brush up on selling features. The age goes from 20 something to 60 something in this survey, with the median age being from 36 to 45--so, running against common wisdom, it's not just the younger generations who get excited about technology. I can also tell you that, in a telephone pre-survey 82% said they had smartphones or would buy one the next time around. Also, 25% currently have an iPad or other tablet. These numbers are huge, folks!

This past year wslash did a bunch of smartphone courses--put the QR code right in the desktop course! And we did a number of tablet courses, too. We also developed a device sniffer, that tells the LMS what kind of device is asking for a course, so everyone gets the right experience--desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

mLearning? For the past several years, mlearning has meant phones. It's time to adjust that thinking. A few years ago, tablets didn't even exist--now they're about to dominate. And if you think you can ignore tablets, think again. In the near future tablets are predicted to be outselling desktop computers. And for most users, you can see why. Light, portable, powerful--and where elearning is concerned, perhaps the most important aspect is that content comes to the learner, no matter where they are!

Want a little more proof that moblie learning is coming like a tsunami? We're just starting on a course that being produced in desktop, tablet, and smartphone formats--in 16 different languages. With our usual 3D avatars and simulations, it's a good thing the media designers are handling that one, and not me!

I can't name the company whose data is displayed here, but they're a Global 500 company in the automotive industry, and we've done their elearning for 10 years. As you can imagine, we have many success stories to tell. We've gathered a lot of critical Kirkpatrick Level 1, 2, 3 and 4 feedback in the past few years--so we really know what works and what doesn't.

The chart you see here is hard, cold, Level 4 data. It's been gathered from actual sell-out numbers. Product that has moved out the door as true proof of change from our elearning courses. Let me explain both of the results you see above:

• 30% greater sales...this was during a 60-day sales spiff. Each salesperson got $4 for each newly released product sold. If they took our elearning course, too, they got double that--$8 per product sold. At the end of 60 days, the salespeople who took the course outsold those who did not by 30%. The only variable? A single elearning course (and maybe previous experience taking our courses).
   
• 16% greater sales...just recently we discovered that a national retailer has been requiring our courses in the state of Floria for the past year. In all other states, participation was voluntary. Looking at hard data, the sell-out numbers for Florida retail sales was 16% higher than the rest of the nation.

We're finding more and more ways to use our elearning simulations with 3D avatars. Just the other day we started working on a set of simulations that demonstrate the wide-ranging characteristics and preferences between the different generations in the workplace. These will be stand alone simulations, used in a live workshop. The client chose these simulations over the off-the-shelf videos they could have bought because we could customize them to specific needs within their organization.

And as you can see in the movie above, we're working with a company called Extended DISC on a number of 3D sims for DISC training. Most of us have completed some sort of DISC tool and gotten a pretty impressive report from it, right? But as good as that information is, if you don't have a chance to practice what you learn, the knowledge eventually evaporates.

Practice. Practice is why we build our immersive elearning simulations. They can be connected to learning course modules, or they can stand alone, as in the two examples above. But if you want your learning to stick--if you want to insure your investment--you can't afford to ignore practice.

Practice and feedback show learners how they can be successful. And that success creates new beliefs that lead to changed behaviors. Isn't that what you spend your learning dollars on? Behavior change? Of course it is. If you want different business outcomes, you have to create different behaviors.

So...Practice = New Beliefs = New Behaviors = Improved Business Results.

And along with practice and new successes comes increased confidence. Increased brand loyalty is also a product of successful practice in elearning. That's not an idle claim; our surveys and frequent learner comments prove it.

So are you providing practice for your learners or not? If you aren't yet, try adding practice to your next course and then ask your learners what they think. If you've done a good job, you may not even have to ask--they'll just tell you.

I know, I know. You just started to implement mlearning (or maybe you haven't). So why do you have to bother with m-selling and m-marketing? Do you even need to know what they are?

The answer is a resounding yes, because smartphones and tablets have revolutionized more than just learning! Keep reading to learn why you need to do more--and more--than you may be doing now.

You can see from this video how we've helped Sony dive into mobile learning. And maybe you haven't thought about it much, but here's the next steps--and why you should take them.

First, mobile learning has lots of applications, but here I'm assuming you're doing elearning and/or mlearning as part of sales training. If that's the case, the next thing you have to do is stop and think about the business case. Within this context of elearning/mlearning, the business case is to build brand and increase sales.

So why only concentrate on half of the job you could be doing?

Salespeople report developing a brand preference from our courses. They become brand advocates who prefer to sell the products we train them on, over other products. That's impact with both top- and bottom-line results.

• But it happens before the sale...why not use some of the same, powerful tools during the sale?
   
• And if elearning both informs and creates brand preference...why not use the same, powerful tools to educate customers?

It's an old saying, "Nothing happens until somebody sells something," right?

And all of the research tells us that the greatest influence on a sale comes from the salesperson. But we also know lots of people do their own research on the web and then, very purposely, go to a retail store to make their purchase. Oh, and then there's the old saying, "No one likes to be sold to, but everyone loves to buy." In your gut, you know all of these things are true.

It's a brave new world out there when it comes to marketing and sales. So why not take advantage of all the old and new wisdoms that are at our disposal?

Why not use strategically created, customer-focused elearning and let your customers sell themselves? 

When you play this video, you get a slice of what this can mean.

Instead of creating a microsite so visitors passively read about their products, one of our customers opted to put Nurse Melissa into a "no-sales-zone" where potential customers can meet a friendly face that knows all about their problems, and can even offer some solid solutions.

This customer-friendly approach gives prospects all the information they're looking for, in a way that creates good will and trust. In a very real way, when they've answered their questions, relying on nurse Susan, they have qualified and sold themselves.

This company looked at the demo you see above and immediately quadrupled their budget, to take advantage of this powerful new way to reach out to customers.

Nurse Melissa answers several questions that visitors can ask, in each of four different categories. It gets to their needs immediately, and unlike other ways of delivering a marketing message, this interactive method puts your customer in control. Because they're asking the questions, the company has automatic permission to convey product and marketing messages.

This approach turns everything around...which is just what's called for when things get competitive.

Is elearning too costly to implement for your budget?  Are you having a hard time getting management buy-in and funding?

I know of one proven way to get upper management to embrace elearning and put a budget behind it. All you have to do is to demonstrate the bottom-line impact of elearning to your business. 

For instance, more than 1000 sales managers for a global manufacturing client of ours recently revealed in a survey that our courses help lift their sales by as much as 18%. The results for that lift would be more than $2 billion in North America.

Now, upper management already had a strong commitment to elearning. But with an ROI of many, many times the cost of the program, our budget has tripled since we took over that account. And the more learners we engage, the lower the cost per course completion.

 Lesson #1.  Find ways to measure your impact.

We love clients who want to measure the impact of our work. We learn what we can do better, of course, but it also sells management on the level of funding elearning should receive.

New to elearning, so you don’t have data?

Lesson #2.  Don’t focus on budget, focus on strategy and the ROI.  

Recently, a new client of ours approached us with a tactical need and a $14,000 budget for promoting products on their website.  We took a couple of hours to talk, learn about their business and their business challenges, and then proposed a creative business strategy that we believed would give them the results they were looking for.  Our client presented our solution to their boss and suddenly the budget grew by 4x.  Why?  Because the boss realized that our strategy would far out-perform their original idea. He could see the return on his investment. 

We talk about this idea a lot...that is ROI vs budget. But it's almost always true that you get further with this focus than any other. And in an upcoming post, we'll talk more about proven ROI with some of our clients.