Marine Corp General says PowerPoint Makes Us Stupid

The slide above has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control.

So much of e-learning today has gone the way of PowerPoint...literally and figuratively. "As easy as PowerPoint" is the specific, or implied, promise of many e-learning products. And since this page-turning mentality is just a presentation tool to begin with, not a learning tool, not much learning takes place.

By contrast, the x-learning approach from w/ is a learning by exploring and practicing approach. Learning the way we have naturally learned since the time we began to crawl. You can read a lot about that in our other blog posts, so for now, just enjoy the exerpt of the Times article, below...

According to the New Your Times, "Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

'It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.' "

 You can read the full article here.

No, I don't mean just our business. I mean our clients' business, too. But I'm not stopping there, either. I'm talking about everybody's business. So, while e-learning  is our core, it's also fair to say that we're something of a business evangelist. Why do we take this position? Because the economies of the world could use a good kick in the butt. And simply put, we believe our approach to e-learning can help improve anyone's business. We also believe there's plenty of business to go around, so...

The only secrets we have to share are creativity, hard work, and common sense.

And when it comes to common sense, too many companies are so caught up in saving money that they miss the bigger picture of ROI.

w/ focuses on results. Primarily, that means adding to the top line through increased sales and brand preference. We don't leave cost savings out of the equation, but in the end, value is what's really important. And the place to save money, while still preserving value, is in efficient design and production engines, and effective project management (all of which we're really good at).

We never cut costs at the expense of increased learning and behavior changes that achieve important business objectives. In other words, we keep our eye on long-term profits, not short-term savings.

Anyone can follow our business model (though we'd like to think that no one does it quite as well as us).

• Strategy...meaning we learn a client's business well enough that we can actually contribute, as a partner, to developing new strategies for success.
• Creativity...this is one area where "good enough" is never enough. And it's important to remember that everything starts with what the learners need.
• Value...as noted above, we create systems to reduce costs. Most of the time, you can count on cheap production being a waste of money.
• Results...we don't do product training, or even just sales training. We do training that moves the needle on sales. Our learner surveys (in other blog posts) make that clear.

In the past couple of weeks I've complained about some questionable e-learning practices. Now I realize I'm ready to declare war. Ready to declare war on ineffective e-learning. Not all elearning, mind you. Just the bad stuff.

In one recent post I spoke out against rapid e-learning being faster and cheaper, at the expense of being better. In another, I warned about turning out courses that don't have enough of a strategic foundation.

But here's the real problem: too many elearning professionals are working from a disadvantage. They're being held responsible for results, but they've either got too little time, too few resources, or too little e-learning experience to be as successful as the wish they could be.

So please, for the moment, allow me to continue to complain on behalf of all elearning professionals. And next week...I promise...we'll start talking about how to win the war against ineffective elearning.

Here's my top five complaints:

1. Missing out on better, by concentrating only on faster and cheaper (read)
   
2. Churning out tactical solutions, without the strategies for ROI (read)
   
3. Designing training without understanding the vision of your customer
4. Continuing to use the page as a measure of learning
5. Expecting learners to be successful, not through practice, but by reading
   

Now, you can check the posts on the first two declarations (click on the list above) but I owe you some explanation on the last three.

The Vision Of Your Customer

Our customers (internal and external) see the world through the prism of their own problems, for the most part. Okay...that's human nature. So why then, do we continue to design e-learning from our point of view, rather than theirs. Why do we put things in terms of what the company needs, or bury important buying information in techno-babble? We need to design and write from the other person's perspective.

The Page As A Measure Of e-Learning

Pages began with books and fliers and newspapers...all methods of communication, for the most part. PowerPoint borrows from that same linear progression of ideas. Why? Okay, for assembly of a complicated widget, sure. But for anything conceptual? Linear is too often an impediment to learning.

Reading, Not Practice

Why do we think reading about something should automatically make it clear. Why would knowledge suffice for experience? The natural way we learn from the time we're born is by doing things. Try. Fail. Try again, fail better. Bad e-learning does not incorporate learning by doing, or practice.

Okay...that's my war on ineffective e-learning. I could actually list a lot more complaints, but let's keep it simple for now, and next week we'll move on to a  solution that we call x-learning.

Please take a look at the work on our site. If you'd like to find out more about what we might do for you, click here.  

It's easy for our jobs to get in the way of what we do. There's so much work to be cranked out! But as always, work should be about quality, not just quantity...and ultimately it has to be about results. We can't afford to put as much time and money into e-learning as we do, if we don't get a good return on our investment.

ROI is the WHY behind strategy. So your first checkpoint on effective e-learning is: are your courses supporting a well articulated strategy? Unfortunately the usual answer is, at best, only a partial "yes".

Check your own experience: is 90% or more of your sales training just product information? Or is it focused on how to sell the right product to the right cusotmer? Too many times, that's not the case. And while sales training is an easy example, we could be talking about any course that's fat on what and lean on how, why and practice.

This post would be way too long if I were going to cover HOW to incorporate strategy. It's more about WHAT you can be doing strategically, to improve both quality and ROI. But I promise, week-after-week in the coming months we will be talking a lot about the HOW-TO of integrating strategy into your courses.

Let's return specifically to sales training as our example for implementing e-learning strategy, allow me to introduce these additional questions:

• Do you understand your customer's point of view and are you training from that direction?
• Are you reusing e-learning content to help customers sell themselves?
• Is part of your effort working to create word of mouth (WOM) in the marketplace?
• And finally, does your e-learning support brand preference that leads to repurchasing?

If it never occurred to you that these strategies should be driving your e-learning efforts, that's okay. But when you're measured on the results of your program, as more and more of us are, this might be just the improvement you've been looking for. See you next week!

Please take a look at the work on our site. If you'd like to find out more about what we might do for you, click here.  

Friday. What better day to turn your back on work and do some blogging, right? Besides, I just linked from LinkedIn to an e-learning blog post titled: Information or Knowledge...Which is it? where the author and commentors were pondering the difference between these two commodities and their meaning in e-learning.

I don't want to sound crude here, but that mentality is so 20th century...and it's so wrong. And it's wrong because business as usual isn't good enough anymore. We have to be better and smarter than that to put the American economy back on track. And for that matter, we have to continually improve what we do and how we do it...not stay stuck in what we did a decade ago.

What e-learning needs to focus on is exploration, practice, feedback...leading to competency. In other words, instructional and creative design that provides a natural way of learning by doing. And in the process e-learning changes behavior, creating new competencies that turn into company new revenues and company profits.

This selling game lets learners explore related digital home media products, then allows them to practice matching products to three different customers' needs. You can experience this game yourself at: http://bit.ly/4qeDcQ

In fact, it was years ago that we told our clients that sales training had to be more than product information. If the end result is to be more sales, then learners need to practice selling. Learners need to explore (not just read about) new products and then be able to apply what they've learned by practicing selling in a safe environment. Moreover, they must fail some of the time...because if they don't have a chance to fail and get feedback, and try again, their learning will be limited. 

If you'd like to learn more about why immersive simulations and serious games make compelling e-learning you might visit another post on this blog, Do games make compelling e-learning?: http://bit.ly/3ilXXG

This post is a real departure from my usual selection of topics, but I think it's really important to help clients manage technical contacts and conversations.

We know that we depend on our clients to survive, of course. But sometimes I think we forget how much our clients depend on us. Case in point: a phone conference I was on the other day where the topic was making two different LMS products communicate with each other. I represented w/ and our product: simpleLMS (www.simplelms.com) and there were two technical contacts from the other company who were trying to communicate what they needed from our joint client.

The details on this project are a bit deep for most clients...but what do they need to know, really? They need to know the end result of how the two products will share information, how much it costs, and how long it will take. That's it.

The mistake the technical contacts made was thinking that the client needed to understand how their database was designed and how many variables were allowed, at which different levels of the product. In other words, they were getting the client involved in the design of the solution...and that's not the client's job. All the tech guys needed to know is what information from the learners' profiles needed to be shared between products and why (login, password, course completions and prerequisites). From that, they could come back with a simple proposal to make things work, without getting the client in way over her head.

Now, you clients out there...applause for how hard you work, but don't let the techies take over the show and drag you into more work, or more information, than you need to be involved in...

• In a preliminary conversation, tell your supplier what you want to accomplish
• Make sure they ask you enough questions, so that they really understand what you need
• Make sure they clearly explain what they will need from you, in order to be successful with your project
• Ask your supplier to create a scope document that outlines all of the above parameters, and have them include at least a preliminary budget and time table
• Now, review the document with support from other people who may be able to spot problems or additional opportunities and go to a final version of the scoping document with your supplier

Professor Andrew McAfee (left) just finished his keynote Enterprise 2.0: The State of an Art at DevLearn 09. He emphasized that web 2.0 isn't something to miss out on and shared some convincing survey and case study results as proof (I promise to share more on these in a future blog post).

He also made the case for getting out of the way, if you're going to be successful with web 2.0. For instance, stop obsessing about the risks, and also, keep things simple. McAfee made a great point for not getting trapped in credentialism (despite the fact that he has five degrees) but rather, trusting in the wisdom of the crowd.

Now, let's take the next step forward, together...

In light of both McAfee's comments, and your own experience, please share with us what issues might have kept you from embracing web 2.0 in the past. The poll widget below is live, so you'll get immediate feedback on what others have been experiencing in their organizations.

From my desk, three different stakeholders in the social learning arena: learners, training managers, and designer/developers.

It seems as designers, we are always excited about what's new (ahead of the curve). Understandably cautious, I usually read managers as somewhat behind the curve. And in the case of social learning,  you could argue that learners are the curve.

One of our large clients that's been holding back on social learning for a couple of years has just decided to move ahead for 2010. Looks like we'll be combining blogs with some YouTube-like submissions from users, where the submissions are focused on quarterly topics. Ratings on the submissions will tie to the e-learning reward system that's already in place (these are non-employee learners).

Because of this, as part of our annual learner survey, we decided to ask learners what resources they already use for personal and/or professional learning. LIVE results are posted in the widget above.

These results are from a real mix of ages from the 20-somethings to the 50-somethings, and unfortunately we don't have specific age or gender demographics. Still, I was pretty encouraged by the response we got.

Now's the time for you to add more depth to our survey. Are you already involved in using social learning tools? How's it going? And if you aren't doing any social learning yet, do you think your learners already have a head start on you?